Ruling — Villagers

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Villagersbg-241724-en-1e

I looked through Villagers'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 Villagers — Rulebook · p.5 · GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played .

Shuffle the rest of the cards and form 6 face-down stacks each with twice as many cards as there are players in the game. In a 5 player game for example you would make 6 stacks with 10 cards in each. Line these stacks up above the Starting Road Villagers . 8 Add the First Market Card beneath the sec

RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook · p.13 · BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE

The player wants to play their Cartwright. As the Production Chain Text shows, it must be placed on top of a Lumberjack and a Wheeler. 1. The player has a Wheeler in their hand, and a Lumberjack already placed in the Village, so getting the Cartwright out will not be a problem. They decide to play t

RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook · p.8 · GAME RULES · THE DRAFT PHASE

The game is played over several rounds until all the face-down stacks of villager cards on the Road * have been emptied. Each round is divided into 2 phases carried out in order: A 1. The Draft Phase: players draft villagers from the Road . 2. The Build Phase: players play villagers from their hand

RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook · p.5

GIVE ALL PLAYERS THIS: VILLAGEFOUNDERSVILLAGE SQUARE PLAYER HANDSUPPLYPLAYER AID Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks.

RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook · p.4

GAME SETUP RESERVE BASIC VILLAGERS DISCARD BANK ROAD Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks. Give each player a Founders

🔧 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 89 ms · ask 1788 ms · total 11907 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 10027 ms · generation 1880 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 5, "score": 0.046676, "snippet": "Shuffle the rest of the cards and form 6 face-down stacks each with twice as many cards as there are players in the game. In a 5 player game for example you would make 6 stacks with 10 cards in each. Line these stacks up above the Starting Road Villagers . 8 Add the First Market Card beneath the sec", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played .", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "The player wants to play their Cartwright. As the Production Chain Text shows, it must be placed on top of a Lumberjack and a Wheeler. 1. The player has a Wheeler in their hand, and a Lumberjack already placed in the Village, so getting the Cartwright out will not be a problem. They decide to play t", "headingPath": "BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "The game is played over several rounds until all the face-down stacks of villager cards on the Road * have been emptied. Each round is divided into 2 phases carried out in order: A 1. The Draft Phase: players draft villagers from the Road . 2. The Build Phase: players play villagers from their hand ", "headingPath": "GAME RULES · THE DRAFT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045957, "snippet": "GIVE ALL PLAYERS THIS: VILLAGEFOUNDERSVILLAGE SQUARE PLAYER HANDSUPPLYPLAYER AID Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044583, "snippet": "GAME SETUP RESERVE BASIC VILLAGERS DISCARD BANK ROAD Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks. Give each player a Founders", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "When playing a villager with a Padlock , you must first unlock it. Check if you or any other player has the villager named next to the Unlocking Symbol in their Village . This is called the Unlocking Villager . A B -If you have the Unlocking Villager in your own Village , place 2 Gold from the Bank ", "headingPath": "PADLOCKS · UNLOCKING PADLOCKS EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "After both players are done drafting do the following: Each player in reverse turn order may choose to place 1 Gold from the Bank on a villager on the Road . You are allowed to place Gold on the same villager, or not place any Gold if you wish. 1 Discard all face-up villagers on the Road with no coi", "headingPath": "UPDATING THE ROAD IN 2 PLAYER GAMES", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030478, "snippet": "You can also play the red Special villagers on your turn in the Build Phase . These give you powerful special actions. Their rules are printed on the cards. Special Villagers that have a Discard Symbol are discarded immediately after use, they do not count towards your Build Limit . You can play as ", "headingPath": "PLAYING SPECIAL VILLAGERS · SPECIAL VILLAGERS EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}]

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 845 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 845 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 27, 2026 18:56 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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played .	p.5	0.046676 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE	p.13	0.046432 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	GAME RULES · THE DRAFT PHASE	p.8	0.046032 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)		p.5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)		p.4	0.044583 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	PADLOCKS · UNLOCKING PADLOCKS EXAMPLE	p.15	0.044337 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	UPDATING THE ROAD IN 2 PLAYER GAMES	p.11	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
#8	RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	PLAYING SPECIAL VILLAGERS · SPECIAL VILLAGERS EXAMPLE	p.17	0.030478 (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 33 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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played .	p.5	#1	0.046676 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	DRAFT PHASE EXAMPLE	p.9	#21	0.014493 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	ADDITIONAL SOLO MODE RULES · RUNNING OUT OF EVENTS · EVENTS IN OTHER PHASES · EVENTS AFFECTING THE ROAD · EMPTY RESERVE · VILLAGERS WITH COINS · …	p.26	#11	0.028531 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	PADLOCKS · UNLOCKING PADLOCKS EXAMPLE	p.15	#6	0.044337 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	SOLO MODE · SETUP	p.22	#13	0.028372 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	BUILD PHASE · PRODUCTION CHAINS	p.12	#10	0.028958 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE	p.13	#2	0.046432 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845)	PLAYING SPECIAL VILLAGERS · SPECIAL VILLAGERS EXAMPLE	p.17	#8	0.030478 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 1747 ms · total 11907 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 10027 ms · retrieval 89 ms · ask 1788 ms · gateway work 1880 ms · total 11907 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2748
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 191.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.047 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s 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 4s 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: 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

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 780), 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.