Ruling — Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

← Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

You asked

Do the Japanese clans build Locations the same way as the base game's clans?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Imperial Settlers: Empires of the Northbg-270844-en-1e · Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North – Japanese Islandsbg-287558-en-1e

I looked through Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.5 · LOCATION PLACEMENT

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

RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.4 · CARDS OVERVIEW · CARD TYPE · Number of copies of a particular card in the Clan deck: · LOCATION PLACEMENT

There are two kinds of cards in a Clan deck: LOCATION CARDS (with the wooden background) that you add to your Empire by building, and BOOST CARDS (with the red banner background) that you play when you activate a specific action. LOCATION CARD BACKGROUND BOOST CARD BACKGROUND BASIC FIELD CARD BACKGR

RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.9 · BUILD A LOCATION · TO BUILD A LOCATION A PLAYER HAS TO: · BUILDING COSTS · LOCATION ABILITIES · FIELDS · FEATURE · …

This action allows a player to place a Location card from their hand into their playing area. Choose the Location card from their hand that they want to build. Pay the building cost depicted in the card's upper left corner using the indicated Goods from your supply. These Goods return to the general

RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.4

4 sail to play Feature: Each time you Conquer, gain 1 . twin ships Feature: Each time you Pillage, gain 1 . spend to build nearby island There are two kinds of cards in a Clan deck: LOCA TION CARDS (with the wooden background) that you add to your Empire by building, and BOOST CARDS (with the red ba

RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook · p.10 · USE A CLAN ACTION PAWN · POPULATE · CONSTRUCT · HARVEST

There are five specific actions that a player may take during their turn, using a Clan action pawn. These appear on the Action tiles arranged in a circle. A player draws a single card from the top of their deck and adds it to their hand. To perform any of the actions from an Action tile, a player mu

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 105 ms · ask 2572 ms · total 2679 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 2679 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 5, "score": 0.032522, "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": 4, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "There are two kinds of cards in a Clan deck: LOCATION CARDS (with the wooden background) that you add to your Empire by building, and BOOST CARDS (with the red banner background) that you play when you activate a specific action. LOCATION CARD BACKGROUND BOOST CARD BACKGROUND BASIC FIELD CARD BACKGR", "headingPath": "CARDS OVERVIEW · CARD TYPE · Number of copies of a particular card in the Clan deck: · LOCATION PLACEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.031498, "snippet": "This action allows a player to place a Location card from their hand into their playing area. Choose the Location card from their hand that they want to build. Pay the building cost depicted in the card's upper left corner using the indicated Goods from your supply. These Goods return to the general", "headingPath": "BUILD A LOCATION · TO BUILD A LOCATION A PLAYER HAS TO: · BUILDING COSTS · LOCATION ABILITIES · FIELDS · FEATURE · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03101, "snippet": "4 sail to play Feature: Each time you Conquer, gain 1 . twin ships Feature: Each time you Pillage, gain 1 . spend to build nearby island There are two kinds of cards in a Clan deck: LOCA TION CARDS (with the wooden background) that you add to your Empire by building, and BOOST CARDS (with the red ba", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030536, "snippet": "There are five specific actions that a player may take during their turn, using a Clan action pawn. These appear on the Action tiles arranged in a circle. A player draws a single card from the top of their deck and adds it to their hand. To perform any of the actions from an Action tile, a player mu", "headingPath": "USE A CLAN ACTION PAWN · POPULATE · CONSTRUCT · HARVEST", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030077, "snippet": "It is both a Field card and a Field upgrade card. When you build it, decide if you want to build it as Field or add it as an upgrade to already existing Field. > There is no limit to the number of Clan action pawns present on any Action tile. > The arrangement order of the Action tiles is random, se", "headingPath": "The Glenn's Clan card - Neighbourhood ice cream shop", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029631, "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": 4, "score": 0.029199, "snippet": "Number of copies of a particular card in the Clan deck: – There is one copy of this card in the Clan deck – There are two copies of this card in the Clan deck – There are three copies of this card in the Clan deck LOCA TION PLACEMENT Players are free to organize their play area (called their Empire)", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 624}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

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

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

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 13, 2026 18:08

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)	LOCATION PLACEMENT	p.5	0.032522 (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)	CARDS OVERVIEW · CARD TYPE · Number of copies of a particular card in the Clan deck: · LOCATION PLACEMENT	p.4	0.032002 (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)	BUILD A LOCATION · TO BUILD A LOCATION A PLAYER HAS TO: · BUILDING COSTS · LOCATION ABILITIES · FIELDS · FEATURE · …	p.9	0.031498 (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)		p.4	0.03101 (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)	USE A CLAN ACTION PAWN · POPULATE · CONSTRUCT · HARVEST	p.10	0.030536 (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)	The Glenn's Clan card - Neighbourhood ice cream shop	p.10	0.030077 (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)	ACTION PHASE · AVAILABLE ACTIONS: · Note for Imperial Settlers fans	p.7	0.029631 (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)		p.4	0.029199 (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 28 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 — 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.

one thing that looks wrong and is not: a row a floor seated can carry a fused rank LARGER than the pool size above it. The floors draw from the whole fused list, not only from the passages the re-ranker scored — so a rank past the pool is a floor reaching down for something the re-ranker would never have seen, which is exactly what the floors are for.

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 – Japanese Islands — Rulebook (corpus doc 933)	COMPONENTS · GAME SETUP · SAIKORO CLAN · INTERACTION WITH OPPONENTS · EXCHANGE · GIVE	p.1	#9	0.016393 (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	guaranteed a slot by the base-rulebook floor
#2	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	ACTION PHASE · AVAILABLE ACTIONS: · Note for Imperial Settlers fans	p.7	#7	0.029631 (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 Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	THE GOAL OF THE GAME	p.1	#23	0.012048 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	USE A CLAN ACTION PAWN · POPULATE · CONSTRUCT · HARVEST	p.10	#5	0.030536 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	The Glenn's Clan card - Neighbourhood ice cream shop	p.10	#6	0.030077 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)		p.2	#15	0.013333 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	Ship · Raze token · Gold token	p.3	#16	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
#8	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North — Rulebook (corpus doc 624)	CARDS OVERVIEW · CARD TYPE · Number of copies of a particular card in the Clan deck: · LOCATION PLACEMENT	p.4	#2	0.032002 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 105 ms · first delta 2368 ms · total 2679 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 105 ms · ask 2572 ms · gateway work 2679 ms · total 2679 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2763
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 38.8 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.232 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 24s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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.