RuleSage cited table rulings
← Roads & Boats

You asked

How do I set up Roads & Boats?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Roads & Boatsbg-875-en-1e

To set up Roads & Boats, follow these steps:
1. Determine the map size (as a rough estimate, use about ten land tiles per player).[1]
2. The player who proposed to play starts laying the map.[1]
3. Proceed clockwise.[1]
4. Every player places two tiles in the playing area, one by one, such that each tile borders on at least one other tile already present.[1]
5. Each tile can be placed anywhere, except for rivers.[1]
6. Place rivers in a natural way, ensuring you do not place a tile such that a river ends without a source or that finishing another river becomes impossible.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Roads & Boats — Rulebook · p.6 · SETTING/.notdefUP
🔧 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 224 ms · ask 6914 ms · total 7148 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 7148 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "ROADS & BOATS - third edition. For 1 - 4 players from 14 years. Duration about 3 to 4 hours. Game design by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga. Graphic design by Herman Haverkort and Tamara Jannink. Tested by (thank you very much!) Arnold Crans, Bram van Dam, Maurice Dekker, Gerben Dirksen, Bianca va", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "OADS & BOATS is played in turns. Each turn consists of four phases. In each phase, all players play simultaneously. Players first go through a phase in which all buildings produce goods. There are which produce goods every production phase (such as a woodcutter, which produces one pile of trunks eve", "headingPath": "SUMMARY · MATERIAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "There are two ways to make a map. Inexperienced players are advised to select one of the maps provided in the scenario book. More experienced players may want to makeamapoftheirownusingthefollowingrules. Determine how big the map is going to be. As a rough estimate, use about ten land tiles per play", "headingPath": "SETTING/.notdefUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Boats can move only on sea and rivers. On a river, a boat moves just like a land transporter on a road. Moving from a river to open sea takes up one movement point. Onopensea, boats can move from the coast to open sea, between sea tiles and from a sea tile to a land tile at the cost of one movement ", "headingPath": "BOATS · MOVEMENT · WALLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "4 In , each player builds up a civi- lization over a long period of time, like in many other games. Unlike most games, however, is not about warfare, population growth, city or statebuilding. The emphasis instead is on logistics, or rather: on transport. Each player starts the game with three donkey", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Some buildings can only be built after the appropriate research has been performed. See the research rules for details. If a player builds a mine, fill the appropriate bag with 3 gold nuggets and 3 iron ore counters (or 4/0, 0/4, 5/5 if the appropriate research has been performed, see page 16). The ", "headingPath": "BUILDING · MINES · BUILDINGNEWMINESHAFTS · OILRIGS · ROADS", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Any building can be built by taking the relevant building goods (a combination of boards and stones, as indicated on the player aid) from your own transporter(s) or the tile. Cooperation between transporters of different players is possible, that is, you may also use goods from other players' transp", "headingPath": "BUILDINGS", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "During the entire production phase, transporters on the same tile can exchange goods with the tile and with each other freely, if their owner(s) want them to. Goods can be exchanged, delivered or taken across a river only if there is a bridge, or a transporter in the river that is willing to act as ", "headingPath": "EXCHANGEOFGOODS,RIVERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETTING/.notdefUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 680}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 680 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 680 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 8, 2026 00:35

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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) p.2 0.048916 (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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) SUMMARY · MATERIAL p.5 0.048652 (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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) SETTING/.notdefUP p.6 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) BOATS · MOVEMENT · WALLS p.11 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) p.3 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) BUILDING · MINES · BUILDINGNEWMINESHAFTS · OILRIGS · ROADS p.13 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) BUILDINGS p.12 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) EXCHANGEOFGOODS,RIVERS p.9 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 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 Roads & Boats — Rulebook (corpus doc 680) SETTING/.notdefUP p.6 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 224 ms · first delta 6061 ms · total 7148 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 0 ms · retrieval 224 ms · ask 6914 ms · gateway work 7148 ms · total 7148 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3465
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
144
tok/sec
136.6 tok/sec — 144 output tokens in 1.054 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 57s 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
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
set up

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 613), 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.