Ruling — Coal Baron

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Coal Baronbg-143515-en-1e

The game is played over a total of 3 rounds (Shifts).[1]

**Turn Sequence and Actions**

1. Each Shift starts with the turn of the current Starting Player and continues in a clockwise direction.[1]

2. On a player's turn, they perform exactly 1 action by placing 1 or more of their Workers onto 1 Worker space of their choice.[1]

3. A player may only choose a space if they are able to perform that space's action.[1]

4. If the chosen Worker space is empty, the player must place exactly 1 Worker from their supply onto it and then perform its action.[1]

5. If there are already 1 or more Workers on the space, the player must remove them from that space and put them on the Canteen first.[1]

6. The player then takes from their supply as many Workers as they removed plus 1 additional Worker and places them onto the Worker space.[1]

7. The player then performs the space's action.[1]

8. If a player cannot perform the action of a Worker space or does not have enough Workers to oust the previous ones, they must select a different Worker space.[1]

**Ending a Shift and Scoring**

1. A Shift ends when the Workers of all players have been placed onto the Game board.[1]

2. Once all players have run out of Workers, a Shift scoring takes place using the Shift Clock.[2]

3. To carry out Shift scoring, players first reveal all their delivered Order cards and display them in a row.[3]

4. Victory Points (VPs) are awarded for majorities (first and second place) according to the elements on the Shift clock.[3]

5. The Scoring marker moves through elements, distributing VPs, until it reaches the position the Shift hand is pointing at, which is the last element scored for that Shift.[3]

6. After the first and second Shift, all Workers return to their owners.[1]

7. To prepare for the next Shift, the Starting Player marker is given to the player with the most Workers on Worker spaces in the Minecarts factory (using clockwise proximity to the previous Starting Player as a tiebreaker).[4]

8. The Scoring marker is returned to the leftmost circle space of the Shift Clock, and the Shift hand is moved to the next hand to the right.[4]

9. Delivered Order cards used for scoring are placed face down for the next Shift.[4]

10. All Workers are removed from the Game board and placed to the left of the player's Pit as their new Worker supply.[4]

**End of the Game**

1. The game ends after the Shift scoring of the 3rd Shift.[4]

2. Players convert remaining Bank notes and Coal cubes into Victory Points: 1 VP for every 5 Marks and 1 VP for every 3 Coal cubes.[4]

3. Players lose 1 VP for each Order card left in their Outstanding Orders area.[4]

4. Players lose 2 VPs for each Tunnel tile that one side of their Pit has in excess of the other.[4]

5. The player with the most total Victory Points wins (with Marks serving as a tiebreaker, or a shared victory in the case of a continued tie).[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP · Playing the game

[2] RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook · p.6 · Important: · End of a Shift · Example:

[3] RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook · p.7 · Example:

[4] RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook · p.8 · After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :

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 78 ms · ask 5355 ms · total 5435 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5435 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "When it is your turn, choose 1 Worker space on the Game board. You may only choose a space if you are able to perform that space's action. If the worker space is empty, you must place exactly 1 of your workers from your supply onto it and then perform its action. If there are already 1 or more Worke", "headingPath": "SETUP · Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Depending on the number of players, each player receives a certain number of Marks from the general Bank note supply as starting capital: in a 2-player game: 10 Marks in a 3-player game: 9 Marks in a 4-player game: 8 Marks Determine the Starting Player and give him the Starting Player marker . Form ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Before the first game, detach all cardboard pieces carefully from the punch boards. Put the Game board in the middle of the table. Depending on the number of players, reduce the number of available Worker spaces by covering the indicated spaces on the Game board with Lock tiles : in a 2-player game:", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Give the Starting Player marker to the player who has the most Workers on Worker spaces in the Minecarts factory. In the case of a tie, give the Starting Player marker to the tied player that in clockwise direction is sitting closest to the Starting Player of the previous Shift. (If the Starting Pla", "headingPath": "After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A boardgame for 2 to 4 players, aged 10 and up", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "To carry out the Shift scoring, first reveal all your delivered Order cards and display them in front of you in a row. (Only delivered Orders are eligible for this scoring. Outstanding Orders to the right of your Pit do not count.) Then, according to the elements on the Shift clock, award Victory Po", "headingPath": "Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When placing your Worker(s) onto a 'Delivery' Worker space, you must deliver all Orders that: 1. show the same transport Vehicle as depicted above that Worker space AND 2. are complete (i.e. all Order spots are occupied by Coal cubes). (You are only allowed to choose a 'Delivery' worker space if you", "headingPath": "3. Delivery (Deliver completed Orders) · 4. Money · Example: · 5. New Order (Gain 1 Order Card)", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Players may not keep their money hidden. The general Bank note supply is not limited. If the supply should run out, keep track of the money in a different way (note it on paper, for example). If the stack of Tunnel tiles or the stack of Order cards should run out, the respective spaces are simply no", "headingPath": "Additional notes: · CreDits", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Important: · End of a Shift · Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :", "sharpsignalDocId": 802}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 802 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 802 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 0.91674 of 2366 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 25, 2026 00:14 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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP · Playing the game	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP	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
#3	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :	p.8	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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)		p.1	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))	46
#6	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Example:	p.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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	3. Delivery (Deliver completed Orders) · 4. Money · Example: · 5. New Order (Gain 1 Order Card)	p.6	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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Additional notes: · CreDits	p.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))	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 18 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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP · Playing the game	p.4	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP	p.3	#2	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
#3	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Example:	p.4	#11	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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)		p.1	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Example:	p.7	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Important: · End of a Shift · Example:	p.6	#14	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 Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :	p.8	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP	p.3	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	SETUP · Playing the game	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Important: · End of a Shift · Example:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	Example:	p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Coal Baron — Rulebook (corpus doc 802)	After all Victory Points of the Shift scoring have been distributed, prepare for the next Shift : · Example: Mike has · End of The Game · Then check if you have Outstanding Orders : · Then check your Pit for Tunnel balance :	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 78 ms · first delta 1891 ms · total 5435 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 78 ms · ask 5355 ms · gateway work 5435 ms · total 5435 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2747
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 707
tok/sec: 202.5 tok/sec — 707 output tokens in 3.492 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s 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 737), 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.