RuleSage cited table rulings
← Acquire

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered
1. Place the gameboard in the center of all players.[1]
2. Place the building tiles facedown next to the gameboard and mix them well.[1]
3. Choose a player to be the banker, who will pass out stocks and handle money exchanges.[1]
4. The banker places the seven headquarters buildings and the stock cards (separated by hotel chain) in the stock market tray as shown.[1]
5. The banker gives each player $6,000 each, consisting of four $1,000 bills, three $500 bills, and five $100 bills.[1]
6. The banker separates the remaining bills by denomination into four separate piles next to the gameboard.[1]
7. Each player receives one stockholder info card and places it in front of them.[1]
8. As a group, decide if stockholder bonuses will be paid to the top two stockholders (Classic Mode) or top three (Tycoon Mode) during a merger.[1]
9. All players flip their info card to the side displaying the chosen mode.[1]
10. As a group, decide whether to display acquired money and stocks for all to see or keep them secret.[1]
11. Decide who will go first by having each player draw a building tile from the facedown pile and place it faceup on the matching letter/number space on the gameboard; the player whose tile is closest to 1A goes first, with play moving to the left.[1]
12. Leave the tiles used to determine order on the gameboard.[1]
13. Each player draws six building tiles and stands them up in front of them so other players cannot see them.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 219 ms · ask 7916 ms · total 8146 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 8146 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Place the gameboard in the center of all players. Place the building tiles facedown next to the gameboard and mix them well. Choose a player to be the banker. This player will pass out stocks and handle money exchanges throughout the game. The banker places the seven headquarters buildings and the s", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Remove all game components from the shrink-wrap, and discard the waste. Remove the headquarters banners from the runner. Insert the banners into the headquarters buildings as shown to the right, matching the numbers on the runner to the numbered image shown.", "headingPath": "THE FIRST TIME YOU PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "The tiles represent new hotels. Each turn, you will add one to the game board. Choose one of your building tiles, and place it on its matching space on the gameboard. For example, the 1A building tile goes on space 1A on the gameboard. When you place a building tile, one of the following things will", "headingPath": "1. Place a Building Tile", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Choose a headquarters building from the stock market tray, and place it on any of the new connected building tiles. Take one stock card for that hotel chain. This is your founder's bonus! If all seven headquarters buildings are already in play on the board, you may not place a building tile that wil", "headingPath": "Immediately do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "When playing a two-player game, follow the rules for the core game using the Classic Mode side of the Stockholder Info Card, but follow the rules below when mergers occur: When determining stockholder bonuses, consider the stock market as an additional stockholder with a random number of shares. To ", "headingPath": "PLAYING A TWO-PLAYER GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "The game ends when one player announces during their turn that either all active hotel chains are safe or that one active hotel chain is made up of 41 or more building tiles. A player does not have to announce that the game is over if it is to their advantage to keep playing-for example, to enlarge ", "headingPath": "THE END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "It is possible to run out of money. If you run out of money, you may still place and draw building tiles each turn, but you may not purchase stock. You must wait until you receive a stockholder bonus or sell stocks in a hotel chain that has been acquired to get money. You can't sell stocks in an act", "headingPath": "RUNNING OUT OF MONEY", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "At the end of your turn, draw a building tile from the facedown pile. At the end of your turn, you may also check your building tiles to see if you have any that are unplayable. An unplayable building tile is one that would merge two or more safe hotel chains (which is not possible). Set any unplaya", "headingPath": "3. Draw a Building Tile", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
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
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)
debug row retained until
Oct 28, 2026 21:21

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) SETUP 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)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) THE FIRST TIME YOU PLAY 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)) 258
#3 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) 1. Place a Building Tile p.6 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Immediately do the following: p.7 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) PLAYING A TWO-PLAYER GAME p.16 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) THE END OF THE GAME p.14 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) RUNNING OUT OF MONEY p.10 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) 3. Draw a Building Tile p.10 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) 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.

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.

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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) SETUP p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 219 ms · first delta n/a · total 8146 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 219 ms · ask 7916 ms · gateway work 8146 ms · total 8146 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
setup

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 24), 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.