RuleSage cited table rulings
← Sidereal Confluence

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Sidereal Confluencebg-202426-en-1e

1. Find the Confluence cards that match the number of players in your game.[1]
2. Put any extra Confluence cards back in the box.[1]
3. Splay the six chosen Confluence cards in a column so the top of each is visible, arranging them so the Turn 1 card is in front, followed by Turn 2, Turn 3, and so on.[1]
4. Shuffle the colony cards without looking at them and set this deck front side up.[1]
5. Put the colony deck near the Colony Bid Track.[1]
6. Deal one Colony card from the top of the Colony deck to each space of the Colony Bid Track, from left to right.[1]
7. Shuffle each era's technology cards separately, research team side up, and stack them with era I on top, era II below that, era III below that, and era IV on bottom.[1]
8. Put the technology deck near the Research Team Bid track.[1]
9. Deal one Technology card from the Technology deck to each space of the Research Team Bid Track, from left to right.[1]
10. Pile the points, ships, and resources in reach of all players.[1]
11. Place boards in the middle of the play area, arranging split track boards as a continuous track in alphabetical order.[2]
12. Each player takes their species' starting cards (those with a star on the top left), components, board(s), a Phases reference card, and a Donations card.[2]
13. Each player collects the resources and ships printed on their starting card.[2]
14. Deal one era I technology card with the research team side faceup to each player who has the corresponding symbol on their starting card.[2]
15. Deal the number of random colonies to players with the corresponding symbol on their starting card.[2]
16. Set your screen close to you, with all other components in front of it.[2]
17. Keep your species deck nearby.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook · p.5 · Confluence Stack · COLONY Cards · Technology Cards · Final Setup
[2] RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook · p.4 · Player Area · Bid Track · Example: Player Area
🔧 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 252 ms · ask 7950 ms · total 8212 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 8212 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Colony Support: 3 Colony Support: 3 ENI ET Bid Tiebreaker: 3 Colony Support: 3 Bid Tiebreaker: 1 Colony Support: 3 GENERAL SUPPLY OF RESOURCES GENERAL SUPPLY OF SHIPS SPECIES DECK COLONY DECK REFERENCE CARD UNIQUE SPECIES COMPONENTS Bid Tiebreaker: 8 Colony Support: 0 STARTING COLONY CARDS SCREEN", "headingPath": "Game Setup Diagram for 4 players · TECHNOLOGY DECK · DONATION CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "Take your species' starting cards, components, and board(s). SPECIES STARTING CARDS Your cards with a star on the top left start in play in front of you. Several species have unique components. Each player also has a Phases reference card and a Donations card. Collect the resources and ships printed", "headingPath": "Player Area · Bid Track · Example: Player Area", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Game Setup Diagram for 4 players SETUP GENERAL SUPPLY OF POINTS GENERAL SUPPLY OF RESOURCES STARTING COLONY CARDS SPECIES DECK UNIQUE SPECIES COMPONENTS DONATION CARD REFERENCE CARD GENERAL SUPPLY OF SHIPS COLONY DECK TECHNOLOGY DECK SCREEN IM’DRIL KJAS KIT Bid Tiebreaker: 8 Colony Support: 0 Bid Ti", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Find the Confluence cards that match the number of players in your game. This is printed next to the icon. Put any others back in the box. They won't be used this game. There should now be six confluence cards. Splay them in a column so you can see the top of each card. Arrange them so the Turn 1 ca", "headingPath": "Confluence Stack · COLONY Cards · Technology Cards · Final Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "SETUP DONATION CARD CONFLUENCE CARDS STARTING SHIPS AND RESOURCES SPECIES BOARD STARTING CONVERTERS COLONY BID TRACK SET UP FOR 5 PLAYERS BECAUSE THE KJAS ARE IN THIS GAME RESEARCH TEAM BID TRACK CAYLION ENI ET FADERAN Bid Tiebreaker: 1 Colony Support: 3 Bid Tiebreaker: 3 Colony Support: 3 Bid Tiebr", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Once all players are ready, simultaneously reveal all colony bids. In order from highest bid to lowest, each player has the opportunity to buy a colony or pass: BUYING A COLONY Return your bid ships to the general supply. Select a colony card from the Colony Bid Track. You may not select a colony ca", "headingPath": "Colony Bids", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl, Caylion, Kjasjavikalimm, and Faderan are easiest to play. A skilled new player can do well with the Im'dril. The Eni Et and Unity require very pushy trading. The Yengii are a challenge for experienced players. Zeth are mean, so best if most players are experienced. ENI ET are resource ", "headingPath": "Advice: Picking a Species", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Anatomy of a Card BORDERS The colors indicate the owner. CONVERTERS These show how you exchange resources. Converters show either a violet arrow or a white arrow, representing when they can run. EXCHANGE RATE: This approximates the values of this conversion. UPGRADES The bottom of your technology ca", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Confluence Stack · COLONY Cards · Technology Cards · Final Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Area · Bid Track · Example: Player Area", "sharpsignalDocId": 419}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 419 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 419 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 01:01

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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Game Setup Diagram for 4 players · TECHNOLOGY DECK · DONATION CARD p.6 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)) 297
#2 RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Player Area · Bid Track · Example: Player Area p.4 0.047938 (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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) p.6 0.047875 (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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Confluence Stack · COLONY Cards · Technology Cards · Final Setup p.5 0.046875 (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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) p.7 0.045285 (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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Colony Bids p.14 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
#7 RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Advice: Picking a Species p.3 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
#8 RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) p.9 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 Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Confluence Stack · COLONY Cards · Technology Cards · Final Setup p.5 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Sidereal Confluence — Rulebook (corpus doc 419) Player Area · Bid Track · Example: Player Area p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 252 ms · first delta 4987 ms · total 8212 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 252 ms · ask 7950 ms · gateway work 8212 ms · total 8212 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3280
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
436
tok/sec
138.1 tok/sec — 436 output tokens in 3.158 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s 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)
setup

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 348), 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.