Ruling — Catan Card Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Catan Card Gamebg-278-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Sort the cards by the symbols on their backs: 9 cards with a red coat-of-arms (starting cards for one player), 9 cards with a blue coat-of-arms (starting cards for the other player), 11 Region Cards with a map, 7 road cards, 5 settlement cards, 7 city cards, 10 Event Cards with a question mark, and 62 Expansion Cards with no symbols.[1]

2. Shuffle the Event Cards and place them face-down in the middle of the table.[1]

3. Place the four stacks of Development Cards (roads, settlements, cities, and regions) in a row between you and your opponent.[1][2]

4. Shuffle the Expansion Cards together and divide this deck into five roughly equal "expansion stacks," placing them next to the Development Cards.[1]

5. Choose one coat of arms and take all nine cards with that symbol on the back, then give the other set of nine starting cards to your opponent.[2]

6. Arrange your nine cards by placing the road card with the Event Die summary in the middle of your side of the table.[2]

7. Place a settlement at each end of the road.[2]

8. Arrange your six Region Cards diagonally around the two settlements in any order you choose, leaving a little space around each card.[2]

9. Ensure the side of each Region Card showing 1 resource icon is closest to you.[2]

10. Place the Event Die, the Production Die, and the two wooden tokens (Knight and Windmill) nearby.[2]

11. Roll the Production Die to determine the first player; the highest roller starts.[2]

12. The first player chooses one expansion stack and three cards from it to begin the game, then returns the stack.[2]

13. The second player chooses a different expansion stack and also chooses three cards from it.[2]

14. Before the game begins, draw a hand of three Expansion Cards.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME

[2] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.13 · Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 213 ms · ask 3324 ms · total 3540 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3540 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Every settlement will have one Region Card at each (diagonal) corner (a total of four Region Cards). So, when you build a new settlement, you also immediately draw two new Region Cards and place them at the empty corners. These new regions can increase your resource production (by adding more number", "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "In order to build up your principality, you will need raw materials. These resources come from your Region Cards. Each turn a die roll will determine which regions produce. Each time the number rolled matches the number on one of your regions, you receive one of that resource. You don't collect reso", "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "This section contains the Game Rules for the Catan Card Game . If you have questions about specific cards, you can refer to the Almanac that starts on page 19. Before you can play, you must sort the cards by the symbols on their backs: 9 cards have a red coat-of-arms; these are the starting cards fo", "headingPath": "GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Now there will be ten stacks of cards on the table: five stacks of Expansion Cards (each with a mix of cards with yellow, green, and red text fields), four stacks of Development Cards (roads, settlements, cities, and regions), and one stack of Event Cards (with blue text fields). Now you can build y", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "(or stacks) you choose. Then, if you wish, you may choose one more card to discard to the bottom of a stack and draw a new card from the same stack. As above, you may either take the top card for free or you can pay two resources of any type to search the stack and take any card there. Once you have", "headingPath": "Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "First he pays two resources so he can search the first expansion stack and draw one car d of his choice. Then he pays two more resources to search a second stack and picks one car d. Finally he draws his third card for free by taking the top card from the first stack. If you have a number of cards i", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "to the center of the table without shuffling. Important: When you choose your starting cards: • You may not change the order of the cards in the stack! • It is probably best to start with cards that have green text fields. Why? Because “Action Cards” (with yellow text fields) can’t be played until t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "You can upgrade a settlement to a city. This will earn you another Victory Point. A city costs five resources: 3 ore and 2 grain. There are only seven cities available in the game. When you build a city, pay the resources required and take a city card from the stack. Place the card face-up on top of", "headingPath": "Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1140 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1140 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 0.90457 of 1467 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 9, 2026 01:30 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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.7	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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.6	0.048131 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME	p.3	0.047643 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.4	0.046898 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game	p.18	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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.17	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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.5	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
#8	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites	p.13	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 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 40 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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	RULE SUMMARY · Turn Sequence · Special Victory Points	p.8	#9	0.028718 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME	p.3	#3	0.047643 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game	p.18	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites	p.13	#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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.5	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.4	#4	0.046898 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.7	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.6	#2	0.048131 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Cities · Expansion Cards · Building Sites	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 213 ms · first delta 1230 ms · total 3540 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 213 ms · ask 3324 ms · gateway work 3540 ms · total 3540 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3114
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 440
tok/sec: 196.9 tok/sec — 440 output tokens in 2.235 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 40s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 2h, 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: 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 1070), 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.