Ruling — Century: Spice Road

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Century: Spice Roadbg-209685-en-1e

### Setup

1. Separate spice cubes by color (Yellow/Turmeric, Red/Saffron, Green/Cardamom, Brown/Cinnamon) and place them into bowls.[1]

2. Shuffle the Point cards (orange back) to form a deck, then draw 5 cards and place them face up in a row to the left of that deck.[2]

3. Place a pile of gold coins (number of players x2) above the first Point card and a pile of silver coins (number of players x2) above the second Point card.[2]

4. From the Merchant cards (purple back), give each player one 'Create 2' and one 'Upgrade 2' card to form their starting hand, returning any remaining starting cards to the box.[2]

5. Shuffle the remaining Merchant cards to form a deck, then draw 6 cards and place them face up in a row to the left of that deck.[2]

6. Take a Caravan card (grey back) for each player, including the card with the first player symbol, shuffle them, and deal one to each player.[1]

7. Place yellow and red cubes on each player's Caravan card based on player order: 1st player gets 3 yellow; 2nd player gets 4 yellow; 3rd player gets 4 yellow; 4th player gets 3 yellow and 1 red; 5th player gets 3 yellow and 1 red.[1]

### Playing the Game

1. The game is played over a series of rounds, with each player taking one turn per round in clockwise order, starting with the first player.[1]

2. On a player's turn, they must perform 1 of the following actions:

* **Play**: Play a card from your hand face up in front of you and apply its effect.[1]

* **Spice cards**: Take the number and color of cubes shown on the card from the bowls and place them on your caravan.[1]

* **Upgrade 2 cards**: You may upgrade a cube on your caravan 1 level and then upgrade a cube 1 level again.[3]

* **Trade cards**: Return the number and color of cubes shown above the arrow from your caravan to the bowls, then take the number and color of cubes shown below the arrow from the supply and add them to your caravan.[3]

* **Acquire**: Acquire a Merchant card by paying for it by placing any cube from your caravan on each Merchant card to the left of the card being acquired; if acquiring the leftmost card, it is free.[3] Any cubes that were on the acquired card are placed on your caravan, and the merchant deck is then replenished by sliding cards left and drawing a new card.[3]

* **Rest**: Take all previously played cards from in front of you back into your hand.[1][3]

* **Claim**: Claim a Point card if you have all the cubes shown on the card in your caravan.[4] Return those cubes to the bowls, place the Point card face down in front of you, and replenish the Point card row by sliding cards left and drawing from the deck.[4] If you claim the leftmost or second leftmost Point card, take one gold or silver coin respectively from above that card (if the last gold coin is taken, slide the silver pile to be above the leftmost card).[4]

3. At the end of a player's turn, if they have more cubes on their caravan than the 10-cube limit, they must return cubes of their choice to the bowls until they reach the limit.[4]

### Ending the Game

1. The game ends after players finish out the current round of play once a player has taken their 5th Point card (or 6th in a 2-3 player game).[4]

2. Each player counts their points:

* Each gold coin is worth 3 points.[4]

* Each silver coin is worth 1 point.[4]

* Each non-yellow cube is worth 1 point.[4]

* Points on Point cards are also counted.[4]

3. The player with the most points wins; in the event of a tie, the last player to take a turn wins.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.1 · Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards

[2] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.1 · To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:

[3] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.2 · Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest

[4] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.2 · Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits

🔧 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 77 ms · ask 5525 ms · total 5604 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5604 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 1, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Century Spice Road is played over a series of rounds. Each player will take one turn each round (starting with the first player and going clockwise) . On a player's turn, they must perform 1 of the following actions: Play: Play a card from your hand Acquire: Acquire a Merchant card Rest: Take all pr", "headingPath": "Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "When playing an 'Upgrade 2' card, you MAY upgrade a cube on your caravan 1 level and then upgrade a cube 1 level again. It is not mandatory to upgrade all cubes from an upgrade card. Example: You may upgrade a yellow cube to a red cube and then upgrade another yellow cube to a red cube, or you can u", "headingPath": "Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "To claim a Point card, you must have all of the cubes shown on the point card in your caravan. Return those cubes to the bowls. Take the Point card and place it face down in front of you. After claiming a Point card, fill the empty slot by sliding the cards to the left, creating an empty slot just t", "headingPath": "Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "1 Centuries ago, the spice trade was the most important market in the world. It established and destroyed empires, compelled men to explore the far corners of the earth, and led to the discovery of new worlds. At that time, the value of spices even rivaled that of gold! In the old days, they carried", "headingPath": "To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 188 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 188 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 0.90260 of 2844 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 14, 2026 11:26

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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards	p.1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest	p.2	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
#3	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits	p.2	0.047123 (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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:	p.1	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

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 4 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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards	p.1	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits	p.2	#3	0.047123 (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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:	p.1	#4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest	p.2	#2	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:	p.1	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 77 ms · first delta 1143 ms · total 5604 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 77 ms · ask 5525 ms · gateway work 5604 ms · total 5604 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1992
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 909
tok/sec: 205.5 tok/sec — 909 output tokens in 4.424 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s 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 106), 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.