Ruling — Barcelona

← Barcelona

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Barcelonabg-383607-en-1e

To play Barcelona, follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. Punch out all components from the punchboards.[1]

2. (Optionally) Apply Tram stickers to wooden components.[1]

3. Place the main board in the middle of the table.[1]

4. Place a Building Bonus tile in each of the four dedicated spaces on the main board.[1]

5. Shuffle all Action tiles and place one on each Action tile space on the main board (for the first game, you may skip this and use the printed setup).[1]

6. Prepare the Citizen track: In a game with fewer than 4 players, place a Citizen token of the corresponding type on each marked space on the Citizen tracks on the main board, covering spaces marked with 3 in a 3-player game and both 3 and 2 in a 2-player game; place all remaining Citizen tokens in the cloth bag.[1]

7. Randomly select three Cerdà Scoring tiles and place them on their designated spaces.[1]

8. Remove the Modernisme tiles that correspond to the three Cerdà Scoring tiles placed on the Citizen track, returning them to the box.[1]

9. Shuffle the remaining Modernisme tiles to create a face-down stack on its dedicated space, then reveal the top four tiles and place them on their reserved spaces.[1]

10. Separate Public Service tiles by type and stack them in descending order of cost; randomly select five stacks and put them on their spaces on the side board, returning the other two to the box (do not use the cheapest building in a 2-player game).[1]

11. Prepare the side board: Separate Sagrada Família tiles by level and place them next to the board.[1]

12. Create two separate piles of Coins and Cloth tokens next to the main board for the general supply.[1]

13. Prepare the player board: Take a player board and all components in your chosen color, placing the board in front of you.[1]

14. Place a small disk on the leftmost space of the Sagrada Família track.[1]

15. Place five cubes next to the Modernisme Project Spaces—one on each bottom space to the right.[1]

16. (From source 6) Place the Tram and your remaining five "Passengers" on the corresponding spaces of the Tram area.[2]

17. (From source 6) Create a stack of 4 Narrow Street tiles and place them on the leftmost dedicated space below the Tram, and a stack of the remaining 6 Narrow Street tiles on the dedicated space to the right.[2]

18. (From source 6) Create a stack of all 5 Wide Street tiles and place it on the dedicated space to the right of the Narrow Street tile stacks.[2]

19. (From source 6) Place all Intersection tiles on their dedicated spaces.[2]

20. (From source 6) Place 1 Coin and 1 Cloth token on separate leftmost spaces of the Warehouse.[2]

21. (From source 6) Place a Cobblestone tile on each of the six rightmost spaces of your Warehouse.[2]

22. (From source 6) Place eight large "Building markers" on the bottom of your player board, creating three stacks of two disks and then two single disks on the last spots.[2]

23. (From source 6) Each player should place their last large disk on the '0' space of the scoring track around the main board and their last small disk on the starting space of the Cerdà track.[2]

24. Determine the first player and give them the First Player token.[2]

25. Each player draws 2 Citizen tokens from the bag and places them face down near their player board, keeping them hidden from others.[2]

**The Turn**

Players take turns clockwise around the table.[3] Each turn consists of two or more actions, a building phase, and preparation for the next turn.[3] The four mandatory steps of a turn must be done in this order:

1. Place 2 Citizens on a street crossing on the main board (if the chosen crossing has a visible printed cost in Coins, you must first pay that cost; if you place them on a built Intersection, check page 8 for details).[3]

2. Optionally perform the street crossing's corresponding actions (you may perform any or all of the actions corresponding to the streets meeting at that crossing in any order: the vertical street, the horizontal street, and/or the diagonal street, if applicable).[3]

3. Remove Citizens from street crossings to construct a Building, placing the selected Citizens on the corresponding Citizen tracks on the main board.[3]

4. At the end of each player's

[1] RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook · p.4 · Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.

[2] RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook · p.5 · 3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.

[3] RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook · p.6 · 5. Prepare for the first turn.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 192 ms · ask 9658 ms · total 9853 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9853 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Barcelona is played over a variable number of rounds interrupted by three scoring phases before a final scoring phase. Every round, each player takes a single turn consisting of two or more actions, a building phase, and then preparation for their next turn. At the end of the game, the player with t", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "At the end of a player turn, if the last (third) section of one of the Citizen tracks has been filled to or beyond its marked Cerdà Scoring space, game end triggers and all players score the third (final) Cerdà Scoring tile. Then, if this was not the last player in turn order's turn, play continues ", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Before your first game, carefully punch out all components from the punchboards. We also recommend that you apply the Tram stickers to their wooden components, though this is not mandatory. To set up the game, perform the following steps in order: a cost on the left and benefits on the right) facing", "headingPath": "Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "At the end of the game, you score Victory Points equal to your rightmost uncovered Passenger space (see the 'Game End and Final Scoring' section for more details). Example: Blue takes a Move Your Tram action, and this is the second time they have taken this action. Blue is allowed to move their Tram", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Either gain 1 Cloth and 3 Victory Points or gain 2 Coins. You must always place Coins and Cloth into your Warehouse on your player board. Each space of your Warehouse can store exactly 1 Coin or 1 Cloth. Any Coins or Cloths that you cannot store in your Warehouse must be immediately returned to the ", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place the Tram and your remaining five cubeshenceforth referred to as your \"Passengers\"-on the corresponding spaces of the Tram area c . Create a stack of 4 Narrow Street tiles, and place them on the leftmost dedicated space below the Tram. Place the remaining 6 Narrow Street tiles in a stack on the", "headingPath": "3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "They later gained importance especially once cars became widespread. Wide Street tile must be placed on empty dedicated spaces for Wide Streets on the main board, and the same rule applies to Narrow Street tiles. After placing a Street tile, immediately gain the printed benefits that you have just c", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "This action lets you do the following: place/move your Tram around the City section of the main board and optionally place a Passenger, which provide you with extra actions. Historical Note: Even though the first tram in Barcelona was not built until 1872, the Eixamplewith its wide streets-was alrea", "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5. Prepare for the first turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 527}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 527 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 527 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.91544 of 3477 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 10:31

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. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.6	0.048131 (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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.16	0.047163 (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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.	p.4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.11	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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.7	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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.5	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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.7	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 Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.11	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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 29 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.6	#1	0.048131 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.	p.4	#3	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.11	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.12	#19	0.013158 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.8	#20	0.012987 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.5	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.12	#14	0.014085 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.16	#2	0.047163 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	Missing or damaged components : · 2. Prepare the side board.	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	3. Prepare the stacks and general supply. · 5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Barcelona — Rulebook (corpus doc 527)	5. Prepare for the first turn.	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 192 ms · first delta 2427 ms · total 9853 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 192 ms · ask 9658 ms · gateway work 9853 ms · total 9853 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3676
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 139.3 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 7.349 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 9s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 458), 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.