Ruling — Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendarbg-126163-en-1e

The game is played in rounds consisting of three phases: Players take their turns, (on Food Days) Feed workers and get rewards, and Advance the calendar.[1] The game ends after one revolution of the Tzolk'in gear (the end of the second age), at which point players convert remaining resources to victory points and add points from certain monuments; the player with the most points wins.[2][1]

**Player Turns**

Players take turns beginning with the starting player and proceeding clockwise.[3][1] On your turn, you must choose one of the following two options; you cannot skip your turn, and you cannot both place and pick up workers in the same turn:[3][1]

1. **Beg for corn:** If you have 2 or fewer corn, you may discard all your corn and replenish to 3, though this angers the gods.[3][1]

2. **Place workers:** You may place one or more available workers onto the gears.[4] To place a worker, choose a gear and put it on the lowest-numbered unoccupied action space (where 0 is the lowest).[4] You must pay an amount of corn equal to the number of the action space, plus a cost for the number of workers placed as depicted on your player board.[4]

3. **Pick up workers:** You may pick up any number of workers, one by as one.[3] For each worker, you may perform the action depicted at its action space, perform a lower-numbered action on the same gear (paying 1 corn for each step back), or perform no action.[3]

If you placed a worker on the Starting Player Space, you take all the corn that has accumulated on the teeth of the Tzolk'in gear at the end of your turn.[3][5] If you constructed buildings, you deal out new buildings from the current age into the emptied spaces.[3]

**Food Days**

This phase only occurs on the four Food Days of the game:[3][1]

1. **Feed workers:** You must pay 2 corn for each worker you have in play; if you cannot feed a worker, you lose 3 victory points.[3]

2. **Get rewards:**

* At each temple, players receive rewards from the temple's god.[3]

* During middle-age Food Days (brown-orange), players receive the resources or crystal skulls depicted on the left side of the steps for their current step and all steps below.[3]

* At the end of an age (blue-green), players receive victory points depicted on the right side of their current step.[3]

* The highest-ranked player receives a bonus indicated above the temple.[3]

3. **Age transitions:** If the Food Day is the end of Age 1, all buildings are discarded from the game board and Age 2 buildings are dealt.[3]

**Advance the Calendar**

1. If no worker is on the Starting Player Space, put 1 corn on the current tooth of the Tzolk'in gear and advance the gear 1 day.[3]

2. Any workers pushed off the gears return to their players.[3]

3. If a worker was on the Starting Player Space, the Starting Player Marker changes hands (the current holder passes it to the player on their left, otherwise the player takes it).[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook · p.6 · COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn

[2] RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook · p.1

[3] RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook · p.14 · DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW

[4] RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook · p.6 · Placing Workers

[5] RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook · p.10 · Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker

🔧 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 5799 ms · total 5878 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5878 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Each round of play has 2 or 3 phases: PLAYERS TAKE THEIR TURNS. Beginning with the starting player and proceeding clockwise, each player takes his or her turn. ON A FOOD DAY, FEED THE WORKERS AND TAKE REWARDS. There are only 4 Food Days per game. Most of the time, you will skip this phase. ADVANCE T", "headingPath": "COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.04741, "snippet": "Cardboard pieces Carefully punch the cardboard pieces out of the punch- boards. Game Board Attach all the gears to the game board using the plastic fasteners. Make sure you attach the gears to the correct positions as shown in the setup picture. There are 3 dif - ferent sizes of gears. STICKERS Afte", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "The Starting Player Space is between Palenque and Chichen Itza. If it is unoccupied, it is one of the action spaces you may choose when placing your workers. As usual, you pay for the number of workers placed and you pay the cost of each action space chosen. The Starting Player Space has a cost of 0", "headingPath": "Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "Carefully punch the cardboard pieces out of the punchboards. Attach all the gears to the game board using the plastic fasteners. Make sure you attach the gears to the correct positions as shown in the setup picture. There are 3 different sizes of gears. After you attach the gears, put the appropriat", "headingPath": "Cardboard pieces · Game Board · STICKERS · ASSEMBLING THE GAME BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "PLAYER TURNS. Begin with the starting player and proceed clockwise. Your turn proceeds in the following order: Beg for corn: If you have 2 or fewer corn, you may replenish to 3. This angers the gods. You must choose one of these two options: Place any number of workers. A worker is always placed on ", "headingPath": "DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.044136, "snippet": "Each player chooses a color and takes in that color: Each player begins the game with his or her player board flipped lighter side up. After setting up the game (including revealing buildings and monuments) mix up the Starting Wealth Tiles and deal 4 secretly to each player. Each player chooses 2 to", "headingPath": "Player setup · 1 PLAYER BOARD · Starting Wealth Tiles · Player markers · Buildings & Monuments · Monument Spaces · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Place the assembled game board in the middle of the table. Lay the rest of the components on or around it as depicted. The illustration shows the setup for a 4-player game. For the differences in 2and 3-player games, consult the column on the next page. Associated with the Palenque gear are groups o", "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME · Jungle · Calendar · Starting Player · Bank · Scoring counter", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.02967, "snippet": "You begin the game with three workers and you may acquire more during the course of play. You must have at least one available worker (not on a gear and not still in the bank) to place workers. If you choose to place (instead of pick up) you must put one or more of your available workers onto the ge", "headingPath": "Placing Workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Placing Workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker", "sharpsignalDocId": 275}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 275 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 275 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 0.90371 of 2399 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 10:24

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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn	p.6	0.048412 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)		p.2	0.04741 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker	p.10	0.046432 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Cardboard pieces · Game Board · STICKERS · ASSEMBLING THE GAME BOARD	p.3	0.045743 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW	p.14	0.045695 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Player setup · 1 PLAYER BOARD · Starting Wealth Tiles · Player markers · Buildings & Monuments · Monument Spaces · …	p.5	0.044136 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	SETTING UP THE GAME · Jungle · Calendar · Starting Player · Bank · Scoring counter	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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Placing Workers	p.6	0.02967 (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 37 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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Placing Workers	p.6	#8	0.02967 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW	p.14	#5	0.045695 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker	p.10	#3	0.046432 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)		p.2	#2	0.04741 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)		p.1	#23	0.0125 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Dummy Workers · Example:	p.5	#13	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
#7	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Cardboard pieces · Game Board · STICKERS · ASSEMBLING THE GAME BOARD	p.3	#4	0.045743 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn	p.6	#1	0.048412 (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 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	COURSE OF THE GAME · Player Turns · Begging for Corn	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)		p.1	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	DETAILED ROUND OVERVIEW	p.14	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Placing Workers	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar — Rulebook (corpus doc 275)	Starting Player Space · Take Accumulated Corn · Take Back Your Worker · Move the Starting Player Marker	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 77 ms · first delta 2334 ms · total 5878 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 5799 ms · gateway work 5878 ms · total 5878 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3561
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 719
tok/sec: 205.7 tok/sec — 719 output tokens in 3.495 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 16s 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 203), 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.