Ruling — Trains

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You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trainsbg-121408-en-1e

**Setup**

1. Choose which side of the board to use, Tokyo or Osaka.[1]

2. Place all station tokens beside the board.[1]

3. Each player selects a color and takes all the rail tokens of that color.[1]

4. Place each player's scoring token on the 0 space on the victory point track.[1]

5. Each player takes 7 Normal Train, 2 Lay Rails, and 1 Station Expansion cards (10 total), shuffles them, and places them face down to form a starting deck.[1]

6. Create the common Supply of cards by placing Express Train, Limited Express Train, Lay Rails, Station Expansion, Apartment, Tower, Skyscraper, and Waste in stacks on the table.[1]

7. Shuffle the randomizer cards, draw the first 8, and place the corresponding stacks of cards on the table.[1]

8. Return randomizers and any unselected card stacks to the box.[1]

9. The player who most recently traveled by train is the starting player.[1]

10. Each player draws a hand of five cards from their deck.[2]

11. Going clockwise, players place one rail token as their starting point, provided it is not on a sea space, a remote location, or where another player has already placed theirs.[2]

**A Turn**

1. Beginning with the starting player and proceeding clockwise, players take turns playing cards, laying rails, and building stations.[2]

2. During a single turn, the active player may both play cards from his hand and buy cards from the Supply, in any order, as many times as he or she chooses.[3]

3. The player must fully complete each action one at a time (playing a card or buying a card).[3]

4. To play a card, take it from the hand and place it face up in the play area.[3]

5. When playing a card, gain money equal to the card's Value (top left number); this money is only valid for the current turn.[3]

6. If the played card is an Action card, the player may choose to apply its effects in full, resolved from top to bottom.[3]

7. To buy a card, take it from the common Supply and put it into the "gained cards" area using money gained from played cards.[4]

8. A player may also decide to simply pass the turn, neither playing nor buying cards.[3]

9. After playing and buying cards, the player goes to the Clean Up stage.[3]

10. The turn then passes to the next player.[3]

**Winning the Game**

1. The game ends when the game ends.[2]

2. The player with the most Victory Points wins.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook · p.4 · All Aboard!

[2] RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook · p.5 · Example Setup · How to Play

[3] RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook · p.6 · On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card

[4] RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook · p.7 · Playing A Card · How to Buy Cards

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 109 ms · ask 4868 ms · total 4979 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4979 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "During a single turn, the active player may both play cards from his hand and buy cards from the Supply, in any order, as many times as he or she chooses. However, the player must fully complete each action one at a time - a player may not buy a card in the middle of playing a card, or vice versa. W", "headingPath": "On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046544, "snippet": ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 All Aboard! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 How to Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 On A Player’s Turn . . . . . . . . . . . .", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "The following diagram is an example setup of a 4-player game, using the Tokyo board. The game starts with each player drawing a hand of five cards from their deck. Going clockwise around the table players place one rail token as their starting point. Players may not place a starting point on a sea s", "headingPath": "Example Setup · How to Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "First he plays 'Station Expansion', places a station marker on Tachikawa, and takes a Waste and places it in his 'gained cards' area. Then he plays his four 'Normal Train' and for the 4 money he gained from them, he buys a 'Amusement Park' from the Supply and places in on his 'gained cards' area. He", "headingPath": "First turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "He then takes a Waste card. Then he plays another 'Lay Rails' and builds below/left of Kichijoji; it's also a field space so no extra cost. And he takes another Waste card. Lastly he plays his 3 'Normal Train' to gain 3 money, and for those he buys 'Express Train'. He has now run out of cards, so he", "headingPath": "Second turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.044583, "snippet": "First, let's get to know the cards. We'll look at things like the board and the pieces soon, but most of the action is on the cards, so that's a good place to start. Effect - This is what happens when you play the card, along with creating any money from the Value icon.", "headingPath": "The Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.043124, "snippet": "Time to set up the game! Follow these steps to pull out of the station: Choose which side of the board to use, Tokyo or Osaka. Each side has a different map and will provide a different experience. Place all station tokens beside the board. Each player selects a color and takes all the rail tokens o", "headingPath": "All Aboard!", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.04257, "snippet": "Blue , Yellow , and Red are playing on the Tokyo map. The eight randomly selected cards are Landfill, Conductor Area, Passing Station, Holiday Timetable, Steel Bridge, Amusement Park, Maintenance Factory and Dump Site. Blue starts the game, followed by Yellow and Red . First, all players check the b", "headingPath": "A GAME EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "All Aboard!", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Example Setup · How to Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing A Card · How to Buy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 772}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 772 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 772 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 0.89457 of 1916 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 25, 2026 09:56 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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card	p.6	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)		p.2	0.046544 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Example Setup · How to Play	p.5	0.046239 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	First turn	p.11	0.045695 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Second turn	p.11	0.045002 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	The Cards	p.3	0.044583 (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))	270
#7	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	All Aboard!	p.4	0.043124 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	A GAME EXAMPLE	p.11	0.04257 (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 20 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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Example Setup · How to Play	p.5	#3	0.046239 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card	p.6	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Playing A Card · How to Buy Cards	p.7	#9	0.029877 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	First turn	p.11	#4	0.045695 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Trash	p.9	#19	0.026172 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)		p.2	#2	0.046544 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	The Cards	p.3	#6	0.044583 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	All Aboard!	p.4	#7	0.043124 (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 Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	All Aboard!	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Example Setup · How to Play	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	On A Player's Turn · Playing A Card	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Trains — Rulebook (corpus doc 772)	Playing A Card · How to Buy Cards	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 109 ms · first delta 1976 ms · total 4979 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 109 ms · ask 4868 ms · gateway work 4979 ms · total 4979 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2556
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 598
tok/sec: 202.7 tok/sec — 598 output tokens in 2.950 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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 5s 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 706), 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.