Ruling — Stardew Valley: The Board Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Stardew Valley: The Board Gamebg-332290-en-1e

1. Place the board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Place the Stardew Dice, Animal Dice, and Spouse Pawn beside the board.[1]

3. Shuffle and place the Villagers, Events, Items, Epic Items, Mine Events, Tile Tray, and Resource Bags facedown, along with the stack of Joja Tiles.[1]

4. Place the Tile Tray near the board.[1]

5. Place the two bags (gray bag for Artifacts & Minerals and blue bag for Fish Tiles) near the Tile Tray.[1]

6. For each Community Center Room, draw 1 random Bundle that matches the room and place it facedown onto its matching room.[2]

7. Shuffle the Goal Deck and draw 4 cards, then place these faceup on Grandpa's Letter at the top of the board.[2]

8. Create 2 stacks of Animal Tiles near the left edge of the board, separated by type: Coop or Barn Animal.[2]

9. Place the Coop Building Tile on top of the Coop Animal stack and the Barn Building Tile on top of the Hay Animal stack.[2]

10. Randomly draw 2 other Building Tiles to place beside the Coop and Barn.[2]

11. Plant 1 Parsnip (a Spring Crop from the Tile Tray) in the second field slot.[1]

12. Place Spring Forageables and Trees on the board.[3] (Specifically: put 1 Spring Forageable tile facedown in each Foraging Spot and place the 4 Spring Tree Tiles onto the Tree Spots, leaf side up).[1]

13. Populate the Fish Track by drawing 5 random tiles from the Fishing Bag and putting 1 in each slot, always filling empty slots starting with the rightmost empty slot.[1]

14. Sort the Mine Level Deck by number so that Level 1 is on top and Level 12 is on the bottom, then place this stack faceup onto its space on the board.[1]

15. Shuffle the Map Cards Deck and draw 1, then place this revealed Map Card faceup on the board in its space next to the Mine Levels.[1]

16. Build the Season Deck and place it facedown in the season space on the board.[1]

17. Each player selects a Player Mat to determine their Profession and takes the matching colored pawn.[2]

18. Each player chooses a Starting Tool (Watering Can, Hoe, Fishing Rod, or Pickaxe) and places it on their Player Mat with Level 0 faceup on top.[2]

19. The person who recommended playing the game chooses the Starting Player and gives them the Pet Token.[2]

20. The group decides which pet they prefer, cat or dog.[2]

21. The players as a team collectively start with a total of 3 Gold.[2]

22. Draw the first Season Card and begin! [3]

[1] RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.4 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.23 · QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS

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 178 ms · ask 5187 ms · total 5368 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5368 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "The Community Center. For each Community Center Room, draw 1 random Bundle that matches the room. Do not look at it. Place each Bundle facedown onto its matching room. Set the remaining cards aside, as you most likely won't need them. Grandpa's Goals. Shuffle the Goal Deck and draw 4 cards. Place th", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Basic Components. Place the board in the middle of the table. Place beside it the Stardew Dice, Animal Dice and Spouse Pawn. Shuffle and place the following decks facedown, along with the stack of Joja Tiles: Villagers Events Items Epic Items Mine Events Tile Tray and Resource Bags. Place the Tile T", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Each round in the game follows these steps: Season Phase : Draw a Season Card and carry out its instructions. Planning Phase : Players discuss their plans and place their pawns at any location. Action Phase : Beginning with the Starting Player, each player takes a turn. Once your turn is complete, p", "headingPath": "How to Play · STEP 1 - SEASON PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "At the start of the game, each player chooses a Starting Tool. Keep all cards associated with your chosen tool stacked faceup in decreasing numerical order (Level 0 on top) on your Player Mat. The mat also has spaces that indicate where Profession Upgrades , items and resources are kept. You are nor", "headingPath": "Starting Tools & Inventory · Season End Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "pages 12 - 19 Water Crops: Move all planted crops in your fields 1 space to the right. Crops that leave the track are harvested. Collect from Animals: Roll the Animal Dice. Each die symbol activates all matching animals, and each animal generates 1 resource each time they are activated. Buy & Plant ", "headingPath": "SUMMARY OF ACTIONS · GETTING MARRIED", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "The basic game is described in the rules above, but players may wish to make a game easier for teaching new players, or harder for advanced players. The game ends the instant your objectives are complete. Choose a mode at the start of the game: 'Seedling' is great for teaching the game, or striving ", "headingPath": "Game Modes · 'Honest Farmer' is the standard way to play. · Optional Season Cards · Extra Challenge: Artisan Scoring · Making the Game Easier · Adjusting Game Length · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "page 10 Season Phase: The Starting Player (denoted by the Pet Token) draws and resolves a Season Card. If it's a Season End Card, remember that you immediately draw the next Season Card after the Season End Card has been resolved. Planning Phase: Players discuss what they'd like to do, and then each", "headingPath": "QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Cost to buy this animal. Resource generated each time you activate this animal. Number of Hearts you must discard to flip over to the Happy side. When watered, all planted crops move 1 space to the right toward harvest. Water Crops (Farm Action) Spend 1 action to move all crops currently planted in ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 841}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 841 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 841 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 0.89907 of 1942 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 25, 2026 14:09 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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.5	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.4	0.048131 (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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	How to Play · STEP 1 - SEASON PHASE	p.10	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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Starting Tools & Inventory · Season End Cards	p.20	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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	SUMMARY OF ACTIONS · GETTING MARRIED	p.23	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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Game Modes · 'Honest Farmer' is the standard way to play. · Optional Season Cards · Extra Challenge: Artisan Scoring · Making the Game Easier · Adjusting Game Length · …	p.22	0.030415 (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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS	p.23	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
#8	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)		p.13	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 29 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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.5	#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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	How to Play · STEP 1 - SEASON PHASE	p.10	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Starting Tools & Inventory · Season End Cards	p.20	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Game Modes · 'Honest Farmer' is the standard way to play. · Optional Season Cards · Extra Challenge: Artisan Scoring · Making the Game Easier · Adjusting Game Length · …	p.22	#6	0.030415 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.7	#18	0.012821 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	STEP 2 - PLANNING PHASE · STEP 3 - ACTION PHASE · ACTION + ACTION · ACTION + MOVE + ACTION · Movement Allows Foraging · Paths.	p.11	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS	p.23	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.4	#2	0.048131 (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 Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Stardew Valley: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 841)	QUICK RULES REFERENCE · Action + Action · QUICK SETUP CHECKLIST · ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS	p.23	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 178 ms · first delta 2138 ms · total 5368 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 178 ms · ask 5187 ms · gateway work 5368 ms · total 5368 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3526
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 629
tok/sec: 201.5 tok/sec — 629 output tokens in 3.121 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 22s 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 0s 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 776), 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.