Ruling — Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

← Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

You asked

What happens during the Expedition phase?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Imperial Settlers: Empires of the Northbg-270844-en-1e

During the Expedition phase, players choose which Island cards they will Conquer or Pillage following the order of the queue.[1] One after another, starting from the first Ship token placed on the arrow, players perform the following for each of their Ships:

1. Choose a single Island to either Pillage or Conquer.[2]

2. If a player has a Ship on the Expedition board with no Raze token or Fish assigned, they can choose any face-up Nearby Island or draw from the top of the Nearby Island deck; however, a Ship must have a fish assigned to it to take any Distant Island card (either face-up or from the top of the deck).[2]

3. If choosing to Pillage: The player can choose to Pillage a selected Island card without additional cost to gain the Goods presented on the Pillage space, then puts the Pillaged card on the appropriate discard pile for Nearby and Distant Islands.[2]

4. If choosing to Conquer: If a player has assigned a Ship with a Raze token, they can choose to Conquer an Island and add it to their Empire to gain access to its action and/or ability; Conquered Islands also provide 1 VP at the end of the game.[2]

5. After choosing an Island card to Pillage or Conquer, the player returns the used Ship to their supply and discards any Raze token and/or Fish assigned to that Ship, even if they were not used.[2]

6. If another Ship remains in the queue, it is that player's turn to choose an Island card.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …

[2] RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.7 · EXPEDITION PHASE

🔧 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 82 ms · ask 4217 ms · total 4301 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4301 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "One after another, starting from the first Ship token placed on the arrow, players choose a single Island to either Pillage or Conquer for each one of their Ships. A player with just a Ship on the Expedition board (no Raze token or Fish assigned) can choose any face-up Nearby Island , or draw from t", "headingPath": "EXPEDITION PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "The Scottish clan that is all about working together, and seeing through their goals. They love to support each other, and it's all thanks to their jolly leader Glenn and his team-player spirit. NOTE: Skip the Cleanup phase in the final round. > Players take all Workers from their Clan tile back to ", "headingPath": "THE GLENN CLAN · CLEANUP PHASE · In this phase: · GAME END · TIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "This is the main phase of the game in which players take their actions to build Locations, use their Clan action pawn to activate Action tiles, and use actions of different Locations. Starting with the First player and continuing clockwise, each player performs one action at a time. Each player can ", "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE · AVAILABLE ACTIONS: · Note for Imperial Settlers fans", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "A player places one of their Ship tokens between the Island cards on the Expedition board. First player to do that places their Ship token on the arrow. During following Sail actions the players place their Ship tokens below the first one, forming a queue. The players choosing this action must also ", "headingPath": "SAIL", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The following rules refer to a game for 2-4 players. Solo mode uses these rules as well, but with a few differences described in the Solo mode booklet. For the first few games, we recommend a 2-player game using the Glen Clan and the Ulaf Clan, as these are easier to play. Other Clans have more comp", "headingPath": "GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "To use the Location's ability a player has to exhaust the card by rotating it 90 degrees to the right. They then must pay any cost described in the ability text. Once the card is exhausted, its ability is no longer available. IMPORTANT: Only Action Location cards are exhausted after use. Both Featur", "headingPath": "ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "NOTE: Before the first game, cards should be unpacked and sorted. Separate the Island cards by their distance, and the individual Clan decks into individual stacks. After the game we recommend keeping each clan and Island deck separate to facilitate faster setup for future games. Additionally, you s", "headingPath": "LOCATION PLACEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Ships represent the Clan's transport capabilities. Players will use Ships by placing them on the Expedition board. During the Expedition phase the Clans will set sail for new and unexplored Islands represented by specific cards, to either Conquer or Pillage Islands. Raze tokens represent the Clan's ", "headingPath": "Ship · Raze token · Gold token", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EXPEDITION PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 624 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 624 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 0.94583 of 1163 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 12:21

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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	EXPEDITION PHASE	p.7	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	THE GLENN CLAN · CLEANUP PHASE · In this phase: · GAME END · TIES	p.8	0.046696 (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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	ACTION PHASE · AVAILABLE ACTIONS: · Note for Imperial Settlers fans	p.7	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	SAIL	p.10	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …	p.6	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	ACTION	p.9	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	LOCATION PLACEMENT	p.5	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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	Ship · Raze token · Gold token	p.3	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 24 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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	SAIL	p.10	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	EXPEDITION PHASE	p.7	#1	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	ACTION	p.9	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	THE GOAL OF THE GAME · 6 Clan score markers · COMPONENTS	p.2	#10	0.014286 (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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)		p.2	#9	0.014493 (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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	ACTION PHASE · AVAILABLE ACTIONS: · Note for Imperial Settlers fans	p.7	#3	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …	p.6	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	Ship · Raze token · Gold token	p.3	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	GAME FLOW · LOOKOUT PHASE · ACTION PHASE · EXPEDITION PHASE · CLEANUP PHASE · Goods are not discarded during the Cleanup phase! · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	EXPEDITION PHASE	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 82 ms · first delta 1820 ms · total 4301 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 82 ms · ask 4217 ms · gateway work 4301 ms · total 4301 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3063
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 333
tok/sec: 136.6 tok/sec — 333 output tokens in 2.437 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 32s 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 556), 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.