Ruling — Power Grid

You asked

How do I take my turn?

Answered counted as answered

Depending on the phase of the game, taking a turn involves different actions:

**In the Auction Power Plants phase:**

1. The player may offer a power plant from the current market for auction.[1]

2. If a player does not want to offer a power plant for auction, they must opt out, which means they cannot bid in later auctions during this phase and will not get a new power plant this round.[2]

3. Players may bid on power plants; if a player buys a power plant, they cannot bid in another auction in the same round, nor can they offer a plant at auction.[1]

4. When the auctioning player wins the auction and buys the power plant, the next player in turn order takes their turn (if they have not already purchased a power plant this round).[1]

5. If a player other than the player who started the auction wins, the auctioning player may choose to auction a different power plant from the current market or pass.[1]

**In the Buy Resources phase:**

1. Players may buy matching resources for their power plants as long as there is still storage space.[2]

2. Players may not buy resources that their current power plants cannot use.[2]

3. The player purchases resource tokens from the spaces of the resource market, paying the price shown on the upper right of each resource space to the bank.[2][3]

4. After purchasing, the player moves their house on the player order track to the same numbered space on the bottom row.[2][3]

**In the phase for increasing electricity networks:**

1. A player may connect any number of new cities during their turn, as long as they pay all building and connecting costs.[4]

2. All subsequent cities added to a network must connect to at least one city already in that player's network (with one of their houses).[4][3]

3. When connecting to a new city, the player chooses the cheapest connection(s) between one of the cities in their network and the new city and pays the total of connecting costs and the cheapest available building cost to the bank.[4]

4. After connecting all desired cities, the player moves their house on the player order track to the same numbered space on the bottom row.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.4 · Important rules to follow:

[2] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.5 · b. Pass the auction

[3] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.5 · b. Pass the auction

[4] RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook · p.5 · b. Pass the auction

🔧 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 208 ms · ask 9758 ms · total 9977 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9977 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.032018, "snippet": "If the player does not want to offer a power plant for auction, they must opt out of this phase. When they do so, they cannot bid in later auctions during this phase and, thus, will not get a new power plant this round. To show this, they move their house on the player order track to the same number", "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029762, "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": 4, "score": 0.028787, "snippet": "> During the first round of the game each player must buy 1 power plant. > As long as the discount token is on the lowest power plant, the minimum bid for that power plant is 1. If a player buys that power plant, they place the discount token next to the market. > As long as the discount token is on", "headingPath": "Important rules to follow:", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "The game is played over several rounds. Each round of the game has five phases. In each phase, all players take their actions in the order specified for the phase before the game continues to the next phase. The five phases are: Determine Player Order Auction Power Plants Buy Resources Build Houses ", "headingPath": "Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "When you draw the Step 3 card from the power plant stack, Step 3 begins at the beginning of the next phase of the game!", "headingPath": "The 3 Steps of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015873, "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": 12, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "This phase is played in reverse player order beginning with the last player. > Each player may choose their starting city anywhere in the contiguous playing zone! > The player connects to any desired number of new cities during their turn, as long as they can pay for them. > Costs: building costs in", "headingPath": "Phase 4: Building Houses", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Rearrange the order of the houses in the top row of the player order. > First player: the player with the most cities in their network. > In case of a tie: the player with the bigger power plant.", "headingPath": "Phase 1: Determine Player Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Important rules to follow:", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction", "sharpsignalDocId": 94}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction", "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 31, 2026 02:24

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. 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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	b. Pass the auction	p.5	0.032018 (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)	b. Pass the auction	p.5	0.029762 (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)	Important rules to follow:	p.4	0.028787 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	Playing the game	p.4	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
#5	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	The 3 Steps of the Game	p.8	0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	119
#6	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	The 3 Steps of the Game	p.7	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
#7	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	Phase 4: Building Houses	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
#8	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	Phase 1: Determine Player Order	p.12	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)	195

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.

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.

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	Important rules to follow:	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	b. Pass the auction	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	b. Pass the auction	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Power Grid — Rulebook (corpus doc 94)	b. Pass the auction	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 208 ms · first delta n/a · total 9977 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 208 ms · ask 9758 ms · gateway work 9977 ms · total 9977 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 53s 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.

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 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.