You asked
How do I setup the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAnswered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but The Isle of Cats has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
I looked through The Isle of Cats'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.
If you own any expansions you can find some additional setup information on page 23.
Each player receives: I random boat side up). I permanent basket (green side up). B Randomly decide who goes first. Then, beginning with that person, go around the table and have each player: Choose a colour by taking their favourite cat figure from the supply. Place their chosen cat figure on the i
Island. Place the island in the centre of the play area ( side up); the areas on either side of the island are known as the fields. Vesh's Boat. Place Vesh's boat on space 5 of the day tracker. Common Treasure. Place the common treasure tiles below the island. Use 5 of each tile for I-player. Use 5
The first time you play, you will need to put some of the cat and treasure tiles into the discovery bag. Place the following in the discovery bag: All blue, green, orange, red and purple cat tiles. All rare treasure tiles. Do not put the Oshax tiles or the common treasure tiles in the discovery bag.
If you prefer watching videos to reading rulebooks, you can find a video explaining how to play this game on our website: www.thecityofkings.com/theisleofcats/ IFISH 5FISH 42 fish tokens 20 x 1 fish and 22 x 5 fish 6 oshax I discovery bag 5 solo colour cards 4 colour cards These can be given to anyo
🔧 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
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 227 ms · ask 1926 ms · total 2163 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 2163 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "If you own any expansions you can find some additional setup information on page 23.", "headingPath": "EXPANSIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Each player receives: I random boat side up). I permanent basket (green side up). B Randomly decide who goes first. Then, beginning with that person, go around the table and have each player: Choose a colour by taking their favourite cat figure from the supply. Place their chosen cat figure on the i", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Island. Place the island in the centre of the play area ( side up); the areas on either side of the island are known as the fields. Vesh's Boat. Place Vesh's boat on space 5 of the day tracker. Common Treasure. Place the common treasure tiles below the island. Use 5 of each tile for I-player. Use 5 ", "headingPath": "GLOBAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The first time you play, you will need to put some of the cat and treasure tiles into the discovery bag. Place the following in the discovery bag: All blue, green, orange, red and purple cat tiles. All rare treasure tiles. Do not put the Oshax tiles or the common treasure tiles in the discovery bag.", "headingPath": "BEFORE YOUR FIRST GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "If you prefer watching videos to reading rulebooks, you can find a video explaining how to play this game on our website: www.thecityofkings.com/theisleofcats/ IFISH 5FISH 42 fish tokens 20 x 1 fish and 22 x 5 fish 6 oshax I discovery bag 5 solo colour cards 4 colour cards These can be given to anyo", "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY VIDEO", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "You are a citizen of Squall's End and are on a rescue mission to save as many cats as possible before Vesh arrives. You must explore the island, rescue cats, gather ancient treasures and find a way to fit them all onto your boat before returning safely to Squall's End. As you explore the island, you", "headingPath": "GAME PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "At the end of the game, you will earn points :or: Each cat family you have. A family is 3 or more touching cats of the same colour. Your rare treasures. Any lessons you have completed. You will lose points for: Every visible rat on your boat. Any rooms on your boat that have not been filled. The pla", "headingPath": "HOW TO WIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "30 cat figures 6 of each colour I Vesh's boat 4 player boats 150 discovery cards Io solo lesson cards 85 cats 17 of each colour 25 rare treasures I island board 18 family cards 9 solo advanced lesson cards", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 106}]
- 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 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
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 897 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 743 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 585 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Oct 23, 2026 20:59
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. 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 rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | EXPANSIONS | p.4 | 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 84 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | PLAYER SETUP | p.4 | 0.016129 (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 The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | GLOBAL SETUP | p.4 | 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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | BEFORE YOUR FIRST GAME | p.5 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | HOW TO PLAY VIDEO | p.3 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | GAME PLAY | p.2 | 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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | HOW TO WIN | p.2 | 0.014925 (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 The Isle of Cats — Rulebook (corpus doc 106) | COMPONENTS | p.3 | 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 205 |
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.
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.
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 227 ms · first delta n/a · total 2163 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 227 ms · ask 1926 ms · gateway work 2163 ms · total 2163 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.
disposition
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
- 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 36), 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.