You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e · Catan: Cities & Knightsbg-926-en-1e · Catan: Seafarersbg-325-en-1e
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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 231 ms · ask 15141 ms · total 15383 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 15383 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Here is a summary of the the game sequence, plus some more specific entries where you can find details: Lay out the game board: Set-up, Variable Y Initial set-up: Set-up Phase Y Play The starting player begins the game. The other players follow in clockwise order. On your turn, you complete these 3 ", "headingPath": "Game play", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "Begin the 'set-up phase' after you build the game map (see Illustration N and Set-up, Variable Y ). Everyone chooses a color and takes the corresponding game pieces: 5 settlements; 4 cities;", "headingPath": "set-up phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045445, "snippet": "Select a color and take your 5 settlements, 4 cities, and 15 roads (no more and no less!). Place your 2 roads and your 2 settlements on the game board. Place your remaining settlements, roads, and cities down in front of you. Note: If you are playing a 3-player game, nobody plays the red position in", "headingPath": "settinG up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045079, "snippet": "You can play the game Catan on a variable game board. For your first game, however, we suggest that you use the 'Starting Set-up for Beginners Y .' (See Illus. A on page 3.) This set-up is well-balanced for all players. Before your first game, you must remove the die-cut components from the cardboar", "headingPath": "Starting Set-up for Beginners", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.042878, "snippet": "If you want to use the starting set-up, lay out the board as shown in Illustration R (and the Game Overview): Assemble the frame exactly as shown in Illustration R. Place the terrain hexes exactly as shown in Illustration R. Place 2 settlements and 2 roads of each color as shown. If only 3 are playi", "headingPath": "startinG set-up for BeGinners", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.042803, "snippet": "It is more fun to play with a variable game board-with the game board laid out randomly. The board changes each game. If you would like to use the variable set-up, you can find the guidelines in the Almanac under Set-up, Variable Y . Also look for useful tips under Set-up Phase Y and Tactics Y .", "headingPath": "Starting Set-up for Experienced Players", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "Gather the hexes listed and randomly place them face up within the frame. Players may take this opportunity to agree to shift the setup of the hexes if they would like to change the number or size of islands. Gather the number discs listed and randomly place them on the land hexes. If 2 red number d", "headingPath": "SETUP · ADDITIONAL RULES · WINNING THE GAME · FURTHER SETUP OPTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 216}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029211, "snippet": "Suggested Beginners' Map Set-up 15 roads; and 1 building costs card. Sort the resource cards into 5 stacks and place them face up beside the board. Shuffle the development cards Y and place them face down beside the resource cards. Place the 2 special cards and the dice beside the board. Place the r", "headingPath": "Illustration N", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- [{"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · ADDITIONAL RULES · WINNING THE GAME · FURTHER SETUP OPTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 216}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "startinG set-up for BeGinners", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Starting Set-up for Beginners", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE FOG ISLANDS · FIXED SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 216}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "settinG up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 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 22:07
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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Game play | p.8 | 0.048412 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | set-up phase | p.12 | 0.045695 (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)) | 190 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | settinG up the Game | p.3 | 0.045445 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Starting Set-up for Beginners | p.2 | 0.045079 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | startinG set-up for BeGinners | p.13 | 0.042878 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Starting Set-up for Experienced Players | p.3 | 0.042803 (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)) | 296 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Catan: Seafarers — Rulebook (corpus doc 216) | SETUP · ADDITIONAL RULES · WINNING THE GAME · FURTHER SETUP OPTIONS | p.20 | 0.029762 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Illustration N | p.12 | 0.029211 (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
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Catan: Seafarers — Rulebook (corpus doc 216) | SETUP · ADDITIONAL RULES · WINNING THE GAME · FURTHER SETUP OPTIONS | p.20 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | startinG set-up for BeGinners | p.13 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Starting Set-up for Beginners | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Catan: Seafarers — Rulebook (corpus doc 216) | THE FOG ISLANDS · FIXED SETUP | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
| [5] | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components | p.4 | no quote on the wire |
| [6] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | settinG up the Game | p.3 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 231 ms · first delta 9382 ms · total 15383 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 231 ms · ask 15141 ms · gateway work 15383 ms · total 15383 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 2001
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 889
- tok/sec
- 149.2 tok/sec — 889 output tokens in 5.958 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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
- SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
- pattern that matched
- SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1), 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.