RuleSage cited table rulings
← Terraforming Mars

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered
For a standard game of 2-5 players, follow these steps:
**Game Board**
1. Place the game board centrally on the table.[1]
2. Place the 9 ocean tiles on their reserved space.[1]
3. Place the temperature and oxygen markers on their starting positions.[1]
4. Place the generation marker on '1' on the TR track.[1]
5. Place resource cubes and remaining tiles so everyone can reach them.[1]
**Project Deck**
1. Ensure there are no Corporate Era cards in the project deck or among the corporation cards (these are marked with a red and white icon in the lower left edge).[1]
2. Shuffle the project cards and place the project deck next to the board.[1]
3. Leave space for a discard pile beside the deck.[1]
**Players**
1. Give the first player marker to the player who most recently won a game of Terraforming Mars.[1]
2. Players choose their colors and take the corresponding player markers and a player board.[1]
3. In the standard game, players place markers on the player board tracks to show 1 production of each resource.[1]
4. Each player places one marker at the starting position (2/20) of the TR track.[1]
**Corporation Cards**
1. For new players: Each gets a Beginner Corporation card (colorless card back), follows its instructions to get 42 MegaCredits, and draws 10 project cards to form a starting hand.[1]
2. For experienced players: Shuffle the 10 standard corporation cards (excluding the 2 Corporate Era corporations) and deal 2 to each remaining player.[1]
**Project Cards**
1. Deal 10 cards to each remaining player.[1]
2. Players examine their options for a starting hand and choose which of the 10 project cards they want to keep, paying 3 M€ for each card kept.[1]
3. Discard the cards that were not kept (discarded corporations should be put back in the box; cards are always discarded face down).[1][2]
**Starting the Game**
1. In player order, players reveal their chosen corporation and receive their starting resources/production.[1][2]
2. The first generation starts directly with the action phase, skipping the player order and research phases.[1][2]
[1] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook · p.7 · SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook · p.7 · SETUP

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 215 ms · ask 10459 ms · total 10683 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 10683 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "This describes the setup for the standard game for 2-5 players. See additional rules for other game variants on page 13. resources and production (if any), and then pay 3 M€ for each project card they keep. Be aware that your resources for the following few generations will be quite limited until yo", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "The cards not kept are discarded (put discarded corporations back in the box) cards are always discarded face down! In player order, players then reveal their chosen corporation, get their starting Start the game: The first generation starts without a player order phase and without a research phase ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "To play the extended game, simply add all cards marked with a red and white icon ( )on the cards' lower left border at the start of setup, including 2 new corporations. Players start with no extra production of resources (see Setup - Players on page 7). Corporate Era can be combined with any of the ", "headingPath": "Corporate Era (extended game):", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "If more interaction is desired, the Draft variant may be used. During the Research phase the players draft 4 cards to buy from instead of just drawing 4 to buy from: Each player first gets 4 cards and chooses one to draft, putting it aside and passing the rest to the next player. Then you have 3 car", "headingPath": "Draft variant:", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "All players perform this phase simultaneously. First, all energy is converted into heat (move all resource cubes from the energy box to the heat box). Secondly, all players receive new resources: Players get M€ according to their terraform rating plus any M€ production (which may be negative!), then", "headingPath": "4) Production phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "All rules apply as usual for solo play, with these exceptions: 1) Before you choose your cards, place 2 neutral city tiles on the map with an adjacent greenery tile each (these tiles are not yours, and do not increase the oxygen level): reveal and discard the 4 top cards of the deck and use their co", "headingPath": "Solo variant for Corporate Era:", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "The game board has a map where tiles may be placed. When placing a tile, you must first check to see if there are any placement restrictions. There are areas reserved for ocean and specific cities, where no other tiles may be placed. Furthermore, each tile may have specific restrictions printed on t", "headingPath": "TI L E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Each player starts the game with a corporation card . During the game, players buy and play many project cards to get benefits of different kinds. The cards are divided into active cards (blue frame, see example), automated cards (green) and event cards (red), read more on page 10. Tag: Places the c", "headingPath": "CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
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)
debug row retained until
Oct 23, 2026 20:59

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) SETUP p.7 0.032787 (at the 2-arm ceiling (0.03279) — the top of a 2-arm fuse; whether more arms ran here was never recorded) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) SETUP p.7 0.032002 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) Corporate Era (extended game): p.13 0.030018 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) Draft variant: p.13 0.029911 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) 4) Production phase p.8 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) Solo variant for Corporate Era: p.13 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) TI L E S p.5 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) CARDS p.6 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) SETUP p.7 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) SETUP p.7 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 215 ms · first delta n/a · total 10683 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 215 ms · ask 10459 ms · gateway work 10683 ms · total 10683 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 8), 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.