Ruling — Inventions: Evolution of Ideas

← Inventions: Evolution of Ideas

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Inventions: Evolution of Ideasbg-347305-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

**Main Board Setup**

1. Place the main board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Place the Chronos meeple on the leftmost space of the Era track.[1]

3. Place 1 Sage meeple on the Sage space in each region.[1]

4. Place 1 random Knowledge tile face up (IP side down) on the Knowledge space in each region.[1]

5. Separate the Milestone tiles by letter.[1]

6. Shuffle Deck A and place 1 tile from it face up on each space of the Common Knowledge display.[1]

7. Shuffle Milestone Deck B and place 1 tile from it face up on each of the 4 Player displays on the board, even if that player is not in the game (this is the Private display).[1]

8. Place the 3 C Milestones face up next to the board to make the Eureka display.[1]

9. Place Decks D, E, and F above the Eureka display.[1]

10. Place 1 random Specialist tile face up in each Region display, to the left of the Idea space.[1]

**Player Setup**

1. Each player chooses a color and takes 1 Era marker, 1 Influence marker, 1 Scoring marker, and 1 Turn Order marker of that color.[1]

2. Place your scoring marker on space 0 of the Ingenuity Points (IP) track.[1]

3. The player who has invented something most recently goes first; the turn order is then clockwise, starting with this player.[1]

4. Place your Turn Order markers on the Turn Order track of the main board accordingly, with the first player's marker on the top space.[1]

5. Place the Era marker for each player below the Era track on the first four spaces (in any order).[1]

6. Place each player's Influence marker on space 1 of the Influence track.[1]

7. Each player takes a Society board, along with 30 citizens, 3 Pillars of Time (1 Epoch and 2 Seasons), 3 Chain Action tokens, 5 Influence tokens, 4 Aspiration tiles, 3 Economy tokens, and an IDEA with the name of your Milestone in the private display.[2]

8. Place 2 citizens in your academy as scholars and 1 in the Home (upper) space of each Specialty area (economy, culture, and technology) as specialists.[2]

9. Place 1 of your citizens as a diplomat on your private Milestone.[2]

10. Sort the Private Goal cards into 3 decks by type, then take 3 random cards (1 of each type) and keep them secret.[2]

11. Set aside your +1 Influence token for now.[2]

12. Place your other 4 Influence tokens (Present an Idea, Invent, Innovate, Share) on the matching Influence spaces in the lower-right portion of your Society board.[2]

13. Place 1 of your Economy tokens on its space in the lower-right corner of your Society board and the other 2 Economy tokens on the matching Progress hexes on the left half of your Society board.[2]

14. Take the idea from the Era-2 stack of Idea cards that depicts your Milestone's name (with a B below it) and place it to the right of your Society board.[2]

15. In turn order, each player takes an Era-3 Idea card from the top of the Idea stack and places it to the right of their board.[2]

16. Lay the top 3 cards face up to the right of the deck to create the Idea display next to the main board.[2]

17. Take 2 random inventions from the Era-1 stack of Prehistoric Invention cards and place them to the left of your board.[2]

18. Place your 3 Chain Action tokens on the upper-left space of your society board.[2]

19. Place your 3 Pillars of Time (Epoch and the 2 Seasons) near your society board.[2]

20. Keep the 4 Aspiration tiles and your remaining citizens near your society board as your citizen supply.[2]

**Automated Opponent (Chronos) Setup**

If playing against Chronos, choose a color for Chronos and create a supply of his citizens, Influence tokens, Era marker, Turn Order marker, and 1 Season pillar.[3] Assign the players' and Chronos' starting turn order at random.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD

[2] RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook · p.6 · Each player takes a Society board, along with: · SOCIETY BOARD SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook · p.23 · Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP

So says the rulebook. So plays the table.

🔧 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 195 ms · ask 10961 ms · total 11159 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 11159 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "In reverse turn order (starting with the player at the bottom of the Turn Order track), each player does the following on their turn: Gain the benefit depicted on the Specialist tile. Choose a region with an Idea card. Tip: If this is your first game, you may choose your region from your Private Goa", "headingPath": "Stone Age (Setup Round) · The Core of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "You will make minor adjustments to how you play the game for different player counts. These will be clearly marked as follows; you can ignore the tweaks that do not apply to your player count: (4-Player games), which is the default player count for which the rules are written. (3-Player games) (2-Pl", "headingPath": "PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "At the beginning of the game, everyone's Era marker and Milestones are Era 2, so at first, everyone can build 1 tile (Era 2 - 1 = 1). For each tile you wish to build, perform these steps: Place the tile on any space on your Progress map that has no tile in it, and immediately gain the benefit from t", "headingPath": "Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "(continued from page 11) Once everyone is familiar with this procedure, you can complete Steps 3 and 4 (below) while the next player starts their turn; this speeds up the game play! During your turn, you may have accumulated several Aspiration tiles, which serve as placeholders for specific types of", "headingPath": "TAKING YOUR TURN · ‹‹‹ DESIGNER TIP ››› · STEP 3: ASPIRATIONS BECOME PROGRESS · STEP 4: BUILD PROGRESS", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the beginning of each round (except in Era 1), Chronos advances 1 step on the Era track. Then, each player takes a turn that consists of a main action and, optionally, one or more Chain Actions . Your turn is divided into the following steps (these are depicted on your Society board, as a reminde", "headingPath": "PLAYING A ROUND · TAKING YOUR TURN · STEP 1: PREPARE CHAIN ACTION TOKENS · Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place any 3 Chronos Influence tokens face down on the Era track between Eras 2-3, 3-4, and 4-5. Separate the Wealth tiles by letter. For each of A-D, place 3 tiles (Chronos counts as a player). For each of E-G, place any 2. For Economy , Culture , and Technology tiles: stack only 2 of each number on", "headingPath": "2-Player Rules · HOW TO PLAY · PRESENT AN IDEA", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "random one of these in each region, except the two regions with the Specialist tiles depicted in the lower-left illustration to the right . Separately shuffle the Idea Era 3, 4, 5, and 6 decks, then create a single face-up Idea stack by stacking the Era-6 ideas on the bottom, then atop those ideas, ", "headingPath": "MAIN BOARD · WEALTH AND PROGRESS TILES", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Score IP based on the level you reached on the Influence track: 1, 5, or 10 IP. Score each Wealth tile on your Society board (see player aid). Score any 2 of your Private Goal cards (see player aid). The winner is the player with the most IP Blue s c o r e s 10 I P f o r b e i n g o n t h e 8 t h s ", "headingPath": "Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Each player takes a Society board, along with: · SOCIETY BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 704}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 704 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 704 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 0.89444 of 3041 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 21, 2026 07:49 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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Stone Age (Setup Round) · The Core of the Game	p.7	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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD	p.4	0.048131 (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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Example	p.21	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
#4	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	TAKING YOUR TURN · ‹‹‹ DESIGNER TIP ››› · STEP 3: ASPIRATIONS BECOME PROGRESS · STEP 4: BUILD PROGRESS	p.21	0.03125 (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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	PLAYING A ROUND · TAKING YOUR TURN · STEP 1: PREPARE CHAIN ACTION TOKENS · Example	p.10	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
#6	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	2-Player Rules · HOW TO PLAY · PRESENT AN IDEA	p.24	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
#7	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	MAIN BOARD · WEALTH AND PROGRESS TILES	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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP	p.23	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 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 55 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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Stone Age (Setup Round) · The Core of the Game	p.7	#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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	The Actions · ‹‹‹ IMPORTANT ››› · PRESENT AN IDEA	p.12	#26	0.011765 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	SHARE AN INVENTION	p.15	#12	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
#4	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD	p.4	#2	0.048131 (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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	NEXT ROUND	p.22	#14	0.013699 (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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Each player takes a Society board, along with: · SOCIETY BOARD SETUP	p.6	#15	0.013514 (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 Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Example	p.21	#3	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
#8	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP	p.23	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	PLAYER COUNT DIFFERENCES · MAIN BOARD	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Each player takes a Society board, along with: · SOCIETY BOARD SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Inventions: Evolution of Ideas — Rulebook (corpus doc 704)	Example · ERA 6: FINAL SCORING · SETUP	p.23	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 195 ms · first delta 3753 ms · total 11159 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 195 ms · ask 10961 ms · gateway work 11159 ms · total 11159 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3391
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 977
tok/sec: 133.4 tok/sec — 977 output tokens in 7.324 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 42s 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 0s 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 637), 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.