You asked
How do I setup the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Catan: Cities & Knightsbg-926-en-1e
1. Assemble the frame as shown, using the sea frame 1-2 from Cities & Knights that shows the barbarian track [1][2]. 2. Place the hexes and number discs in the frame [1][2]. 3. Sort resource cards and commodity cards by type and place them in eight faceup stacks in the card trays [1][2]. 4. Sort progress cards by type, shuffle each stack, and place the three stacks face down in the remaining card tray [1][2]. 5. Place VP tokens in a pile within easy reach [1][2]. 6. Place the 3 metropolises, the merchant piece, the 3 dice, and the Longest Route tile next to the game board [1][2]. 7. Place the barbarian ship on the starting space of the barbarian track [1][2]. 8. Place the robber next to the final space of the barbarian track (or place the pirate on the final space of the barbarian track if combining with Seafarers) [1][3][2]. 9. Each player rolls the dice; the highest roll is the first player [4][5]. 10. Each player selects a color and takes the roads, buildings, city walls, and knights in that color, along with a player aid, 1 city improvement board, and 3 cubes [4][5]. 11. Place a cube in the bottom space of each track on the city improvement board [4][5]. 12. In Round 1, starting with the first player and moving left, each player places 1 settlement on an empty intersection and 1 road on an empty edge next to that settlement until all players have 1 settlement and 1 road [4][5]. 13. In Round 2, starting with the last player and going in reverse order, each player places 1 city on an empty intersection and a second road on an empty adjacent edge, ensuring they follow the Distance Rule [4][5]. 14. Each player takes 1 matching resource card from the supply for each hex adjacent to their city (taking only 1 card per hex during setup) [4][5].
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)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 251 ms · ask 9641 ms · total 9901 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 9901 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "4 Activate the robber. KNIGHT © 2025 CATAN GmbH Activate the robber. KNIGHT © 2025 CATAN GmbH Activate the robber. KNIGHT © 2025 CATAN GmbH CN3081 CATAN 5 of 5 v6.250401 LONGEST ROUTE The first player to build 5 continuous roads receives this tile. If another player builds more, they immediately rec", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "Assemble the frame as shown. Be sure to use the sea frame 1-2 from Cities & Knights that shows the barbarian track. If this is your first time playing Cities & Knights , we recommend placing the hexes and number discs in the frame as shown. It provides a balanced set of starting positions for your f", "headingPath": "Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.031319, "snippet": "You can combine your Cities & Knights game with CATAN - Seafarers Expansion (aka Seafarers ). The best Seafarers scenarios to use are ones that do not involve the exploration of hidden portions of the board (such as 'The Fog Islands') or the exploration of many small islands (such as 'The Four Islan", "headingPath": "COMBINING WITH CATAN - SEAFARERS EXPANSION™", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "Choose another player. That player must choose one of their knights to remove from the board. You may then place one of your knights of the same strength or lower on the board, following the normal placement rules. Your knight's status is set to the same status as the removed knight (active or inact", "headingPath": "TREASON (2x)", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Each player rolls the dice. The player with the highest roll is the first player. Then each player selects a color and takes the roads, buildings, city walls, and knights in that color along with a player aid. Each player should also take 1 city improvement board and 3 cubes. Place a cube in the bot", "headingPath": "Choose the First Player · ROUND 1 · ROUND 2 · Collect Your Starting Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "© 2025 C ATAN GmbH 5 © 2025 CATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH © 2025 CATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH © 2025 CATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH © 2025 C ATAN GmbH 5 Choose the First Player Each player rolls the dice. The player with the highest roll is the first player. The", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "ity ct resource '). ity Cities & Knights uses all the rules from CATAN with the following additions. You play over a series of turns, starting with the first player, and moving clockwise around the table. Each turn consists of three phases, which occur in this order: Roll Dice phase Production phase", "headingPath": "Collect Your Starting Resources · TURN OVERVIEW · ROLL DICE PHASE · PLAY A PROGRESS CARD Basic City · ROLL THE DICE · Move the Barbarian Ship to mighty knights (Level 3).", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "ALCHEMY Play this card at the start of the Roll Dice phase. Set the production dice to the result CRANE ENGINEERING Build 1 city improvement for 1 commodity less INVENTION Build 1 city wall at no cost. Swap 2 number discs of your choice (except 2, 6, 8, or 12). IRRIGATION Take 2 grain cards for each", "headingPath": "PROGRESS CARDS: SCIENCE · ALCHEMY (2x) · CRANE (2x) · IRRIGATION (2x) · MEDICINE (2x)", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMBINING WITH CATAN - SEAFARERS EXPANSION™", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Choose the First Player · ROUND 1 · ROUND 2 · Collect Your Starting Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 217}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of)
- 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 3, 2026 20:26
retrieval — what the search arm returned
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the TWO-ARM fuse (full-text + vector), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.03279 — both arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). Measured healthy band on this fuse: 0.016–0.033. 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: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | p.4 | 0.032002 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 | |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components | p.4 | 0.032002 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | COMBINING WITH CATAN - SEAFARERS EXPANSION™ | p.12 | 0.031319 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | TREASON (2x) | p.16 | 0.029911 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Choose the First Player · ROUND 1 · ROUND 2 · Collect Your Starting Resources | p.5 | 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | p.5 | 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse) | 300 | |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Collect Your Starting Resources · TURN OVERVIEW · ROLL DICE PHASE · PLAY A PROGRESS CARD Basic City · ROLL THE DICE · Move the Barbarian Ship to mighty knights (Level 3). | p.6 | 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | PROGRESS CARDS: SCIENCE · ALCHEMY (2x) · CRANE (2x) · IRRIGATION (2x) · MEDICINE (2x) | p.13 | 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse) | 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: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Assemble the Frame · Place the Hexes and Number Discs · Place Remaining Components | p.4 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | p.4 | no quote on the wire | |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | COMBINING WITH CATAN - SEAFARERS EXPANSION™ | p.12 | no quote on the wire |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | p.5 | no quote on the wire | |
| [5] | RULEBOOK Catan: Cities & Knights — Rulebook (corpus doc 217) | Choose the First Player · ROUND 1 · ROUND 2 · Collect Your Starting Resources | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 251 ms · first delta 6432 ms · total 9901 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 251 ms · ask 9641 ms · gateway work 9901 ms · total 9901 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4018
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 473
- tok/sec
- 138.8 tok/sec — 473 output tokens in 3.408 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.
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
- SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
- 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 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.