Ruling — Race for the Galaxy

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Race for the Galaxybg-28143-en-1e

1. Place 12 victory point (VP) chips per player in 1 and 5 VP chips nearby [1]. 2. Set aside the 10 VP chips (and any left over chips) for use only during the final round of play [1]. 3. Each player takes a set of seven different action cards [1]. 4. Find and shuffle the five start worlds [1]. 5. Deal one world face up to each player to form their initial card tableau [1]. 6. For your first game, use specific start worlds based on player count: 1 and 2 for two players; 1-3 for three players; and 1-4 for four players [1]. 7. Shuffle the unused start worlds together with the game cards [1]. 8. Deal six face down cards to each player [1]. 9. Each player examines these cards and discode two cards face down to the discard pile [1]. 10. The remaining game cards form the initial card supply [1]. 11. For your first game, instead of the above, each player uses the four numbered game cards matching their start world's number as their initial (preset) hand; then shuffle all remaining game cards, including any left over start worlds and preset hand cards, together [1]. 12. If Alpha Centauri is in play, place a card from the card supply face down on top of it as its starting windfall good [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook · p.2 · SETUP

🔧 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 241 ms · ask 7201 ms · total 1180147 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1172696 ms · generation 7451 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Place 12 victory point (VP) chips per player in 1 and 5 VP chips nearby. Set aside the 10 VP chips (and any left over chips) for use only during the final round of play. Each player takes a set of seven different action cards . Find and shuffle the five start worlds . Deal one world face up to each ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Shuffle the unused start worlds and game cards. Each player gets 6 cards and discards 2 of them. The remaining cards form the card supply. Cards in the card supply and the discard pile are both face down. To tell them apart, keep the card supply neat and the discard pile a bit 'messy'. Use 12 VPs pe", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "Some cards in the two decks have been presorted for your very first game (see Setup). Unpack the card decks carefully. 5 start world cards (numbered '0' to '4' in red or blue squares in their upper left and lower right corners) 109 game cards (like start worlds, these have the game title on back) 59", "headingPath": "CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "Corin Anderson, Brian Bankler, Eric Brosius, Mark Delano, David desJardins, Chris Esko, Barry Eynon, Jeff Goldsmith, Dave Helmbold, Jay Heyman, Beth Howard, Bryan Howard, Joe Huber, Chris Lopez, Larry Rosenberg, Ron Sapolsky, Steve Thomas, Jay Tummelson, Lou Wainwright, Don Woods, and many, many oth", "headingPath": "Playtesting and Advice", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046394, "snippet": "Mostly, play can and should be performed simultaneously. However, there are a few cases where player order can matter, such as: when there are only a few cards left in the card supply, or when the VP chips might run out in a Consume phase, or when players are resolving settling near the end of the g", "headingPath": "TIMING · 2 PLAYER GAME (for experienced players) · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "A game is played over several rounds (typically 7 to 11). At the start of a round, players simultaneously and secretly choose one action card, placing it face down in front of themselves. Once all players have done so, they turn these action cards face up. Then, the players perform the selected phas", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Action: each player places a development card from their hand face down, or no card if a player doesn't intend to place a development. Once all players have done so, they simultaneously turn them face up and then pay for them. If desired, players can put their intended developments (if any) under th", "headingPath": "II: DEVELOP", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Action: each player places a world card from their hand face down, or no card if a player doesn't intend to place a world. Once all players have done so, they simultaneously turn them face up and then pay for (or conquer) them. Many worlds contain a black number, ranging from 0-6, in a black circle;", "headingPath": "III: SETTLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 239}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 239 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 239 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 6, 2026 14:28

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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	SETUP	p.2	0.048387 (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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	SETUP	p.2	0.047619 (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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	CONTENTS	p.1	0.046696 (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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	Playtesting and Advice	p.8	0.046635 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	TIMING · 2 PLAYER GAME (for experienced players) · CREDITS	p.8	0.046394 (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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	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
#7	RULEBOOK Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	II: DEVELOP	p.4	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 Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	III: SETTLE	p.5	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))	300

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Race for the Galaxy — Rulebook (corpus doc 239)	SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 241 ms · first delta 5129 ms · total 1180147 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1172696 ms · retrieval 241 ms · ask 7201 ms · gateway work 7451 ms · total 1180147 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3184
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 311
tok/sec: 137.3 tok/sec — 311 output tokens in 2.265 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 165), 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.