You asked
How do I play?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Mare Nostrum: Empiresbg-174785-en-1e
I looked through Mare Nostrum: Empires's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
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
Circe Legions placed on empty Caravan spaces collect their associated Resources. Hamilcar Doubles Pillage income (4.3.1) . Temple of Artemis Receives 1 extra Coin each round. The Colossus Receives 1 extra Commodity each round. A new Trade Leader takes possession of all 3 Exchange Markers . Each Exch
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
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
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
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 168 ms · ask 2129 ms · total 2299 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 2299 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04866, "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}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Circe Legions placed on empty Caravan spaces collect their associated Resources. Hamilcar Doubles Pillage income (4.3.1) . Temple of Artemis Receives 1 extra Coin each round. The Colossus Receives 1 extra Commodity each round. A new Trade Leader takes possession of all 3 Exchange Markers . Each Exch", "headingPath": "2 Heroes and 2 Wonders give additional Resources: · 2.1 Play an Exchange Marker", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "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": 7, "score": 0.031746, "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": 11, "score": 0.030769, "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": 3, "score": 0.030303, "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": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Heroes and Wonders powers always have priority over other game rules. Players may talk with each other and negotiate deals. But promises and deals may be broken at any time. Example: The Roman player promises the Greek player that he will not invade Dacia if the Greek player does not build a Tri", "headingPath": "7. Heroes and Wonders · 8. Diplomacy · Build · Q: Am I limited to how many Units I can build? · Move and Battle", "sharpsignalDocId": 768}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029643, "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}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- 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
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 24, 2026 07:35 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) | 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 | 0.04866 (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) | 2 Heroes and 2 Wonders give additional Resources: · 2.1 Play an Exchange Marker | p.5 | 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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | /orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players | p.3 | 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 |
| #4 | 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 | 0.031746 (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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | caesar · cleopatra · You may: · hammurabi · hannibal · pericles · … | p.11 | 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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | 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 | |
| #7 | 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 | 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 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 | 0.029643 (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) | 2 Heroes and 2 Wonders give additional Resources: · 2.1 Play an Exchange Marker | p.5 | #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 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | 3.1.1 Control | p.6 | #16 | 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 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | 4.1.2 Land Movement | p.7 | #24 | 0.011905 (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) | /orn.003Game Setup For 3 or 4 players | p.3 | #3 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | 2.2 Trading Resources · 2.2.1 Uneven number of Resources taken | p.5 | #11 | 0.028446 (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 |
| #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 | #12 | 0.014493 (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 Mare Nostrum: Empires — Rulebook (corpus doc 768) | p.3 | #6 | 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 | |
| #8 | 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 | #7 | 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 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 168 ms · first delta 2186 ms · total 2299 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 168 ms · ask 2129 ms · gateway work 2299 ms · total 2299 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3874
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 180.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.050 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 6s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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 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.