RuleSage cited table rulings
← Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Pax Renaissance: 2nd Editionbg-308119-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:
1. Each player places his Player Board in front of him.[1]
2. Each player places the 9 remaining Pawns of his color into his Reserves near his Player Board.[1]
3. Place one Token of the shape and color indicated in the capital of each Empire; other Cities start empty, though Constantinople starts with three Tokens (two green Knights and a green Rook).[1]
4. Separate the tableau cards into two piles, one East and the other West.[1]
5. Create the East Draw Deck by taking 12 random facedown East cards and shuffling the two East Comet cards into them, then adding 4 additional random East cards for each player in the game to the top of this 14-card deck.[1]
6. Create the West Draw Deck by doing the same with West cards plus the two West Comet cards, placed just above the East draw deck.[1]
7. (Optional Astrology Variant) Turn the top card of each Draw Deck faceup, visible but not available for purchase.[1]
8. Deal 6 cards from the East draw deck to form a row of six faceup cards where indicated on the gameboard, then flip the leftmost one facedown; repeat this process for the West draw deck.[1]
9. Place the ten Empire Squares King side up in the slots next to their respective Empires.[1]
10. Place the four Victory Squares on the gameboard where indicated, with the inactive side faceup.[1]
11. Place a black disk over both Timbuktu and Novgorod, and a white disk over both the Spice Islands and the Red Sea.[2]
12. (If not using the gameboard) Arrange the 10 starting Map Cards into a 2 x 5 matrix.[2]
13. Randomly determine a first player; if the Fugger Bank is in the game, this player is always the first player.[3]
14. Assign Florins to players: the first player receives 3 Florins, the second receives 4, the third receives 5, and the fourth receives 6.[3]
15. Place the remaining Florin disks onto the gameboard in the region called China.[3]
[1] RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.10 · C3. PLAYER TABLEAUX · C4. STARTING RULING CLASS · C5. PREPARING THE EAST & WEST DRAW DECKS · C6. THE MARKET, THRONES, & VICTORY SQUARES
[2] RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.8 · B7. COMET CARDS & VICTORY SQUARES · C1. POPULATING THE 1460 MAP
[3] RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.10 · C7. STARTING FLORINS
🔧 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 388 ms · ask 16116 ms · total 16516 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 16516 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 10, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "To start his Tableau , each player places his Player Board in front of him. He will play East Tableau cards to the right of his Player Board, and West Tableau cards to the left. Pawns. Each player places the 9 remaining Pawns of his color into his Reserves near his Player Board. Place one Token of t", "headingPath": "C3. PLAYER TABLEAUX · C4. STARTING RULING CLASS · C5. PREPARING THE EAST & WEST DRAW DECKS · C6. THE MARKET, THRONES, & VICTORY SQUARES", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "Comets. These 4 cards are mixed into the last 12 cards of both draw decks during setup ( C5 ). Victory Squares. These 4 tiles start inactive (facedown) in the four slots provided on the gameboard. One is flipped to its active side each time someone buys a Comet. Thereafter, if any player spends a vi", "headingPath": "B7. COMET CARDS & VICTORY SQUARES · C1. POPULATING THE 1460 MAP", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Place an East card from your Hand to the furthest right side of your Tableau (next to existing cards), or a West card to the furthest left side. If the played card has a bomb icon 18 , you must first decide and announce if the listed One-shot (1) occurs, or (2) doesn't occur/there is none. If One-Sh", "headingPath": "E2. PLAY HAND CARD & PLACE AGENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Rulebook (You are reading it). Player's Guide . 188 Cards; 168 Tableau & 20 Map. 14 Tiles; 10 Empire Squares & 4 Victory Squares. 1 Mapboard . 4 Player Boards (on punchout board). 13 Pirate Ships (6 gold galleys, 4 green galleys, 3 red round ships). 40 Pawns; 10 in each of four player colors (yellow", "headingPath": "B1. GAME CONTENTS · B2. GAMEBOARD ANATOMY · B3. PLAYER BOARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "There will be two Comet cards , functionally identical, placed towards the end of each of the two draw decks. If you purchase one from the Market, you immediately choose one of the four Victory Squares (holy, imperial, globalization, or Renaissance) to become active. Activation. Once a Victory Squar", "headingPath": "A3. OBJECTIVE OF THE GAME · A4. CHANGES FROM 1ST EDITION", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "[E4a-e] No One-Shot Example + + 2. As 2nd Op, you use inquisitor to move a red Bishop to an Adjacent card. 1. Y ou decide to take commerce as your first Op, gaining a Florin. 3. As 3rd Op, commerce is possible now that the Bishop is gone. 1. Play card and choose to place its Agent without triggering", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "n your turn, you must perform either 1 or 2 actions ( Part E ), chosen from the list below. They can be performed in any order. You cannot choose an action unless it changes the game state in some way (e.g., if you choose to run Ops, there must be at least one Op with a valid target). The first thre", "headingPath": "D1. ACTION PHASE · (Max twice per turn) · (Max once per turn)", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Randomly determine a first player. If the Fugger Bank (blue) is in the game, this player is always the first player. 15 The first player receives 3 Florins (3 yellow disks), the second player (clockwise) = 4 Florins, the third player (if any) = 5 Florins, and the fourth player (if any) = 6 Florins. ", "headingPath": "C7. STARTING FLORINS", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "C3. PLAYER TABLEAUX · C4. STARTING RULING CLASS · C5. PREPARING THE EAST & WEST DRAW DECKS · C6. THE MARKET, THRONES, & VICTORY SQUARES", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "B7. COMET CARDS & VICTORY SQUARES · C1. POPULATING THE 1460 MAP", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "C7. STARTING FLORINS", "sharpsignalDocId": 446}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 446 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 446 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 9, 2026 08:42

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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) C3. PLAYER TABLEAUX · C4. STARTING RULING CLASS · C5. PREPARING THE EAST & WEST DRAW DECKS · C6. THE MARKET, THRONES, & VICTORY SQUARES p.10 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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) B7. COMET CARDS & VICTORY SQUARES · C1. POPULATING THE 1460 MAP p.8 0.046432 (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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) E2. PLAY HAND CARD & PLACE AGENTS p.14 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
#4 RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) B1. GAME CONTENTS · B2. GAMEBOARD ANATOMY · B3. PLAYER BOARDS 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
#5 RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) A3. OBJECTIVE OF THE GAME · A4. CHANGES FROM 1ST EDITION p.3 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
#6 RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) p.17 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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) D1. ACTION PHASE · (Max twice per turn) · (Max once per turn) 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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) C7. STARTING FLORINS p.10 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 Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) C3. PLAYER TABLEAUX · C4. STARTING RULING CLASS · C5. PREPARING THE EAST & WEST DRAW DECKS · C6. THE MARKET, THRONES, & VICTORY SQUARES p.10 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) B7. COMET CARDS & VICTORY SQUARES · C1. POPULATING THE 1460 MAP p.8 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Pax Renaissance: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 446) C7. STARTING FLORINS p.10 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 388 ms · first delta 12952 ms · total 16516 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 388 ms · ask 16116 ms · gateway work 16516 ms · total 16516 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3528
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
480
tok/sec
136.7 tok/sec — 480 output tokens in 3.512 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 376), 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.