Ruling — Ecos: First Continent

← Ecos: First Continent

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Ecos: First Continentbg-279254-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Each player chooses a color and takes the Dial token in their color, oriented with the word 'START' at the top.[1]

2. Each player also gets 7.[1]

3. Place the Score Board on the table.[1]

4. Take the Score Markers for each player and place them on the starting space of the Score Board.[1]

5. Create the initial landscape with 1 Desert, 1 Grassland, and 2 Water tiles.[1]

6. Put the rest of the Map tiles nearby, with one stack of Land tiles and one stack of Water tiles.[1]

7. Place the token organization trays, the Mountain tokens, and Forest tokens nearby on the table.[1]

8. Make sure all 40 Element tokens are in the Element bag.[1]

9. The player who went for a hike most recently is the start player and takes the Element bag.[1]

10. Create starting hands and active cards:[1]

* If it is your first time playing, you can use recommended pre-set starting hands by sorting all cards from both decks into 6 piles of 12 cards each based on the footprint icons.[1]

* Players each randomly choose 1 pile, which becomes their starting set of cards.[1]

* 3 cards in the set of 12 have the footprint icon printed darker than the rest; these 3 cards become the starting 'active' cards and should be placed on the table face up.[1]

* The other 9 cards are the starting hand, which can be looked at but should be kept hidden from other players.[1]

* Alternatively, for subsequent games, players can use more preset hands by using leaf icons to sort cards.[2]

* Alternatively, players can draft starting cards:

* Deal 5 blue-backed cards to each player face down.[2]

* Each player looks at their 5 blue cards, chooses 1 to keep, and passes the other cards face down to the player on their left.[2]

* Repeat this process until all players have 4 blue cards.[2]

* Shuffle the remaining undrafted cards back into the deck.[2]

* Deal 9 brown-backed cards to each player face down.[2]

* Repeat the same process, but passing to the right, until players have exactly 8 brown cards.[2]

* Shuffle the remaining undrafted cards back into the deck.[2]

* Each player should now have 12 cards.[2]

* From the hand of 12 cards, choose any 3 cards to be starting active cards and place them face up in front of you, facing you (with the side with the most leaves at the top).[2]

* Keep the other 9 cards in your hand until they are played.[2]

* All blue and brown cards not in any players' initial 12 cards should be shuffled separately and placed into separate face down decks.[2]

* For a two-player game, players get 12 brown-backed cards and 6 blue-backed cards instead of the regular 8 and 4.[3]

* In a two-player draft, players are dealt 2 blue-backed and 4 brown-backed cards and then draft the rest of their hand (4 more blue-backed and 8 more brown-backed cards) by drafting 2 cards at a time instead of 1.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook · p.4 · 1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME

[2] RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook · p.4 · SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!

[3] RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook · p.11 · 'LANDMASS' · Production: · Development Leads: · Graphic Design: · Proofing: · Playtesters

One rule clearer, zero feelings hurt.

🔧 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 191 ms · ask 6138 ms · total 6331 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6331 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "3 Setup ............................................... 4 Game Play .......................................... 6 Completing a Card .............................. 6 Using Your Dial .................................. 7 Gaining Cards ................................... 7 Game End ......................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Each player chooses a color and takes the Dial token in their color. The Dial tokens show the distribution of Element tokens in the game. Your Dial token should be oriented with the word 'START' at the top. Each player also gets 7 . Place the Score Board on the table. Also take the Score Markers for", "headingPath": "1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "If players have played previously, then you can try one of 2 options for more variety. More preset hands: On the opposite side from the footprint icons are leaf icons. These can be used to sort the cards in the same manner as the footprints for more variety of pre-set cards. Draft: Alternatively, yo", "headingPath": "SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The start player begins as the 'Harbinger'. They take the Element bag and draw out 1 random Element token, announcing what it is, and placing it on the table. The possible elements are listed below and also on each player's Dial tokens along with their commonality... All players, including the Harbi", "headingPath": "You are now ready to begin!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 44 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 55 57 58 59 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 80 60 40 Eleme", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "25 Forest Tokens 6 Dial Tokens 40 Element Tokens and Element Bag The sections below are numbered to correspond to the number on the setup image. Setup is the same for any player count 3 to 6, and slightly different for 2 players.", "headingPath": "1 Score Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030282, "snippet": "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 44 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 55 57 58 59 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 80 60 Ecos: Fi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Every time an Element token is drawn and you either can't place a or don't want to, you instead turn your Dial token 90 degrees clockwise. Once your Dial token has made 2 rotations, you MAY immediately reset the Dial token to start (so the 'Start' side is at the top) to 'gain a card' (see 'Gaining C", "headingPath": "Using Your Dial · Energy Cube Spots · Impact Card Coloration · Card Number · Gaining Cards · OR · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "'LANDMASS' · Production: · Development Leads: · Graphic Design: · Proofing: · Playtesters", "sharpsignalDocId": 1090}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1090 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1090 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 0.89832 of 2321 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 29, 2026 04:54 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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)		p.2	0.048916 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME	p.4	0.047883 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!	p.4	0.047619 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	You are now ready to begin!	p.6	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
#5	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)		p.3	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
#6	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	1 Score Board	p.3	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))	229
#7	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)		p.2	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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	Using Your Dial · Energy Cube Spots · Impact Card Coloration · Card Number · Gaining Cards · OR · …	p.7	0.029851 (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 22 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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)		p.2	#1	0.048916 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!	p.4	#3	0.047619 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)		p.2	#7	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
#4	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	'LANDMASS' · Production: · Development Leads: · Graphic Design: · Proofing: · Playtesters	p.11	#11	0.014286 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	Introduction · 1 Score Board	p.2	#13	0.013699 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	You are now ready to begin!	p.6	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	1 Score Board	p.3	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME	p.4	#2	0.047883 (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 Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	1 Score Board · ISLANDS · FIRST GAME	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	SUBSEQUENT GAMES · You are now ready to begin!	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Ecos: First Continent — Rulebook (corpus doc 1090)	'LANDMASS' · Production: · Development Leads: · Graphic Design: · Proofing: · Playtesters	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 191 ms · first delta 2527 ms · total 6331 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 191 ms · ask 6138 ms · gateway work 6331 ms · total 6331 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2959
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 758
tok/sec: 201.8 tok/sec — 758 output tokens in 3.756 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.

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: 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

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1020), 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.