RuleSage cited table rulings
← Power Grid

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered
1. Place the remaining resource tokens as a supply near the resource market.[1]
2. Place the money separated by value next to the game board.[1]
3. For the USA map, place a storage space for coal next to the resource market and ensure it is empty, as all coal tokens are placed on the spaces of the resource market.[1]
4. Place the appropriate resource refill summary card next to the resource market.[1]
5. Take the power plant cards with a plug on the back (numbered '03' to '15') and shuffle this pile.[1]
6. Draw the top 8 cards from the shuffled plug-back pile and place them face up on the power plant market.[1]
7. Sort these 8 cards in ascending order by their numbers.[1]
8. Place the four smallest cards in the top row of the market (the current market) in ascending order, left to right.[1]
9. Place the remaining four cards in the bottom row (the future market) in ascending order, left to right.[1]
10. Take one more power plant card with a plug on the back face down and set it aside.[1]
11. Set aside the 'Step 3' card.[1]
12. Shuffle the power plant cards with a socket on the back.[1]
13. Depending on the number of players, randomly remove some power plant cards with plugs and sockets from this pile and set them face down in the box without looking at them.[1]
14. Shuffle all remaining power plant cards together and place them as a stack face down next to the power plant market.[1]
15. Place the 'Step 3' card face down under the supply stack.[1]
16. Take the power plant with a plug on the back that was set aside in step 5 and set it face-down on top of the supply stack.[1]
17. Place the auction hammer and discount token next to the power plant market.[1]
18. Players determine the player order randomly at the beginning of the game.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.3 · Preparation
[2] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.4 · Phase 1: Determine Player Order
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 240 ms · ask 9569 ms · total 9817 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9817 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 7, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "The game runs through three Steps and begins with Step 1. Step 2 begins when the first player has connected a certain number of cities in their network. Step 3 begins after the Step 3 card is drawn from the power plant stack. The game usually ends in Step 3, but in some cases may end in Step 2. This", "headingPath": "The 3 Steps of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "The Trust needs its own space next to the game board, where it places its own power plants. The Trust gets 16 houses of its own color, plus one additional house for player order (The trust does not place a house on the scoring track for connected cities). The Trust does not get any money. Randomly d", "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Place the board in the middle of the table. For the first game we suggest choosing Germany. The map is separated into 6 areas, each with 7 cities. In each game, players choose a contiguous playing zone of connected areas depending on the number of players. This is the whole playing zone for ALL play", "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The player purchases the resource tokens from the spaces of the resource market. The printed number on the upper right of each resource space shows the price for one resource token. The player pays this amount to the bank for each token. They move their house on the player order track to the same nu", "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Earning cash Each player earns cash from the bank based on the number of cities they power as shown on the payment summary card. Resupply the resource market Based on the number of players and the current Step of the game, resupply the resource market with resource tokens from the supply, using the ", "headingPath": "Phase 5: Bureaucracy", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Players determine the player order for the round. The first player is the player with the most cities in their network (the house on the highest numbered space of the scoring track for connected cities). If two or more players are tied for the most cities, the first player is the player among them w", "headingPath": "Phase 1: Determine Player Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Place the remaining resource tokens as a supply near the resource market. Place the money separated by value next to the game board. USA map: There is a storage space for coal next to the resource market. At the beginning of the game, this storage space is empty, as all coal tokens are placed on the", "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "During Step 1 of the game, players cannot connect to the six cities, where the players placed the Trust's houses on the spaces numbered 10 during the preparation. These cities are only available when Step 2 of the game starts. As long as the Trust has houses in its supply, each time a player connect", "headingPath": "Phase 4: Building Houses", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Phase 1: Determine Player Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
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)
debug row retained until
Oct 30, 2026 03:03

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) The 3 Steps of the Game p.7 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Preparation p.9 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Preparation p.2 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) b. Pass the auction p.5 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Phase 5: Bureaucracy p.12 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Phase 1: Determine Player Order p.4 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Preparation p.3 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Phase 4: Building Houses p.10 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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
[1] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Preparation p.3 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94) Phase 1: Determine Player Order p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 240 ms · first delta n/a · total 9817 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 240 ms · ask 9569 ms · gateway work 9817 ms · total 9817 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 16s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 25), 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.