Ruling — AuZtralia

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: AuZtraliabg-231581-en-1e

### Setup

1. Set the board to show the Eastern map.[1]

2. Select a colour and take the corresponding set of pieces, including seven of each type of Farm (Sheep, Cattle, Corn), twenty Railway tiles, twenty cubes, three discs, one Port marker, and one Player Board.[1]

3. Place your Player Board in front of you with the 'Eastern Barrages' showing and place your cubes in the HQ box.[1]

4. Place the rest of your pieces by the side of your Player Board.[1]

5. Place the four resource types in a supply by the side of the board.[1]

6. Start the game with two Coal, two Iron, and four Gold placed in your Warehouse.[1]

7. Place three Sanity markers on your Player Board.[1]

8. Set aside the eight Old One files with X or XX on the front, then separate the rest into stacks of the same level (one, two, and three), shuffle each stack, and place them face down by the side of the board.[1]

9. Shuffle the twenty Survey tiles face down.[1]

10. Draw and place one tile in each hex marked with a Survey triangle (thirteen in all), then flip each tile face up and orientate so that the arrow is pointing to the top of the board.[1]

11. Shuffle the Personality cards and draw the top five cards to form a line from left to right.[2]

12. Place the remaining Personality cards as a draw deck to the left of the display.[2]

13. Shuffle the Old One cards and place them beside the board.[2]

14. Place the Old One's purple disc on the 22 space of the Time Track.[2]

15. Place the Military Units in stacks in the corresponding boxes on the board.[2]

16. Randomly determine the first player.[2]

17. Each player places one of their discs on the correct space of the Time Track based on the number of players, stacking them with the first player on top.[2]

18. Going in reverse player order, each player places their Port disc in a Coastal hex that contains the Port symbol, ensuring no Port is within two hexes of another Port by the most direct route.[2]

### A Turn

1. The active player is the player whose disc is in the lowest numbered position on the Time Track (if multiple discs are in one space, the player whose disc is highest in the disc stack is active).[3]

2. The active player takes one cube from their HQ and places it in an Action Box of their choice on their Player Board.[3]

3. The active player performs the corresponding action.[3]

4. The player moves their disc a number of spaces along the Time Track equal to the action's Time Point cost.[3]

5. If the disc ends up in a space with other discs, the player places their disc on top.[3]

6. If a player wishes to perform an action they have already performed, they must pay one Gold for each cube already in that box, or spend a Time Point to retrieve their cubes.[3]

7. If a player's disc reaches or passes space 53, they cannot take any more actions.[3]

### Activating the Old Ones

1. When every player disc has passed the purple disc at no. 22 on the Time Track, the Old Ones become the active player.[4]

2. Move the purple disc one Time Point along the track.[4]

3. If the purple disc moves to an illuminated space, draw one Revelation card and resolve it.[4]

4. If there are any face up Old Ones on the board capable of moving (excluding Temples), draw two Old One cards and resolve any movement.[4]

5. The Old Ones may have consecutive activations as long as the purple disc is furthest back on the Time Track.[4]

### Ending the Game

1. The game ends when everybody has expended a certain number of Time Points or a port has been destroyed.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook · p.6 · SETTING UP THE GAME

[2] RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook · p.7 · Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.

[3] RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook · p.8 · PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS

[4] RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook · p.15

[5] RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME OVERVIEW & OBJECTIVE

That's the page. Back to 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 196 ms · ask 9942 ms · total 10140 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 10140 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "The player whose disc is in the lowest numbered position on the Time Track is the active player. If there is more than one disc in a space, the player whose disc is highest in the stack is the ac� ve player. Example - Red is the acti ve player. Once Red and Blue pass Green, Green will be the acti ve", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Put the unused cards back in the box without looking at them. Shuffl e the Personality cards and draw the top fi ve cards to form a display. The order in which the cards are drawn is important. They should form a line going from le� to right, with the right-hand side being the end of the line. Place", "headingPath": "Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "When every player disc has passed the purple disc that is wai� ng at no.22 on the Time Track, the Old Ones become the ac� ve player. This involves: Moving the purple disc one Time Point along the track. Revela� on. If purple moves to an illuminated space, draw one Revela� on card and resolve it. Old", "headingPath": "ACTIVATING THE OLD ONES · Revelations", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.045956, "snippet": "- 15 - ACTIVATING THE OLD ONES When every player disc has passed the purple disc that is wai� ng at no.22 on the Time Track, the Old Ones become the ac� ve player. This involves: 1. Moving the purple disc one Time Point along the track. 2. Revela� on. If purple moves to an illuminated space, draw on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Set the board to show the Eastern map (as shown above). Select a colour and take the corresponding set of pieces. You will have seven of each type of Farm (Sheep, Ca� le, Corn), twenty Railway � les, twenty cubes, three discs, one Port marker, and one Player Board. Place your Player Board in front o", "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Proceed as above, star� ng your Time Point marker on Posi� on 1 of the Time Track. When taking the Recruit Help ac� on, you may also pay one Gold to discard as many cards as you wish to refresh the display. Do this before selec� ng the person to recruit. Choose a diffi culty level and start with the", "headingPath": "SOLO MODE · SOLO OBJECTIVES · TWO-PLAYER VARIANTS · WESTERN AUSTRALIA · Survey stage · Rule changes · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "More info and a how to play video at www.auztralia.net", "headingPath": "CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "However, you cannot build Railway that does not connect back to your port solely on your colour tracks. 3. Import export allows you to gi� imported resources or Gold received from expor� ng to another, so that the recipient is free to use them on their turn. 4. When you take a personality card you c", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW & OBJECTIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 737}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 737 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 737 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 0.91018 of 2850 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 23, 2026 19:48 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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS	p.8	0.048172 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.	p.7	0.047371 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	ACTIVATING THE OLD ONES · Revelations	p.14	0.047163 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)		p.15	0.045956 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	SETTING UP THE GAME	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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	SOLO MODE · SOLO OBJECTIVES · TWO-PLAYER VARIANTS · WESTERN AUSTRALIA · Survey stage · Rule changes · …	p.19	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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	CONTENTS	p.3	0.030214 (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))	54
#8	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)		p.19	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 46 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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	SETTING UP THE GAME	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
#2	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS	p.8	#1	0.048172 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	CONTENTS	p.3	#7	0.030214 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)		p.15	#4	0.045956 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	ACTIVATING THE OLD ONES · Revelations	p.14	#3	0.047163 (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
#6	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.	p.7	#2	0.047371 (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 AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	GAME OVERVIEW & OBJECTIVE	p.3	#9	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
#8	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	GAME OVERVIEW & OBJECTIVE	p.3	#23	0.012195 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	Resources are never placed in COASTAL hexes. Old Ones are never placed in HILL or COASTAL hexes.	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	PLAYING THE GAME · AVAILABLE ACTIONS	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)		p.15	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK AuZtralia — Rulebook (corpus doc 737)	GAME OVERVIEW & OBJECTIVE	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 196 ms · first delta 3502 ms · total 10140 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 196 ms · ask 9942 ms · gateway work 10140 ms · total 10140 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3717
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 873
tok/sec: 133.0 tok/sec — 873 output tokens in 6.564 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 7s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 671), 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.