Ruling — Acquire

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Acquirebg-5-en-1e

1. Place the gameboard in the center of all players.[1]

2. Place the building tiles facedown next to the gameboard and mix them well.[1]

3. Choose a player to be the banker, who will pass out stocks and handle money exchanges.[1]

4. The banker places the seven headquarters buildings and the stock cards, separated by hotel chain, in the stock market tray as shown.[1]

5. The banker gives each player $6,000 in bills: four $1,000 bills, three $500 bills, and five $100 bills.[1]

6. The banker separates the remaining bills by denomination and places them in four separate piles next to the gameboard.[1]

7. Each player gets one stockholder info card and places it in front of them.[1]

8. As a group, decide whether stockholder bonuses will be paid to the top TWO stockholders (Classic Mode) or the top THREE stockholders (Tycoon Mode) during a merger.[1]

9. All players flip the info card to the side displaying the chosen mode.[1]

10. As a group, decide whether to display acquired money and stocks for all players to see or keep them secret.[1]

11. Decide who will go first by having each player draw a building tile from the facedown pile and place it faceup on the matching letter/number space on the gameboard.[1]

12. The player who plays the tile closest to 1A goes first, and play moves to the left.[1]

13. Leave the tiles on the gameboard.[1]

14. Each player draws six building tiles and stands them up in front of them so other players cannot see them.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP

🔧 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 81 ms · ask 9181 ms · total 9264 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9264 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Place the gameboard in the center of all players. Place the building tiles facedown next to the gameboard and mix them well. Choose a player to be the banker. This player will pass out stocks and handle money exchanges throughout the game. The banker places the seven headquarters buildings and the s", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Remove all game components from the shrink-wrap, and discard the waste. Remove the headquarters banners from the runner. Insert the banners into the headquarters buildings as shown to the right, matching the numbers on the runner to the numbered image shown.", "headingPath": "THE FIRST TIME YOU PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The tiles represent new hotels. Each turn, you will add one to the game board. Choose one of your building tiles, and place it on its matching space on the gameboard. For example, the 1A building tile goes on space 1A on the gameboard. When you place a building tile, one of the following things will", "headingPath": "1. Place a Building Tile", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Choose a headquarters building from the stock market tray, and place it on any of the new connected building tiles. Take one stock card for that hotel chain. This is your founder's bonus! If all seven headquarters buildings are already in play on the board, you may not place a building tile that wil", "headingPath": "Immediately do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "When playing a two-player game, follow the rules for the core game using the Classic Mode side of the Stockholder Info Card, but follow the rules below when mergers occur: When determining stockholder bonuses, consider the stock market as an additional stockholder with a random number of shares. To ", "headingPath": "PLAYING A TWO-PLAYER GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "On your turn, you'll perform the following three actions. Place a building tile on its matching space. Buy up to three stocks in any active hotel chains. Draw a new building tile from the facedown pile. You'll find a more detailed description of each action below.", "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Insert the banners into the headquarters buildings, matching the numbers on the runner to the numbers shown below. 8 1 2 3 6 2 4 5 1 4 5 8 7 9 9 6 10 11 3", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The game ends when one player announces during their turn that either all active hotel chains are safe or that one active hotel chain is made up of 41 or more building tiles. A player does not have to announce that the game is over if it is to their advantage to keep playing-for example, to enlarge ", "headingPath": "THE END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 93 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 93 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 0.89735 of 1208 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 18:12

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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	SETUP	p.4	0.048139 (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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	THE FIRST TIME YOU PLAY	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))	258
#3	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	1. Place a Building Tile	p.6	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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	Immediately do the following:	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
#5	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	PLAYING A TWO-PLAYER GAME	p.16	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
#6	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	HOW TO PLAY	p.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))	264
#7	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	SETUP	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))	154
#8	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	THE END OF THE GAME	p.14	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 48 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	SETUP	p.4	#1	0.048139 (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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	Immediately do the following:	p.7	#4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	SETUP	p.5	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	THE END OF THE GAME	p.14	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	PLAYING A TWO-PLAYER GAME	p.16	#5	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
#6	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	HOW TO PLAY	p.6	#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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	3. Draw a Building Tile	p.10	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	1. Place a Building Tile	p.6	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93)	SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 81 ms · first delta 2028 ms · total 9264 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 81 ms · ask 9181 ms · gateway work 9264 ms · total 9264 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1689
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 374
tok/sec: 51.9 tok/sec — 374 output tokens in 7.207 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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: SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 24), 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.