You asked
Can I move the robber back to the desert?
Answered counted as answeredYes, you can move the robber to the desert hex [1][2][3]. When a "7" is rolled [1][3] or a "Knight" development card is played [2][4], the robber must be moved to the number token of any other terrain hex or to the desert [1][2][3].
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:12b think:false 4eb23ef187e2
- timings
- search 151 ms · ask 2983 ms · total 3149 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3149 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 11, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "The robber begins the game in the desert Y . It is moved only by rolling a '7' Y or playing a Knight Y card. If the robber is moved to any other terrain hex, it prevents that hex from producing resources. Players with settlements and/or cities adjacent to the target terrain hex receive no resources ", "headingPath": "roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "If you roll a '7,' no one receives any resources. Instead, every player who has more than 7 resource cards must select half (rounded down) of their resource cards and return them to the bank. Then you must move the robber Y . Proceed as follows: You must move the robber Y immediately to the number t", "headingPath": "a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "If you roll a '7' for resource production, none of the players receive resources. Instead: Each player counts their resource cards. Any player with more than 7 resource cards (i.e., 8 or more) must choose and discard half of them. Return discards to the supply stacks. If you hold an odd number of ca", "headingPath": "rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The desert is the only terrain hex that does not produce resources. The robber Y starts the game there. A settlement or a city built adjacent to the desert yields fewer resources than those built next to one of the other terrain types.", "headingPath": "desert", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "When you play a 'Knight' development card during your turn, you must immediately move the robber Y . Place the knight card face up in front of you. You must move the robber away from its current spot and onto the number token of any other terrain hex or on the desert. You then steal 1 resource card ", "headingPath": "KniGht Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "clockwise toward the center. Skip the desert. Important: Alternatively, you can use a fully random set-up. Place 1 token on each land hex. Start at one corner of the island, and place the number tokens in random order. In such case, the tokens with the red numbers must not be next to each other. You", "headingPath": "Illustration Q", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "If you play a knight card, you must immediately move the robber. See 'Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber' above and follow steps 1 and 2. Once played, knight cards remain face up in front of you. The first player to have 3 knight cards in front of themself receives the special card 'Largest Arm", "headingPath": "Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Suggested Beginners' Map Set-up 15 roads; and 1 building costs card. Sort the resource cards into 5 stacks and place them face up beside the board. Shuffle the development cards Y and place them face down beside the resource cards. Place the 2 special cards and the dice beside the board. Place the r", "headingPath": "Illustration N", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "KniGht Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- 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 14, 2026 10:22
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) | roBBer | p.11 | 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) | a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y | p.5 | 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) | rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer | p.11 | 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) | desert | p.7 | 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) | 235 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | KniGht Cards | p.8 | 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) | Illustration Q | p.13 | 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) | Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y | p.5 | 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) | Illustration N | p.12 | 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | KniGht Cards | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer | p.11 | no quote on the wire |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 151 ms · first delta n/a · total 3149 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 151 ms · ask 2983 ms · gateway work 3149 ms · total 3149 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s 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 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.