Ruling — Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition

← Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Clash of Cultures: Monumental Editionbg-299659-en-1e

The game is structured as follows:

**Setup**

1. Set up the game board according to the provided images.[1]

2. Place each player's starting Region faceup (noting the placement of Mountain and Forest spaces).[1]

3. Place all regular Regions facedown as "unrevealed" Regions.[1]

4. In 3- and 4-player games, randomly determine seating positions around the board.[1]

5. Each player selects a color and places a Player board, Player aid, color-specific cubes, City pieces, Units, 5 Resource markers (placing Food on space 2 and others on space 0), a random Civilization board, and 3 matching Leader cards in front of them.[1]

6. Each player places a cube from their supply on the Farming and Mining Advances.[1]

7. Each player places 3 cubes in the three spaces of their Event tracker.[1]

8. Each player starts their first city by placing a Settlement on the Plains space of their starting Region.[2]

9. Place a Mood token next to the city, Happy-side up, and place a Settler in the space near the city.[2]

10. Shuffle the Objective, Event, Action, and Wonder cards and place them facedown as their respective decks.[2]

11. Each player draws 1 Action card and 1 Objective card into a hidden hand.[2]

12. Place Barbarian Settlements, Barbarian Units, Culture tokens, Mood tokens, dice, and (with expansion) black ships in a common supply.[2]

13. Place the Round track beside the board and set the Round marker to Age 1, Round 1.[2]

14. Randomly determine a first player and give them the First Player marker.[2]

**Game Structure and Turns**

1. The game is divided into 6 Ages, each consisting of 3 Rounds followed by a Status Phase.[3]

2. During each Round, each player takes a turn in clockwise order, starting with the first player.[3]

3. During a turn, a player must perform 3 Main Actions.[3]

4. After 3 Rounds, a Status Phase occurs, followed by the start of the next Age.[3]

5. The game ends after 6 Ages, or earlier if a player has no cities on the board when entering a Status Phase.[3]

**Combat**

1. Battles typically occur during a Move Action when 1 or more Army Units move into a space with 1 or more enemy Units or an enemy city.[4]

2. Battles are resolved immediately and must be completed before moving further units.[4]

3. Each Combat Round consists of these steps:

1. If the attacker has the Tactics Advance, they may play 1 Action card facedown.[4]

2. If the defender has the Tactics Advance, they may play 1 Action card facedown.[4]

3. Simultaneously reveal any played Action cards and read effects aloud.[4]

4. Perform the combat roll, where each player rolls a number of dice equal to the number of Army Units they have in the battle.[4]

5. Activate Clash abilities for any matching Unit icons rolled (each Unit's ability can only be activated once per roll).[4]

4. Combat Rounds continue until an attacker retreats or one side loses all Army Units.[4]

**Winning the Game**

1. When the game ends, players count Victory Points ():[3]

* 1  per Settlement and Building [3]

* ½  for each Advance (do not round down) [3]

* 2  per completed Objective [3]

* 4  per Wonder (2  if conquered) [3]

* Variable  from certain Event cards [3]

* 2  per defeated Leader [3]

2. The player with the most points wins.[3]

3. In the event of a tie, players compare points starting from the top of the list (Settlements/Buildings, then Advances, etc.).[3]

4. If players are still tied after this process, they share the victory.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · Game Setup · -P B S

[2] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER AID

[3] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.8 · PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources

[4] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.22 · Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll

🔧 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 87 ms · ask 8867 ms · total 8959 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8959 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 19, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "You start the game with 1 Action card and get more during the game-most commonly during the Status Phase. They are kept secret from other players and can give you extra options or Actions when played. If you are ever told to draw an Action Card and there are no cards left to draw, shuffle the discar", "headingPath": "Action Cards · Objective Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047183, "snippet": "Each player starts their first city on the board by placing a Settlement on the Plains space of their starting Region. Place a Mood token next to the city, Happy-side up to show that the city is Happy, and place a Settler in the space near the city. Shuffle the Objective cards and place them facedow", "headingPath": "PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "Battles typically occur during a Move Action when 1 or more Army Units moves into a space with 1 or more enemy Units or an enemy city. Battles are resolved immediately when they occur and must be completed before moving further Units/groups. Battles are resolved by performing a number of Combat Roun", "headingPath": "Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "2 The Player Aid contains important reference information. Once you are familiar with the game, you can play without it. The Player Aid is two sided, where the red side includes things from the Civilizations  expansion.", "headingPath": "E P A · PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 35, "score": 0.043301, "snippet": "This variant mirrors the 1st edition rules where Wonders were open to all players who had the Engineering Advance. Due to the extra information load, this variant is not recommended for new players. Whenever a player is prompted to draw a Wonder they do not draw it into their hand, but instead place", "headingPath": "OPEN WONDERS · ALTERNATE HISTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": " The Game is divided into 6 Ages, with each Age divided into 3 Rounds followed by a Status Phase. During each Round, each player will take a turn in which they must perform 3 Main Actions. The first player takes the first turn, followed by the other players in clockwise order, until each player has", "headingPath": "PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Set up the game board in accordance with the images shown below. Each player's starting Region is placed faceup (pay attention to which side the Mountain space is on). Note: The starting Regions are two-sided. The difference between the two sides is the placement of the Mountain and the Forest space", "headingPath": "Game Setup · -P B S", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 34, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "When another player plays an Action card for its non-combat effect, you may discard 1 Action card from your hand to cancel its effect. You must have a city or Army Unit within 2 spaces of any Units or city of that player to do this. You must declare this immediately after the other player has announ", "headingPath": "Subterfuge (Tactics) · Shogunate (Any Government Advance) · Ballcourts (Circus & Sports) · Calendar (Astronomy)", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup · -P B S", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 352 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 352 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 0.88395 of 2835 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 07:47

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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Action Cards · Objective Cards	p.19	0.047379 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	0.047183 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll	p.22	0.046696 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	E P A · PLAYER AID	p.5	0.045055 (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))	220
#5	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	OPEN WONDERS · ALTERNATE HISTORY	p.35	0.043301 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources	p.8	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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	0.031746 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Subterfuge (Tactics) · Shogunate (Any Government Advance) · Ballcourts (Circus & Sports) · Calendar (Astronomy)	p.34	0.029958 (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 69 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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	#2	0.047183 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources	p.8	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Action Cards · Objective Cards	p.19	#1	0.047379 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	#7	0.031746 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	 Pirates Spawn and Raid ·  Attacking Pirates	p.27	#13	0.026585 (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 re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll	p.22	#3	0.046696 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Subterfuge (Tactics) · Shogunate (Any Government Advance) · Ballcourts (Circus & Sports) · Calendar (Astronomy)	p.34	#8	0.029958 (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 re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	E P A · PLAYER AID	p.5	#4	0.045055 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Land Combat · 1. Play Action card · 2. Reveal Action card · 3. Combat Roll	p.22	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 87 ms · first delta 4425 ms · total 8959 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 87 ms · ask 8867 ms · gateway work 8959 ms · total 8959 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3498
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 912
tok/sec: 203.8 tok/sec — 912 output tokens in 4.475 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 18s 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 280), 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.