RuleSage cited table rulings
← Citadels

You asked

What needs to be placed on the table before the first round begins?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Citadelsbg-478-en-1e

Before the first round begins, the following items are placed on or in the table/bank:
1. Gold counters are placed on the table in a central 'bank'.[1]
2. A random character card is drawn from the Character Deck and set facedown in the center of the table without being looked at.[2]
3. A second set of cards is drawn from the Character Deck and set faceup in the middle of the table (the number of cards depends on the number of players).[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook · p.2 · IntroductIon · components · District Cards · Character Cards · Reference Cards · Gold Counters · …
[2] RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook · p.3 · settIng up the BasIc game · playIng the game · Step One: Remove Characters · Step Two: Choose Characters
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 263 ms · ask 4733 ms · total 166146 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 161140 ms · generation 5006 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "On your turn, you must first take an action, after which you may build a district card. Take an Action: At the beginning of your turn, you must do one of the following: Take two gold from the bank, or Draw two district cards from the District Deck, choose one card to put in your hand, and place the ", "headingPath": "On Your Turn · Characters and Their Special Abilities · Step Four: End of Round · game end", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "To prepare Citadels for play, follow these steps: Remove the bonus character and district cards (marked by a white star). Shuffle the eight remaining character cards together into one deck. This is called the Character Deck . Shuffle the remaining district cards together into one deck. This is calle", "headingPath": "settIng up the BasIc game · playIng the game · Step One: Remove Characters · Step Two: Choose Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once all players have chosen a character card, the player who has the Crown now calls out the name of each character one-at-a-time in the order of numerical rank. In this way, he first calls out the 'Assassin' (#1), then the 'Thief' (#2), etc. If no player reveals that character when called, simply ", "headingPath": "Step Three: Player Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The bonus character cards are used as follows: Before the game begins, players may agree to remove one or two of the original eight character cards and replace them with the bonus characters of the same rank numbers. For example, you may agree to remove the Merchant (#6) and replace him with the Alc", "headingPath": "Bonus Characters · Bonus Districts · dIstrIct cards · Bell Tower · Observatory & Library", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "If players agree, the game can be made shorter by playing to seven districts instead of eight. This edition of Citadels includes 10 bonus character cards and 14 bonus purple district cards, all marked with a white star. You can add these bonus cards to your Citadels game for more fun and variety.", "headingPath": "Shorter Game · Bonus cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After you take an action, announce the title of another character who you wish to bewitch, and then immediately end your turn. When the bewitched character is called upon, its player must show his character card, take an action, and then immediately end his turn. The bewitched character cannot use h", "headingPath": "Bonus characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030282, "snippet": "In Citadels , each player leads a city and seeks to increase its prosperity by building new city districts. The game ends after one player has built his eighth district, after which a winner is determined by how many points his completed city is worth. Building the most impressive city, however, is ", "headingPath": "IntroductIon · components · District Cards · Character Cards · Reference Cards · Gold Counters · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A few more rules are explained below, including special modifications for games with two, three, seven, and eight players. In a two- or three-player game, all players play with two characters each. The game is played normally, except that each player has two turns each round (one turn for each chara", "headingPath": "other rules · Two- or Three-player Games · Two-player Game · The Three-player Game · The Seven-player Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IntroductIon · components · District Cards · Character Cards · Reference Cards · Gold Counters · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "settIng up the BasIc game · playIng the game · Step One: Remove Characters · Step Two: Choose Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 557}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 557 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 557 boosted
answered-before recall
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until
Nov 7, 2026 08:05

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) On Your Turn · Characters and Their Special Abilities · Step Four: End of Round · game end p.4 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) settIng up the BasIc game · playIng the game · Step One: Remove Characters · Step Two: Choose Characters p.3 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) Step Three: Player Turns p.3 0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) Bonus Characters · Bonus Districts · dIstrIct cards · Bell Tower · Observatory & Library p.6 0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) Shorter Game · Bonus cards p.5 0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 297
#6 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) Bonus characters p.9 0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) IntroductIon · components · District Cards · Character Cards · Reference Cards · Gold Counters · … p.2 0.030282 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) other rules · Two- or Three-player Games · Two-player Game · The Three-player Game · The Seven-player Game p.5 0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) IntroductIon · components · District Cards · Character Cards · Reference Cards · Gold Counters · … p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Citadels — Rulebook (corpus doc 557) settIng up the BasIc game · playIng the game · Step One: Remove Characters · Step Two: Choose Characters p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 263 ms · first delta 4155 ms · total 166146 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 161140 ms · retrieval 263 ms · ask 4733 ms · gateway work 5006 ms · total 166146 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4167
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
108
tok/sec
136.5 tok/sec — 108 output tokens in 0.791 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 40s ago)
stream path
streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog
first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture
both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched
BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question)
before the first round

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 489), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.