You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Backgammonbg-2397-en-1e
To set up the game, follow these steps: 1. Place the 30 men on the board as shown in diagram A [1]. 2. Place the doubling cube in the centre of the board, midway between the two players (it is often placed to one side) [1]. 3. If using a baffle box, place it on the nonhome board side [2]. 4. If using a clock, place it on the home board side [2]. 5. Each player rolls one die; the player with the higher number wins the honour of playing first [3]. 6. If both players roll the same number, they roll again until the two dice show different numbers [3].
🔧 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 912 ms · ask 12252 ms · total 1892721 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 1879478 ms · generation 13243 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "8 S o now we have our board, men and dice, how do we set up the board at the start of the game? The 30 men are placed on the board as shown in the diagram below, A , and the doubling cube is placed in the centre of the board midway between the two players (it is often placed to one side of the board", "headingPath": "Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047891, "snippet": "6 L earning the rules of backgammon may be difficult at first, but it is actually simple to understand and play . So, to begin, what do you need to play backgammon? Just four things. Backgammon is played on a board consisting of 24 narrow triangles called 'points'. The triangles alternate in colour ", "headingPath": "Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "S o how do we start the game? Each player rolls one die and whoever gets the higher number wins the honour of playing first. If both players roll the same number, then they roll again until the two dice show different numbers. When rolling the dice each player rolls on his right-hand side of the boa", "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031754, "snippet": "Players must share two dice when using a clock; otherwise, they may share two dice or use four dice. Each player may choose to use either a dice cup or a baffle box. A baffle box must be placed on the nonhome board side. To mix dice, the requesting player rolls all four dice. Their opponent selects ", "headingPath": "EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031258, "snippet": "Matches must start, or resume following a scheduled suspension, at the designated time and take place in a designated playing area (non-smoking Preferred). Between games each player may call 5-minute breaks, limited in number to the match length divided by 6 (rounded down). Players may tend to emerg", "headingPath": "START OR RESUME TIMES AND BREAKS · EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "W e are nearly ready to start moving the men around the board but first we need a method of notation to describe the movement of the men. For many years there was no agreed notation but that problem was solved about 30 years ago, and there is now a universally agreed notation. Dice rolls are shown a", "headingPath": "notation", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03031, "snippet": "If your opponent has made a homeboard point, then it is often correct to split the back men. For example, if your opponent opens with 42 and makes his 4-pt with 8/4, 6/4 and you roll 43 then you should play 24/20, 13/10. If your opponent has started by splitting to your 5-pt, for example, by playing", "headingPath": "A Couple More Guidelines", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029644, "snippet": "T he greatest challenge in backgammon is in consistently finding the 'right' play . One of the reasons it took computers so long to become good at the game is that on every turn there are so many possible moves and until sophisticated techniques came into existence computers were useless at the game", "headingPath": "Choosing a Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 148 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 148 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 14:42
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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game | p.5 | 0.048916 (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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube | p.4 | 0.047891 (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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | the First Move | p.8 | 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)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 149) | EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS | p.2 | 0.031754 (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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 149) | START OR RESUME TIMES AND BREAKS · EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE | p.1 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | notation | p.6 | 0.030777 (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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | A Couple More Guidelines | p.19 | 0.03031 (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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | Choosing a Move | p.15 | 0.029644 (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
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 Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 149) | EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Rulebook (corpus doc 148) | the First Move | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 912 ms · first delta 12102 ms · total 1892721 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 1879478 ms · retrieval 912 ms · ask 12252 ms · gateway work 13243 ms · total 1892721 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4337
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 148
- tok/sec
- 136.9 tok/sec — 148 output tokens in 1.081 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 3s 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 70), 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.