You asked
Can I build a settlement on top of another player's road?
Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this counted as refusedThe rulebook doesn't appear to cover this cleanly — but here are the closest passages retrieved, in case they help you rule.
Each player rolls both dice. The player who rolls highest is the starting player and begins. The starting player places a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y of their choice, then places a road adjacent to this settlement. The other players then follow clockwise. Everyone places 1 settlement
The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example
Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se
Once all players have built their first settlement, the player who went last in the first round begins round two. That player builds their second settlement and its adjacent road. Important: After the starting player builds, the other players follow counterclockwise , so the starting player in round
You may only build a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y and only if none of the 3 adjacent intersections contains a settlement or city. Example: See Illustration F. Coleman, the blue player, wants to build a settlement. The settlements marked 'A' are already in play. Coleman cannot build on
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- qwen3:4b-instruct-2507-q4_K_M@0edcdef34593
- timings
- search 148 ms · ask 3342 ms · total 3491 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued n/a ms · generation 3491 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 12, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Each player rolls both dice. The player who rolls highest is the starting player and begins. The starting player places a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y of their choice, then places a road adjacent to this settlement. The other players then follow clockwise. Everyone places 1 settlement ", "headingPath": "Round One", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example", "headingPath": "roads", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Once all players have built their first settlement, the player who went last in the first round begins round two. That player builds their second settlement and its adjacent road. Important: After the starting player builds, the other players follow counterclockwise , so the starting player in round", "headingPath": "Round Two", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "You may only build a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y and only if none of the 3 adjacent intersections contains a settlement or city. Example: See Illustration F. Coleman, the blue player, wants to build a settlement. The settlements marked 'A' are already in play. Coleman cannot build on ", "headingPath": "distanCe rule", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Take special note of the 'Distance Rule' Y : you may only build a settlement at an intersection if all 3 of the adjacent intersections are vacant (i.e., none are occupied by any settlements or cities-even yours). Each of your settlements must connect to at least 1 of your own roads. Regardless of wh", "headingPath": "b) Settlement Y Requires: Brick, Lumber, Wool, & Grain", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "A settlement is worth 1 victory point. Settlements are built on intersections Y (where 3 hexes meet or 1 or 2 hexes meet the frame). You share in all of the resource production of each terrain hex adjacent to your settlements. You must meet 2 conditions when building a settlement: Your settlement mu", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Select a color and take your 5 settlements, 4 cities, and 15 roads (no more and no less!). Place your 2 roads and your 2 settlements on the game board. Place your remaining settlements, roads, and cities down in front of you. Note: If you are playing a 3-player game, nobody plays the red position in", "headingPath": "settinG up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- citations (raw)
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
- gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
- 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
- Oct 6, 2026 23:59
retrieval — what the search arm returned
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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Round One | p.12 | 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 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | roads | p.11 | 0.016129 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | settlements | p.12 | 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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Round Two | p.12 | 0.015625 (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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | distanCe rule | p.7 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | b) Settlement Y Requires: Brick, Lumber, Wool, & Grain | p.5 | 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) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | settlements | p.11 | 0.014925 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | settinG up the Game | p.3 | 0.014706 (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 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 148 ms · first delta n/a · total 3491 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued n/a ms · retrieval 148 ms · ask 3342 ms · gateway work 3491 ms · total 3491 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 44s 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
- REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
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 1), 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.