Ruling — Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Merv: The Heart of the Silk Roadbg-306040-en-1e

Merv is played over three years.[1] Each year consists of an action phase, which is divided into four rounds of turns.[1] In the second and third year, an invasion phase follows the action phase; in the first year, the game proceeds straight to the scoring phase.[2]

**A Turn**

On your turn, you must follow these steps in order:

1. Choose one of the five action slots along the side of the city you are on and move your master meeple there; you cannot choose an occupied slot.[1]

2. Choose to activate one of the building sites in the same row or column as your master meeple.[1]

* In the first and third rounds of each action phase, you must choose a building site in the same column as your master meeple.[1]

* In the second and fourth rounds, you must choose a building site in the same row.[1]

* You can choose any site regardless of whether a building is already there, but the camel market is not a building site.[1]

3. If you choose a building site with no building, you must place one of your buildings on it.[1]

**End of Round**

Once every player has taken a turn, the master meeples are moved to the next queue:

1. The player on the action slot furthest counterclockwise (closest to the queue they were just in) places their master meeple in the space furthest to the back of the next queue.[3]

2. The player in the next slot clockwise places their master meeple as far back in the queue as possible.[3]

3. This process repeats until all master meeples are in the queue.[3]

**Invasion Phase (Years 2 and 3)**

During the invasion, Mongols attack the city from every direction and destroy buildings unless a ransom is paid or they are protected.[2]

1. Mongols attack the first two building sites from the top and bottom of every row and column, unless protected by a wall segment, a gate, or a building with a soldier on it.[2]

2. Building sites in the middle column and middle row require only a single wall (a gate) to protect them.[2]

3. If a building site is attacked, you must return the building to your supply unless you pay a ransom.[2]

4. The ransom is one resource of the colour produced by the building (or the colour indicated by a bonus upgrade; or any colour if it has a white upgrade).[2]

5. After all attacks are resolved, remove all resource cubes and soldiers from the city.[2]

**Scoring and Ending the Game**

The game ends after the scoring phase of the third year.[4] Players earn points for courtiers in the palace, buildings in the city, and advancements on the mosque track.[1]

* **Caravan Cards:** Divide cards into sets (a set can have a maximum of one of each type). A set of one scores 1 point, a set of two scores 3 points, a set of three scores 6 points, and a set of four scores 10 points.[4]

* **Winning:** The player with the most points wins.[4]

* **Tiebreakers:** If tied, the player with the most favour wins; if still tied, the player with the most influence wins; if still tied, the player whose turn is first in the order queue wins.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook · p.6 · HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate

[2] RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook · p.7 · PLAY EXAMPLE: ROUND END (3 PLAYERS) · Invasion Phase

[3] RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook · p.7 · PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order

[4] RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook · p.14 · PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …

So says the rulebook. So plays 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 95 ms · ask 5916 ms · total 11251 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 5236 ms · generation 6015 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "6 Merv is played over three years. In each year there is an action phase, which is divided into four rounds of turns. Thus, over the course of the game, each player will take twelve turns. Each year also has a scoring phase, in which players earn points for their courtiers in the palace, their build", "headingPath": "HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Red places their master meeple in the fourth action slot from the queue. They choose the second building site down, placing a building there. They have another building in the same column, so together the buildings generate two resources: a teal cube and a tan cube. Rather than taking the building a", "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "14 The game ends after the scoring phase of the third year. Add up all the end of game points from your caravan cards as follows: Divide your caravan cards into sets. Each set can include a maximum of one of each type of caravan card. Then score each set depending on the number of cards in that set.", "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "Blue is taking the mosque action. They have a teal, an orange, and a tan cube that they want to spend on advancing along the mosque track. The camel for the first row has already been taken, and they can only advance once along the fourth row (and not at all along the third row) as they have no purp", "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: MOSQUE ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.04311, "snippet": "Yellow is taking the caravansary action. They spend two purple cubes and a white cube, which means they can take three caravan cards. They start by taking the frontmost ginger card, gaining the camel on the card: They want to take the juniper card, but they haven't reached they cannot collect a seco", "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: CARAVANSARY · Palace · FAVOUR TRACK", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Each player chooses a colour. Give each player all the meeples, buildings, and discs of that colour If there are fewer than four players, return all the unused player pieces to the box. . Place all the players' master meeples in the queue in the north-west corner of the city in a random order Place ", "headingPath": "Player Pieces · Two-Player · Single-Player · The City · The Library · The Marketplace · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "As your action on your turn, you may gain favour. You may also gain favour from advancing along the mosque track, placing a courtier in the palace, advancing on the influence track, collecting pairs of juniper at the caravansary, establishing trading posts in the marketplace, making breakthroughs in", "headingPath": "Gain Favour · FAVOUR TRACK · Deploy a Soldier · INFLUENCE TRACK", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "At the end of the first and second year, move the year marker to the next space on the year track. Then start the action phase for the next year. At the end of the third year, the game ends. Calculate end game points for caravan cards (explained on page 14). The player with the most points wins!", "headingPath": "End of The Year", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: ROUND END (3 PLAYERS) · Invasion Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 685}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 685 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 685 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 0.91841 of 2439 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 25, 2026 14:43 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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate	p.6	0.048412 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order	p.7	0.048387 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …	p.14	0.045724 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: MOSQUE ACTION	p.13	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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: CARAVANSARY · Palace · FAVOUR TRACK	p.10	0.04311 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	Player Pieces · Two-Player · Single-Player · The City · The Library · The Marketplace · …	p.5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	Gain Favour · FAVOUR TRACK · Deploy a Soldier · INFLUENCE TRACK	p.9	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
#8	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	End of The Year	p.8	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))	296

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 39 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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: MOSQUE ACTION	p.13	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	sInGle-Player: tHe corruPt maGIstrate · The Corrupt Magistrate's Turn · 1) Draw a Solo Card · 2) Choose an Action Slot · Method A	p.15	#9	0.030282 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: ROUND END (3 PLAYERS) · Invasion Phase	p.7	#13	0.027588 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: CARAVANSARY · Palace · FAVOUR TRACK	p.10	#5	0.04311 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	Player Pieces · Two-Player · Single-Player · The City · The Library · The Marketplace · …	p.5	#6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …	p.14	#3	0.045724 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order	p.7	#2	0.048387 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate	p.6	#1	0.048412 (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 Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	HIstorIcal note · How to Play · Action Phase · Turns · 1) Choose an Action Slot · 2) Choose a Building Site to Activate	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: ROUND END (3 PLAYERS) · Invasion Phase	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: A TURN · Round End · Manipulating Turn Order	p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 685)	PLAY EXAMPLE: WALL ACTION · Game end · Tiebreakers · two-Player: tHe HIGH courtIer · The High Courtier's Turn · 1) Choose an Action Slot · …	p.14	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 95 ms · first delta 2318 ms · total 11251 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 5236 ms · retrieval 95 ms · ask 5916 ms · gateway work 6015 ms · total 11251 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4238
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 728
tok/sec: 200.2 tok/sec — 728 output tokens in 3.637 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s 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 1s 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 618), 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.