Ruling — Agricola

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Agricolabg-31260-en-1e

To play Agricola, follow these steps:

**Setup**

1. Place the three game boards as shown in the provided illustration.[1]

2. Each player chooses a color and takes the playing pieces of that color and one farmyard, placing them in front of the player.[1]

3. On each of the two building spaces on the farmyard, players place a Wooden hut room tile and then one of their Family members in each room.[1]

4. Place remaining playing pieces (additional Family members, fences, and stables) in the bag or to one side.[1]

5. Sort the remaining house and hut tiles and other game components and place them beside the playing area.[1]

6. Place grey Begging cards face-up beside the playing area.[2]

7. Each player takes a Summary card and places it in their playing area.[2]

8. Choose a starting player, who receives the Starting player marker and 2 Food; other players receive 3 Food.[2]

9. Shuffle the orange Minor Improvement cards; each player is dealt a hand of 7 and the rest are set aside.[3]

10. Place the 10 red Major Improvement cards face up on the Major Improvements board.[3]

**The Game Structure**

The game consists of six stages divided into 14 rounds.[2] Each round follows a pattern of four phases:

* **Phase 1: Start the round** — Draw a new Round card and place it on the appropriate space on the board; actions on this card are available to all players for this and subsequent rounds.[2] All actions occurring at the beginning of a particular or every round occur now.[2]

* **Phase 2: Replenish** — Place new goods and Food on Action spaces that require them, adding to existing items if present.[2]

* **Phase 3: Work phase** — In clockwise order starting with the Starting player, players take turns taking a single Family member from their farmyard, placing it on an unoccupied Action space, and taking that action.[3] This continues until all Family members have been placed.[3] A player may never use an Action space without performing its action, and only one person can use an Action space per round.[4][3]

* **Harvest** — Occurs at the end of each stage (after rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14).[2]

**Rules and Actions**

* A player may never use an Action space without taking one of the actions shown on the space.[4]

* When taking building resources, Grain, Vegetables, or Food, tokens are placed in a player's personal supply.[3] Animals must be placed directly into the farmyard.[3]

* During the Feeding phase of the Harvest, if a player cannot or chooses not to produce enough Food to feed their family, they must take 1 Begging card for each missing Food.[3]

* Adult Family members must be fed 3 Food each at Harvest time (Newborn offspring are fed only 1).[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook · p.2 · preparinG to play

[2] RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook · p.3 · Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.

[3] RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook · p.3 · phase 3: Work phase

[4] RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook · p.9 · solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes

🔧 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 91 ms · ask 7924 ms · total 8019 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8019 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "To play a Solo game, start with 0 Food. The left-hand spaces on the left game board remain empty, as in the 2-player game. Otherwise, play the game by the same rules as the multi-player game, taking your turns one after another. After you play a Minor Improvement that should be passed to the player ", "headingPath": "solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Place the three game boards as shown in the illustration to the right. Each player chooses a color and takes the playing pieces in that color, as well as one farmyard. These are placed in front of the player (facing whichever direction the player chooses). On each of the two building spaces on this ", "headingPath": "preparinG to play", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Place the grey Begging cards face-up beside the playing area. Each player takes a Summary card and places it in their playing area. One side of the card gives an overview of the game phases; the other explains the scoring at the end of the game. There are no scoring rounds during the game. Players c", "headingPath": "Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "The actions that are printed on the game board are the same each time the game is played. They vary slightly in the Solo game and in the Family Game variant (see Rules) . Action spaces with an arrow: Players whose Family members use this space take all the resources, animals or Food that are on the ", "headingPath": "1.1. aCtions that are printed on spaCes on the Game board", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.043596, "snippet": "Players may not un-Plow plowed fields (that is, a player may never remove a field tile) for any reason. 1 Occupation: The player plays 1 Occupation card from his hand by placing it face-up on the table and reading it aloud. The first Occupation card a player plays in a game is free; each additional ", "headingPath": "1.1. aCtions that are printed on spaCes on the Game board", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.043184, "snippet": "Players start the game with a farming couple living in a simple two-roomed hut. During the course of the game, these families have abundant possibilities to improve their quality of life by building up their home, improving their fields and breeding their animals. In each of the game's 14 rounds, ea", "headingPath": "objeCt of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.042534, "snippet": "Sort the cards according to the color of the reverse side. Depending on the number of players, different green Action cards (B) are used . There are also blue Round cards (A), yellow Occupation cards (C), orange 'Minor Improvement' cards (D), red 'Major Improvement' cards (E), grey Begging cards (F)", "headingPath": "Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.041931, "snippet": "The first game board has a different re -verse side which is used for the simplified Family game. The other two game boards should be turned facedown during the rules explanation. They have illustrative examples. The reverse sides of two of the farmyards can be used as supply areas for game componen", "headingPath": "Reverse sides:", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "preparinG to play", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "phase 3: Work phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes", "sharpsignalDocId": 271}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 271 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 271 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 0.90244 of 2214 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 17:44

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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes	p.9	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))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	preparinG to play	p.2	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
#3	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.	p.3	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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	1.1. aCtions that are printed on spaCes on the Game board	p.9	0.044563 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	1.1. aCtions that are printed on spaCes on the Game board	p.9	0.043596 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	objeCt of the Game	p.2	0.043184 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	Cards	p.2	0.042534 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	Reverse sides:	p.2	0.041931 (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 51 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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	preparinG to play	p.2	#2	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes	p.9	#1	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	4. the oCCupation Cards	p.11	#12	0.027588 (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 re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	1.2. aCtion spaCes on the round Cards.	p.10	#10	0.028405 (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 re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	aCtion d - raisinG animals: fenCe pastures, build stables, raise sheep, Wild boar and Cattle.	p.6	#38	0.0125 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	phase 3: Work phase	p.3	#18	0.025245 (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 re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.	p.3	#3	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	1.1. aCtions that are printed on spaCes on the Game board	p.9	#5	0.043596 (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 Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	preparinG to play	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	Reverse sides: · startinG player · play of the Game · phase 1: start the round - draW a neW round Card. · phase 2: replenish - plaCe neW Goods and animals.	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	phase 3: Work phase	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Agricola — Rulebook (corpus doc 271)	solo version (for 1 person, from 12 years) · To play a series of Solo games: · 1. the aCtion spaCes	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 91 ms · first delta 3053 ms · total 8019 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 91 ms · ask 7924 ms · gateway work 8019 ms · total 8019 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3972
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 659
tok/sec: 135.2 tok/sec — 659 output tokens in 4.873 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 31s 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 199), 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.