RuleSage cited table rulings
← Tiny Towns

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Tiny Townsbg-265736-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:
1. The Master Builder names a type of resource (Wood, Wheat, Brick, Glass, or Stone).[1]
2. All players simultaneously take a cube of this resource and place it in an empty square in their town grid.[1]
3. Players may optionally place up to 2 resources named by other players off to the side of their board, though these score no points or penalties.[1]
4. After resources are placed, players have until the next resource is named to construct any buildings for which they have the matching resources in the correct shape.[1]
5. To construct a building, remove the correct resources in the correct shape from your board and place them back in the general supply, then take the matching wooden building from the general supply and place it in one of the squares that was occupied by the removed resources.[1][2]
6. If constructing a monument, the player must read the card aloud, place it face-up in front of them, and resolve any immediate effects.[3]
7. Once all players have placed their resources and constructed buildings, a new round begins, and the Master Builder token passes to the player on the left.[1]
8. The game ends immediately when all players' towns are completed (when a town is filled with resources and the player cannot or chooses not to construct any buildings).[4]
9. To calculate the final score, remove all remaining resource cubes (except from Warehouses), subtract 1 point for each empty square, add points for each building in the town, and subtract any penalties.[4]
10. The player with the most points wins; ties are broken by the player with the fewest turns as Master Builder, then the fewest empty squares, then the most Cottages.[4]
[1] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook · p.4 · building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules
[2] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook · p.4 · building construction example
[3] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook · p.3 · Monuments · building card anatomy
[4] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook · p.5 · feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules
🔧 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 81 ms · ask 3090 ms · total 3173 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 3173 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "2 Give each player a player board. Leave the Resource cards in the box (unless you are playing the T own Hall rules or Solo variant). Place the Cottage card (with the symbol on the back) face-up in the center of the table. Sort the remaining Building cards into separate piles by the symbols on the b", "headingPath": "contents · Setup · There are 5 different resources:", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Town Hall is a different way to play Tiny T owns that introduces the Resource deck and changes the way resources are selected during the game. Assign 1 player to be the Mayor, who will draw Resource cards to determine which resource all players will place. Shuffle the 15 Resource cards to form a dra", "headingPath": "Town Hall Rules · gameplay · Solo Variant · setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046394, "snippet": "Courtney Maki, Josh Beauregard, Mark J. Minick, Jenna Townsend, Lucas Roby, Jesse Bisceglia, Adam Schuurmans, Nick Wilsey, Faith Hardin, Nick Painter, Jenny Ritz, Ben Ritz, Andrew Couperus, Danielle Schissler, Josh McCabe, Kevin Root, Jeff Warrender, Kevin Gibson, Quentin Hudspeth, Dean Howard, P.D.", "headingPath": "Thank you to the playtesters:", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "4 The Master Builder names a type of resource. (Wood, Wheat, Brick, Glass, or Stone) All players MUST take a cube of this resource and place it in an empty square in their town grid. Players do this simultaneously. Resources may never be moved to a different square after being placed. Resources can ", "headingPath": "building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Shuffle the 15 Resource cards to form a draw pile and reveal the top 3 cards. Y ou choose to place any 1 of the 3 resources shown in your town and construct buildings as normal. Then place the corresponding card face-down on the bottom of the draw pile and draw a new Resource card to replace it. Not", "headingPath": "solo rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You are the mayor of a tiny town in the forest, where the smaller creatures of the woods have created a civilization hidden away from predators. This new land is small and the resources are scarce -you take what you can get and never say no to building materials. Cleverly plan and construct a thrivi", "headingPath": "§elcome! · objective · contents", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Remember! Cottages ( ) must be fed by buildings to be worth 3 . Players may construct Cottages before or after constructing buildings, but unfed Cottages at game end score 0 . When your town is filled with resources and you cannot (or choose not to) construct any buildings, your town is completed. Y", "headingPath": "feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "A monument is a special type of building that can only be constructed by the player holding that card. Players may only construct their monuments once . Monuments may be constructed in any round, just like a normal building (see Building Construction Rules). Upon constructing a monument, the player ", "headingPath": "Monuments · building card anatomy", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "building construction example", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Monuments · building card anatomy", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 556}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 556 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 556 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 0.93211 of 1414 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until
Nov 15, 2026 12:40

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) contents · Setup · There are 5 different resources: p.2 0.048916 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Town Hall Rules · gameplay · Solo Variant · setup p.6 0.047643 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Thank you to the playtesters: p.8 0.046394 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules p.4 0.046176 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) solo rules p.6 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
#6 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) §elcome! · objective · contents p.1 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
#7 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules p.5 0.029851 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Monuments · building card anatomy p.3 0.029412 (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 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 12 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) contents · Setup · There are 5 different resources: p.2 #1 0.048916 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules p.4 #4 0.046176 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Thank you to the playtesters: p.8 #3 0.046394 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules p.5 #7 0.029851 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) building construction example p.4 #11 0.014085 (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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Monuments · building card anatomy p.3 #8 0.029412 (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
#7 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) solo rules p.6 #5 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
#8 RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Town Hall Rules · gameplay · Solo Variant · setup p.6 #2 0.047643 (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

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 Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) building card anatomy · Round Overview · resource placement · the cavern rule · Building Construction Rules p.4 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) building construction example p.4 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) Monuments · building card anatomy p.3 no quote on the wire
[4] RULEBOOK Tiny Towns — Rulebook (corpus doc 556) feeding your cottages · Completing Your Town · Game End · Additional Rules p.5 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 81 ms · first delta 1310 ms · total 3173 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 81 ms · ask 3090 ms · gateway work 3173 ms · total 3173 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2655
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
379
tok/sec
207.4 tok/sec — 379 output tokens in 1.827 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 25s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 488), 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.