Ruling — Trekking Through History

You asked

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

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trekking Through Historybg-353288-en-1e

To set up the game before the first round begins, follow these steps:

1. Place the Supply tray (containing all Experience tokens and Time Crystals) on the table.[1]

2. Place the playmat on the table.[1]

3. Place the stack of Ancestor cards on the table (6 copies for 2-players, 9 copies for 3-players, or 12 copies for 4-players).[1]

4. Shuffle the Day I deck of History cards and place it face up.[1]

5. Draw 5 cards from the Day I deck and place them in the 5 empty spaces to the right of the deck to form the 6-card Departures Row.[1]

6. Shuffle the Day II and Day III decks separately and set them aside.[1]

7. Shuffle the Itineraries and deal four to each player.[1]

8. In your first game, each player chooses one Itinerary at random, places it face up in front of them, and keeps the others facedown nearby.[1]

9. Place the Clock beside the playmat.[2]

10. Players pick a Pocket Watch matching their color and stack them in random order at 12 o'clock.[2]

11. Each player takes a wood Point marker matching their color and places it at 0 on the score track.[2]

12. Give each player a Crystal Tank matching their color and one Time Crystal.[2]

13. Give each player a Reference card.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook · p.2 · Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook · p.3 · Game Setup

🔧 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 254 ms · ask 5443 ms · total 189858 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 184151 ms · generation 5707 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Place the Supply tray (with all Experience tokens and Time Crystals inside it) on the table. Place the playmat on the table. Place the stack of Ancestor cards . 2-players: Place 6 copies. 3-players: Place 9 copies. 4-players: Place 12 copies. The Day I deck of History cards has the roman numeral 'I'", "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player takes a wood Point marker matching their color and places it at 0 on the score track . Place the Clock beside the playmat. Players pick a Pocket Watch matching their color and stack them in random order at 12 o'clock. TIP stands for points you can score. You'll find these on your Itinera", "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The Pocket Watches on the Clock determine turn order. The player whose Pocket Watch is on top goes first. As play progresses, the player whose Pocket Watch is furthest behind on the Clock goes next. If multiple Pocket Watches are tied for furthest behind, the player who is on top of the stack goes n", "headingPath": "Understanding Turn Order · 1 Choose a Card · About History Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "If this is your first card, place it in front of you. This starts your first column of cards, called a Trek. A Trek is a series of events visited in chronological order. The more events in a Trek, the more points you'll score at the end of the game. On a later turn when you choose a new card, do one", "headingPath": "Place Card in Trek 4", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Slide the History cards in the Departures Row to the right to fill in any empty spaces, keeping them in the same order. Slide the top card of the Day deck to fill the leftmost empty space in the row. Players must always stop at 12 o'clock upon reaching it (see 'Clock Details' on this page). When all", "headingPath": "Slide and Refill History Cards · End of Day · Hours in a Day · Punctuality Bonus · Movement Always Ends at 12", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "4 PLA YING THE GAME Understanding Turn Order The Pocket Watches on the Clock determine turn order. The player whose Pocket Watch is on top goes first. As play progresses, the player whose Pocket Watch is furthest behind on the Clock goes next. If multiple Pocket Watches are tied for furthest behind,", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Components 108 History cards s 12 Ancestor cards s 1 Clock s 1 Neoprene playmat s 4 Pocket Watches s 4 Player Point markers 84 Experience tokens (20 Person, 18 Event, 16 Innovation, 16 Progress, 14 Wild) s 20 Time Crystals s 4 Crystal Tanks s 24 Itineraries 4 Reference cards s 1 Rulebook s 1 Date in", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Look at the number on the lower left of the History card you chose. That's the number of hours you'll spend visiting the historical event. Move your Pocket Watch that many hours on the Clock, stacking it on top of any opponent Pocket Watches on the space where it lands. Example: This red player choo", "headingPath": "Move Your Pocket Watch 2 · Saving Time with Time Crystals · 3 Collect Benefits", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 561}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 561 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 561 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 08:06

retrieval — what the passage search returned

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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Game Setup	p.2	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 Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Game Setup	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 Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Understanding Turn Order · 1 Choose a Card · About History Cards	p.4	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 Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Place Card in Trek 4	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 Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Slide and Refill History Cards · End of Day · Hours in a Day · Punctuality Bonus · Movement Always Ends at 12	p.7	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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)		p.4	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 Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)		p.1	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
#8	RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Move Your Pocket Watch 2 · Saving Time with Time Crystals · 3 Collect Benefits	p.5	0.029412 (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 the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

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.

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Game Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trekking Through History — Rulebook (corpus doc 561)	Game Setup	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 254 ms · first delta 3265 ms · total 189858 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 184151 ms · retrieval 254 ms · ask 5443 ms · gateway work 5707 ms · total 189858 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3360
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 328
tok/sec: 138.0 tok/sec — 328 output tokens in 2.377 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

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

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 493), 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.