Ruling — 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties

← 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Countiesbg-66837-en-1e

**Setup**

1. Place the board in the centre of the playing area.[1]

2. Place hexagonal track tiles close by.[1]

3. Stack the trains in ascending order (A-H) in a pile on the designated area of the board.[1]

4. Nominate a banker and arrange money in piles to form the bank.[1]

5. The banker shuffles directors' certificates and deals them out on the three Initial Purchase Offer (IPO) areas: first eight (spaces 1-8), then four (9-12), then four (13-16).[1]

6. Place white counter markers on the home stations of the final four companies to show they are out of play.[1]

7. The banker shuffles 16 train permit cards (six Freight, five Express, and five Local) and deals one to each company so each has one permit for a particular type of train.[1]

8. Place company charters, ordinary share certificates, and tokens in piles next to the board.[1]

9. Decide on the game length (short, standard, or long).[2]

10. Place the appropriate train manifest card face up in the trains space.[2]

11. Sort train cards into alphabetical order (A at the top, H at the bottom).[2]

12. For the standard game, count out seven 'A' trains, six 'B' trains, four 'C' trains, three 'D' trains, three 'E's, two 'F's, one 'G', and all 'H' trains.[2]

13. Place phase cards for each letter at the top of each group of trains with the same letter.[3]

14. Place home base markers for available companies on the Home Base Chart.[2]

15. As desired, place permit tokens on the Home Base Chart corresponding to those granted to companies.[2]

16. Place trains waiting to be bought on the Stock Market Chart.[2]

17. Players choose seating order randomly using player order cards and are handed initial money (e.g., £1200 for 2 players, £400 for 6 players).[3]

18. The player with the lowest value card is given the Priority Deal token (PD).[3]

**Game Sequence**

1. The game starts with two consecutive Parliament Rounds.[3]

2. The game proceeds in a sequence of Parliament Round, Stock Round, and some Operating Rounds (one in Phase A, two in Phases B and C, and three thereafter), which repeat until the game ends.[3]

3. Phases progress from A to H as the first train in each band is purchased (e.g., Phase C starts when the first 'C' train is bought).[4]

**Turns and Actions**

1. The player with the Priority Deal token starts the Stock Round, and play passes clockwise.[5]

2. On a turn, a player may perform the following actions in this order:

a. Sell one or more shares.[5]

b. Purchase a single share or start an un-chartered company.[5]

3. If a player performs neither action, they are deemed to pass.[5]

4. When a train is bought, the player must choose its type (Express, Local, or Freight) and place the card on the company charter so the type is clear.[6]

**Game End**

1. The game ends when the bank runs out of money, a company share price reaches the top of the market, or after a full set of operating rounds following the sale of the first 'H' train.[3]

2. The winner is the player with the most personal wealth (cash in hand plus shares); money in company treasuries does not count.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.5 · 2.4 Game Setup · 2.4.1 Setup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2 Setup for 7-8 players

[2] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.5 · 2.4.3 Trains and Game Length

[3] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.6 · 2.4.3 Trains and Game Length · 2.4.4 Player Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5 Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW

[4] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.20 · 9.0 PHASES

[5] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.10 · 6.1 Priority Deal · 6.2 Player actions

[6] RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook · p.4 · 2.2 Trains

That's the page. Back to 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 107 ms · ask 8761 ms · total 14175 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 5305 ms · generation 8870 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Place the board in the centre of the playing area, in easy access to all players. Place the hexagonal track tiles close by, so that players can see which tiles are available. Stack the trains in ascending order (A-H) in a pile on the designated area of the board. Nominate a competent player as banke", "headingPath": "2.4\t Game Setup · 2.4.1\tSetup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2\tSetup for 7-8 players", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046871, "snippet": "The player with the Priority Deal token starts the Stock Round, and play passes clockwise. This continues until all players pass consecutively (see 6.6). A player may perform the following actions on his turn, in the following order: Sell one or more shares Purchase a single share or start an un-cha", "headingPath": "6.1\t Priority Deal · 6.2\t Player actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 13.0 NOTES ON THE NEW EDITION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 14.0 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Calculating Train Routes. . . . . . . . ", "headingPath": "RULES OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "1862 ( a k a 1 8 E A ) Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties by Mike Hutton © 2019 GMT Games, LLC", "headingPath": "RULES OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "The game starts in Phase A. Thereafter it goes through phases B to H when the first train in each band of trains is purchased. In other words, as soon as the first 'C' train is bought, phase C starts. The number of trains available in each phase varies depending on which length of game the players a", "headingPath": "9.0 PHASES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045079, "snippet": "Place the phase cards for each letter at the top of each group of trains with the same letter, as follows: Players choose their seating order randomly using the player order cards, and are handed their initial money at the start of the game: | 2 players: £1200 | 6 players: £400 | The player with the", "headingPath": "2.4.3\tTrains and Game Length · 2.4.4\tPlayer Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5\t Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "Decide what length of game you will be playing. The short game uses fewer trains than the standard game, and the long game uses more. Place the appropriate train manifest card face up on the table in the trains space. Sort the train cards into alphabetical order (A at the top, H at the bottom). For ", "headingPath": "2.4.3\tTrains and Game Length", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.042399, "snippet": "2 1862 8.0 9.0 7.5.1 Consent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7.5.2 Connection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7.5.3 New Share Price. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7.5.4 New Par Price. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .", "headingPath": "RULES OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2.4\t Game Setup · 2.4.1\tSetup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2\tSetup for 7-8 players", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2.4.3\tTrains and Game Length", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2.4.3\tTrains and Game Length · 2.4.4\tPlayer Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5\t Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "9.0 PHASES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6.1\t Priority Deal · 6.2\t Player actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2.2\t Trains", "sharpsignalDocId": 1151}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1151 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1151 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 0.87728 of 2526 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 27, 2026 02:47 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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4 Game Setup · 2.4.1 Setup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2 Setup for 7-8 players	p.5	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
#2	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	6.1 Priority Deal · 6.2 Player actions	p.10	0.046871 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	RULES OF PLAY	p.2	0.045921 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	RULES OF PLAY	p.1	0.045743 (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))	97
#5	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	9.0 PHASES	p.20	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
#6	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length · 2.4.4 Player Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5 Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW	p.6	0.045079 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length	p.5	0.045009 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	RULES OF PLAY	p.2	0.042399 (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 80 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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	6.1 Priority Deal · 6.2 Player actions	p.10	#2	0.046871 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length	p.5	#7	0.045009 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.2 Trains	p.4	#10	0.029418 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length · 2.4.4 Player Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5 Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW	p.6	#6	0.045079 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	RULES OF PLAY	p.2	#11	0.026743 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	RULES OF PLAY	p.2	#3	0.045921 (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 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	9.0 PHASES	p.20	#5	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
#8	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4 Game Setup · 2.4.1 Setup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2 Setup for 7-8 players	p.5	#1	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4 Game Setup · 2.4.1 Setup for 2-6 players · 2.4.2 Setup for 7-8 players	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.4.3 Trains and Game Length · 2.4.4 Player Order, and Starting the Game · 2.5 Simpler Game Variants · 3.0 GAME OVERVIEW	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	9.0 PHASES	p.20	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	6.1 Priority Deal · 6.2 Player actions	p.10	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties — Rulebook (corpus doc 1151)	2.2 Trains	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 107 ms · first delta 4666 ms · total 14175 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 5305 ms · retrieval 107 ms · ask 8761 ms · gateway work 8870 ms · total 14175 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2810
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 820
tok/sec: 197.7 tok/sec — 820 output tokens in 4.147 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 53s 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: 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 1081), 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.