Ruling — First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express!

← First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express!

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express!bg-206941-en-1e

1. Take all base cards (those with an X on their ticket) and add all cards from the two chosen modules.[1]

2. Separate these cards into three piles according to their color/number: green (1), blue (2), and red (3).[1]

3. For each color, shuffle the base and module cards together to form a separate face-down pile for each color, and place these piles on the table.[2][3]

4. Take the first pile (green) of Action cards and place 3 rows of 6 cards, face up, in the middle of the table.[1]

5. Place the Start player tile to the left of the first card in the first row.[1]

6. Take the Railroad Car cards and place them on the table accessible to all players, sorted in ascending order: 0 - 1 - 2 - 4 - 7 - 12.[2][4]

7. Place the coins in a general supply accessible to all players.[2][4]

8. Sort the Locomotive tiles in ascending order (5 to 15) and place them in a pile (5 on top, 15 at the bottom) accessible to all players, and place the Constantinople tile next to it.[2][4]

9. Each player chooses a color and receives 1 player board, 1 coin, 3 conductors, 1 locomotive, 6 scoring markers, 4 mail cars, and 2 0-value railroad cars.[2][4]

10. Choose a player to be scorekeeper and place the score board near them.[2][4]

11. Each player takes one of their conductors and puts it onto the 0/50 space of the score board, and puts their 6 scoring markers next to the score board.[2][4]

12. Choose a start player and give them the Start Player figure.[4]

13. Shuffle the Game End cards face down.[1][4]

14. The player to the right of the start player draws a number of cards equal to the number of players + 1, chooses 1 to keep, and passes the rest to the next player in counter-clockwise direction until all players have 1 Game End card; the remaining card is shuffled back into the pile.[1][4]

15. Keep the chosen Game End card face down in a pile in the bottom left of your player board.[1][4]

16. Draw 4 more Game End cards and place them face up on the table, and place the remaining Game End cards as a face-down pile.[1][4]

[1] RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook · p.2 · Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.

[2] RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook · p.3 · Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.

[3] RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook · p.3

[4] RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook · p.3

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 239 ms · ask 5046 ms · total 5287 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5287 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "10. Take the first pile (green) of Action cards and place 3 rows of 6 cards, face up, in the middle of the table. You will have a total of 18 Action cards to choose from in the first round. Place the Start player tile to the left of the first card in the first row. Once you have finished setting up ", "headingPath": "Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "2. For each color, shuffle well the base and Module cards together, forming a separate face-down pile for each color. Place these piles on the table, somewhat off to the side. From now on, these cards will be referred to as Action cards . 3. Take the Railroad Car cards and place them on the table ac", "headingPath": "Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "1 You take the Start Player tile and get 2 coins . Unfortunately, the next player gets nothing. The third player gets a 0-value railroad car. The fourth player chooses between a new 0-value railroad car or upgrading one of his existing 0-value railroad cars to 1-value . He chooses the latter. Start ", "headingPath": "Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "First, we will give you an overview of the game and what kind of actions you will take on your turns. Then we'll explain the various symbols you'll encounter during the game. Once you understand them, you will have all the necessary knowledge to start playing the game. From there, understanding the ", "headingPath": "Game Overview · Gameplay · Playing a round", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "In this case, you would end up with 2 scoring markers on the Constantinople tile. On their player board, each player has an area composed of 12 spaces for coins. Players start the game with 1 coin. There are many cards that will give you coins, such as several of the Action cards in the various modu", "headingPath": "Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "If nobody took the Start Player tile, then the start player remains unchanged. That player keeps the Start Player figure. Important: If noboby took the Start Player tile, then no compensations are distributed (page 9). When you finish the first round with pile 1, 2, or 3, lay out another 18 Action c", "headingPath": "new sTarT Player · afTer The firsT round wiTh one of The Piles · afTer The second round wiTh one of The Piles", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Keep your chosen card face down in a pile in the bottom left of your player board. It will come into play only at game end. (Game End cards are explained on page 10.) Finally, draw 4 more Game End cards and place them face up on the table. Place the remaining Game End cards as a face-down pile. Cons", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Coins must always be added to the lowest, leftmost, empty space on your player board. spaces in the first column before filling the In other words, you have to fill all empty spaces in the second column, and so on. Important: You had 3 coins on your board already from earlier. You receive 3 coins an", "headingPath": "how To Place coins · Example: · What happens when you receive more coins than you have room for? · how do you sPend coins and whaT are They worTh?", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 609}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 609 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 609 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 0.86772 of 1648 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 19, 2026 18:29 UTC

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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.2	0.04866 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.3	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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Example:	p.9	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
#4	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Game Overview · Gameplay · Playing a round	p.4	0.045805 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Example:	p.11	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
#6	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	new sTarT Player · afTer The firsT round wiTh one of The Piles · afTer The second round wiTh one of The Piles	p.13	0.030769 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)		p.3	0.030303 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	how To Place coins · Example: · What happens when you receive more coins than you have room for? · how do you sPend coins and whaT are They worTh?	p.12	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

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 27 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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.2	#1	0.04866 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.3	#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
#3	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	The Basic Symbols · Take a 0-value railroad car	p.5	#11	0.028139 (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
#4	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)		p.3	#10	0.028439 (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
#5	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)		p.3	#7	0.030303 (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
#6	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Example:	p.11	#5	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
#7	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Example:	p.9	#3	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
#8	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Game Overview · Gameplay · Playing a round	p.4	#4	0.045805 (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 First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)	Setup and gameplay is the same regardless of the number of players.	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express! — Rulebook (corpus doc 609)		p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 239 ms · first delta 2443 ms · total 5287 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 239 ms · ask 5046 ms · gateway work 5287 ms · total 5287 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2851
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 574
tok/sec: 205.1 tok/sec — 574 output tokens in 2.799 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 20s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 60h, checked 8s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 541), 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.