Ruling — Mare Nostrum: Empires

← Mare Nostrum: Empires

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Mare Nostrum: Empiresbg-174785-en-1e

**For 3 or 4 players:**

1. For 3 players, overlay the Babylonian and Egyptian Provinces with the 'Leader' and 'Heroes & Wonders' boards.[1][2]

2. For 4 players, overlay the Babylonian Provinces with the Leader Board.[1][2]

3. All visible Provinces are playable.[1][2]

4. Place a Leader Track Marker of your color on each Leader Track.[1][2]

5. For the first few games, place 5 random Hero and Wonder tiles face up on the first 5 spaces and the Pyramines tile face up on its space, then place the rest of the Hero and Wonder tiles randomly face down on the remaining empty spaces.[2]

6. For experienced players, place all 17 Hero and Wonder tiles and the Pyramids tile face up on their spaces.[2]

**General Setup:**

1. Players each choose or randomly select one of 5 Empires.[3]

2. Choose an Empire and all of its identically colored Legions, Triremes, Fortresses, and Control Markers, and place these near you next to the game board.[3]

3. Sort and place all Commodities, Coins, Markets, Caravans, Cities, and Temples face up next to the map.[3]

4. Place all Legendary Commodities together in one pile face down next to the map.[3]

5. Place Legions, Fortresses, Caravans, Markets, Cities, Temples, and Control Markers on your Empire's three starting Provinces as shown on the inside of your Empire Screen.[3]

6. Collect the 9 Resources (Coins and Commodities) shown.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook · p.3 · /orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players

[2] RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook · p.2 · /orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 234 ms · ask 5401 ms · total 5638 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5638 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "The Mare Nostrum map consists of Provinces (land areas) and Seas. Players each choose or randomly select one of 5 Empires. Each Empire begins the game controlling 3 Provinces, which are outlined in the same unique color as the Empire's Control Markers , Legions , Triremes , and Fortresses . Each Emp", "headingPath": "/orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "For 3 or 4 player games, you will use only part of the game board: 3 players: Overlay the Babylonian and Egyptian Provinces with the 'Leader' and 'Heroes & Wonders' boards. 4 players: Overlay the Babylonian Provinces with the Leader Board. All visible Provinces are playable. Below, the game map and ", "headingPath": "/orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "ɰ -2- For your first few games: Place 5 random Hero and Wonder tiles face up on the first 5 spaces and the Pyramids tile face up on its space. The rest of the Hero and Wonder tiles are randomly placed face down on the remaining empty spaces. At the end of each Build Phase, turn over new Hero/Wonder ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "Starting hero Phase 4: Move & Battle Active All of your Legions add +1 to each of their Battle Die rolls when you are the Player . Starting hero Phase 3: Build substitute 1 Coin for a Commodity in each set of Commodities, and/or substitute 1 Commodity for a Coin in each set of Coins. Starting hero P", "headingPath": "caesar · cleopatra · You may: · hammurabi · hannibal · pericles · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "➢ 23 tiles: 5 Starting Heroes, ( Caesar , Hannibal , Pericles , Cleopatra , and Hammurabi) , plus 12 additional Heroes, 5 Wonders, and the Pyramids. Legendary Commodities (13 - one of each Commodity type) 9 Land Battle Dice (beige) and 5 Sea Battle Dice (blue). 5 different colored Empire sets of min", "headingPath": "/orn.003Game Components · Commodities (13 types) and Coins · Caravan, Market, City & Temple · /orn.003Game overview · /orn.003Round Overview · Phase 1. Collect Resources (simultaneous)", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The Culture Leader selects an Active Player to build first (he can choose himself). Once that Active Player has finished building, the Culture Leader selects the next Active Player to build, and so on, until all players have had a turn to build. A player builds items by spending his Resources and pl", "headingPath": "3. Build Phase · ➢ Cleopatra may: · 1 Wonder can alter the storage rule: · 3.1 Build Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "At the end of each player's Build Phase turn, the player adjusts his Trade, Culture, and Military Track levels to reflect the Buildings and/or Units he has gained (5.0) , plus any Hero & Wonder Leader Bonuses he gained. Example: The Greek player built a Trireme and a Legendary City. He increases his", "headingPath": "3.2 Adjust Leader Tracks · 4. Move &Battle Phase · 4.1 Movement · 4.1.1 Sea Movement", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Trade Leader plays an Exchange Marker of his choice, determining how many Resources (Commodities and/or Coins) each player must offer for trade. The Trade Leader now claims one Resource from those offered by another player. Then the player he took the Resource from claims a Resource from another", "headingPath": "Phase 2. Trade Resources (beginning with the Trade Leader) · Phase 4. Move and Battle (in order determined by the Military Leader) · Phase 5. Claim Leadership (simultaneous)", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "/orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "/orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 768 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 768 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 0.88441 of 1142 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 22, 2026 17:18 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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)	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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players	p.3	0.048387 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)		p.3	0.046696 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	caesar · cleopatra · You may: · hammurabi · hannibal · pericles · …	p.11	0.045921 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Components · Commodities (13 types) and Coins · Caravan, Market, City & Temple · /orn.003Game overview · /orn.003Round Overview · Phase 1. Collect Resources (simultaneous)	p.4	0.044796 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	3. Build Phase · ➢ Cleopatra may: · 1 Wonder can alter the storage rule: · 3.1 Build Rules	p.6	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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	3.2 Adjust Leader Tracks · 4. Move &Battle Phase · 4.1 Movement · 4.1.1 Sea Movement	p.7	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
#8	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	Phase 2. Trade Resources (beginning with the Trade Leader) · Phase 4. Move and Battle (in order determined by the Military Leader) · Phase 5. Claim Leadership (simultaneous)	p.4	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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players	p.3	#2	0.048387 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)		p.3	#3	0.046696 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	3.1.1 Control	p.6	#14	0.013889 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	7. Heroes and Wonders · 8. Diplomacy · Build · Q: Am I limited to how many Units I can build? · Move and Battle	p.10	#17	0.013158 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	Phase 2. Trade Resources (beginning with the Trade Leader) · Phase 4. Move and Battle (in order determined by the Military Leader) · Phase 5. Claim Leadership (simultaneous)	p.4	#8	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
#6	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	caesar · cleopatra · You may: · hammurabi · hannibal · pericles · …	p.11	#4	0.045921 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)		p.3	#9	0.029139 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768)	/orn.003Game Setup (5 player setup shown)	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 234 ms · first delta 2806 ms · total 5638 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 234 ms · ask 5401 ms · gateway work 5638 ms · total 5638 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4167
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 358
tok/sec: 130.7 tok/sec — 358 output tokens in 2.740 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s 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 4s 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 702), 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.