RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

What happens when 2 chains merge?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Acquirebg-5-en-1e

When two or more hotel chains merge, the following happens:
1. The smaller chain (the one with fewer building tiles) is acquired and becomes part of the larger chain.[1][2][3]
2. If the hotel chains are the same size, the mergemaker decides which chain survives and which is acquired.[3]
3. When merging three or more chains, the largest survives and the smaller ones are acquired one at a time from largest to smallest, with the mergemaker breaking any ties.[3]
4. The headquarters building from the smaller hotel chain is removed and returned to the game tray.[3]
5. The building tile that caused the merger does not add to the size of either hotel chain.[4]
6. Bonuses are handed out to the stockholders of the acquired (smaller) hotel chain in the form of money.[2][3] To determine bonuses:
* Each player reveals their exact number of stocks in the acquired chain; the players with the most, second-most, and third-most stocks are the primary, secondary, and tertiary stockholders, respectively.[4]
* The mergemaker goes first, and players proceed clockwise.[3]
7. Players with stock in the acquired hotel chain must do one or more of the following:
* Keep the stock in hand in hopes a new hotel chain with the same name is founded later.[3]
* Sell it back to the bank for the price indicated on the info card, which is determined by the chain's name and size.[3]
* Trade it in: For every two stocks from the acquired chain, you receive one stock in the surviving chain from the stock market tray.[3]
[1] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.8 · YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER
[2] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.3 · Stockholder Bonuses
[3] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.9 · YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER
[4] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook · p.11 · DISTRIBUTING STOCKHOLDER BONUSES
🔧 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 259 ms · ask 7821 ms · total 8092 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 8092 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 9, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "When you merge two hotel chains, immediately do the following: Count the building tiles in each of the hotel chains involved. Do not count the building tile that caused the merger. You may temporarily flip the merging tile over so it is not accidentally counted. Once the merger is complete, flip it ", "headingPath": "YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "If you place a building tile so that it connects two or more hotel chains, those hotel chains will merge and the smaller chain-that is, the one with fewer building tiles-becomes part of the larger chain. Remember, a hotel chain with eleven or more building tiles is safe and cannot be absorbed by ano", "headingPath": "YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When hotel chains merge, the smaller chain is acquired and its building tiles become part of the larger chain. When this occurs, bonuses are handed out to the smaller hotel chain's stockholders in the form of money. Stockholder bonuses are also handed out at the end of the game.", "headingPath": "Stockholder Bonuses", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "When a player places a building tile that connects two or more hotel chains, a merger occurs.", "headingPath": "Merger", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A hotel chain is dissolved when it is acquired by a larger chain and becomes inactive.", "headingPath": "Acquired Hotel Chains", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After you place a building tile and resolve any mergers, you may (you don't have to) buy up to three stocks in any active hotel chains from the stock market tray. You can buy multiple stocks in the same hotel chain and/or buy stocks in multiple chains during the same turn. Stock prices depend on the", "headingPath": "2. Buy Stocks", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When you are determining stockholder bonuses for mergers, the merging building tile does not add to the size of either hotel chain. To determine stockholder bonuses, do the following: Determine who gets a bonus: Each player reveals the exact number of stocks they own in the hotel chain that was acqu", "headingPath": "DISTRIBUTING STOCKHOLDER BONUSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The player who places a building tile that connects two or more hotel chains is considered the mergemaker.", "headingPath": "Mergemaker", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Stockholder Bonuses", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DISTRIBUTING STOCKHOLDER BONUSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 93}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 93 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 93 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)
debug row retained until
Nov 2, 2026 15:39

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. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER p.9 0.032787 (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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER p.8 0.032258 (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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Stockholder Bonuses p.3 0.031746 (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)) 279
#4 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Merger p.3 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)) 93
#5 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Acquired Hotel Chains 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)) 86
#6 RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) 2. Buy Stocks p.9 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) DISTRIBUTING STOCKHOLDER BONUSES p.11 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 Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Mergemaker p.3 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)) 106

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.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER p.8 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) Stockholder Bonuses p.3 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) YOU MERGE TWO OR MORE HOTEL CHAINS TOGETHER p.9 no quote on the wire
[4] RULEBOOK Acquire — Rulebook (corpus doc 93) DISTRIBUTING STOCKHOLDER BONUSES p.11 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 259 ms · first delta 5455 ms · total 8092 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 259 ms · ask 7821 ms · gateway work 8092 ms · total 8092 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1503
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
359
tok/sec
137.8 tok/sec — 359 output tokens in 2.606 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 42s ago)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 24), 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.