Ruling — Catan — RuleSage

You asked

How do I place an adornment on the river?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e · Catan: Cities & Knightsbg-926-en-1e · Catan: Seafarersbg-325-en-1e

The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.12 · set-up, variaBle

Assemble the frame as outlined on pages 2-3. Note: If you want to vary relative harbor locations slightly, just shuffle the order of the frame pieces and do not place the random harbor pieces as outlined below in point 2. Turn the terrain hexes face down. Shuffle the terrain hexes. Randomly place th

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.13 · set-up, variaBle

Now take the 9 harbor pieces (the small 5-sided pieces with ships on them) and randomly place one on top of each harbor on the frame. See Illustration P .

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.13 · Illustration Q

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

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.13 · Illustration P

Place the 18 number tokens as shown in Illustration Q: Sort the number tokens beside the board, letter side face up. Place 1 token on each land hex. Start at a corner of the island. Place the number tokens on the terrain hexes in alphabetical order, proceeding counter-

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.6 · Coast

When a terrain hex borders on the sea (i.e., a frame piece), it is called a 'coast.' You can build a road along a coast. You can build settlements and upgrade settlements to cities on intersections that border on the sea. However, since a site on the coast borders only 1 or 2 terrain hexes, coastal

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 258 ms · ask 11666 ms · total 11933 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 11933 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 12, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Assemble the frame as outlined on pages 2-3. Note: If you want to vary relative harbor locations slightly, just shuffle the order of the frame pieces and do not place the random harbor pieces as outlined below in point 2. Turn the terrain hexes face down. Shuffle the terrain hexes. Randomly place th", "headingPath": "set-up, variaBle", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "Now take the 9 harbor pieces (the small 5-sided pieces with ships on them) and randomly place one on top of each harbor on the frame. See Illustration P .", "headingPath": "set-up, variaBle", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.031258, "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": 13, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "Place the 18 number tokens as shown in Illustration Q: Sort the number tokens beside the board, letter side face up. Place 1 token on each land hex. Start at a corner of the island. Place the number tokens on the terrain hexes in alphabetical order, proceeding counter-", "headingPath": "Illustration P", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029469, "snippet": "When a terrain hex borders on the sea (i.e., a frame piece), it is called a 'coast.' You can build a road along a coast. You can build settlements and upgrade settlements to cities on intersections that border on the sea. However, since a site on the coast borders only 1 or 2 terrain hexes, coastal ", "headingPath": "Coast", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.026779, "snippet": "Example: See Illustration A. Blue receives 1 brick card, 1 lumber card, and 1 ore card for his leftmost settlement (i.e., his settlement marked with a star H ). Each player keeps their resource cards hidden in their hand. Important: Settlements and cities may only be placed at the corners of the ter", "headingPath": "settinG up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.025678, "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": 3, "score": 0.025232, "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): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 boosted
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: Nov 3, 2026 20:33

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 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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	set-up, variaBle	p.12	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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	set-up, variaBle	p.13	0.032002 (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))	154
#3	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	Illustration Q	p.13	0.031258 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	Illustration P	p.13	0.029911 (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))	269
#5	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	Coast	p.6	0.029469 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	settinG up the Game	p.4	0.026779 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	roads	p.11	0.025678 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43)	settinG up the Game	p.3	0.025232 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 258 ms · first delta 11800 ms · total 11933 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 258 ms · ask 11666 ms · gateway work 11933 ms · total 11933 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3718
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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.