RuleSage cited table rulings
← Messina 1347

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Messina 1347bg-238799-en-1e

I looked through Messina 1347'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.

RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.6 · Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP
Each player chooses a color. Take the player board, the figures, the cubes, the counters, and the overseer tokens in your color. You also take a scroll board, which fits beside your player board as shown below. Keep 3 of your figures near your board for now. You will send them to Messina on your fir
RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.14 · Registers · Advancing · Types of Actions
Three registers in the center of the scoreboard measure your reputation with the people, the city, and the church. Your position on these registers determines play order (see page 16) and at the end of the game, it may give you points (see page 17). Advancing on a register can often give you immedia
RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.19 · Register Priority Tile · Solo Variant · Setup · Lieutenants · Opponent's Turns
This tile can be used even if you are not playing the advanced variant. It modifies the round info table, altering which register has priority in each round. Messina 1347 can also be played as a single-player game. It works with or without the Advanced Variant boards. You will play against one (virt
RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.18 · Advanced Variant
The other sides of the player boards and scroll boards are used for asymmetric play. Assign player colors randomly. Each player takes the board in that color and uses the b side. (Quarantine cabins will be on the right.) Mix up the scroll boards and assign them randomly. Each player uses the b side.
RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.10 · Actions · Actions with Options · Advance on Register · Advance on Your Scroll Board · OVERSEER'S PATH
The hex you choose allows you to take one specific action. Some actions have simple consequences, such as gaining a fire token. Some actions lead to other actions, which offer many interesting opportunities to build your reputation. To perform these actions, simply take the indicated tokens. There i
🔧 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 195 ms · ask 2121 ms · total 2319 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2319 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Each player chooses a color. Take the player board, the figures, the cubes, the counters, and the overseer tokens in your color. You also take a scroll board, which fits beside your player board as shown below. Keep 3 of your figures near your board for now. You will send them to Messina on your fir", "headingPath": "Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Three registers in the center of the scoreboard measure your reputation with the people, the city, and the church. Your position on these registers determines play order (see page 16) and at the end of the game, it may give you points (see page 17). Advancing on a register can often give you immedia", "headingPath": "Registers · Advancing · Types of Actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "This tile can be used even if you are not playing the advanced variant. It modifies the round info table, altering which register has priority in each round. Messina 1347 can also be played as a single-player game. It works with or without the Advanced Variant boards. You will play against one (virt", "headingPath": "Register Priority Tile · Solo Variant · Setup · Lieutenants · Opponent's Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.046452, "snippet": "The other sides of the player boards and scroll boards are used for asymmetric play. Assign player colors randomly. Each player takes the board in that color and uses the b side. (Quarantine cabins will be on the right.) Mix up the scroll boards and assign them randomly. Each player uses the b side.", "headingPath": "Advanced Variant", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045957, "snippet": "The hex you choose allows you to take one specific action. Some actions have simple consequences, such as gaining a fire token. Some actions lead to other actions, which offer many interesting opportunities to build your reputation. To perform these actions, simply take the indicated tokens. There i", "headingPath": "Actions · Actions with Options · Advance on Register · Advance on Your Scroll Board · OVERSEER'S PATH", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "After taking penalties for your rat tokens, evaluate your final position on each register. If there are points shown on your current space, score those points at this time. On the popularity register, players also get points for being farther ahead. In a two-player game, the first player gets 5 poin", "headingPath": "POINTS ON REGISTERS · REPOPULATED NEIGHBORHOODS · SCROLL BOARD · REMAINING TOKENS · The Winner", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "Advance the round counter to the next round. Lay all lieutenant figures in Messina flat on their hexes to show that they have not been used yet in the new round. Remove citizen tokens from hexes that have plague cubes. Check the round info table to see which register has priority this round. Rearran", "headingPath": "Setup for Next Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The other tiles need to be separated into stacks and shuffled. Docking Tiles are shuffled into a facedown stack. Whenever this stack is empty, reshuffle all the tiles to make a new stack. Boat Tiles are sorted into stacks by number. Shuffle each stack then stack them in order with 1 on top. Place th", "headingPath": "Other Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}]
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 764 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 764 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 25, 2026 23:40 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP 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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Registers · Advancing · Types of Actions p.14 0.047379 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Register Priority Tile · Solo Variant · Setup · Lieutenants · Opponent's Turns p.19 0.046696 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Advanced Variant p.18 0.046452 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Actions · Actions with Options · Advance on Register · Advance on Your Scroll Board · OVERSEER'S PATH p.10 0.045957 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) POINTS ON REGISTERS · REPOPULATED NEIGHBORHOODS · SCROLL BOARD · REMAINING TOKENS · The Winner p.17 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
#7 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Setup for Next Round p.16 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
#8 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Other Tiles p.5 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 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 35 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP 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
#2 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Register Priority Tile · Solo Variant · Setup · Lieutenants · Opponent's Turns p.19 #3 0.046696 (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
#3 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Registers · Advancing · Types of Actions p.14 #2 0.047379 (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
#4 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Other Tiles p.5 #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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#5 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Final Scoring · OTHER NOTES ON SCORING (all player counts) p.19 #11 0.028006 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Setup for Next Round p.16 #7 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)) vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#7 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Game Setup p.4 #20 0.013158 (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
#8 RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764) Advanced Variant p.18 #4 0.046452 (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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 195 ms · first delta 2212 ms · total 2319 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 195 ms · ask 2121 ms · gateway work 2319 ms · total 2319 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3829
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.
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
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 698), 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.