Ruling — Century: Spice Road

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Century: Spice Roadbg-209685-en-1e

To set up a game of Century, follow these steps: 1. Separate spices by color and place them into the bowls, ensuring the order matches Yellow (Turmeric), Red (Saffron), Green (Cardamom), and Brown (Cinnamon) [1]. 2. Shuffle the Point cards (orange back) to form a deck [2]. 3. Draw 5 cards from the Point card deck and place them face up in a row to the left of that deck [2]. 4. Place a pile of gold coins equal to the number of players x2 above the first (leftmost) point card [2]. 5. Place a pile of silver coins equal to the number of players x2 above the second Point card [2]. 6. Each player gets one 'Create 2' and one 'Upgrade 2' card from the 10 starting Merchant cards (purple back) with purple borders to form their starting hand; any remaining starting cards are returned to the box [2]. 7. Shuffle the remaining Merchant cards to form a deck [2]. 8. Draw 6 cards from the Merchant deck and place them face up in a row to the left of that deck [2]. 9. Take a Caravan card (grey back) for each player, including the card with the first player symbol, shuffle them, and deal each player one card in front of them [1]. 10. Place yellow and red cubes on each player's Caravan card according to the following: 1st player gets 3 yellow cubes; 2nd player gets 4 yellow cubes; 3rd player gets 4 yellow cubes; 4th player gets 3 yellow and 1 red cube; 5th player gets 3 yellow and 1 red cube [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.1 · Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards

[2] RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook · p.1 · To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:

🔧 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 220 ms · ask 4513 ms · total 1999350 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1994612 ms · generation 4738 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 1, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "1 Centuries ago, the spice trade was the most important market in the world. It established and destroyed empires, compelled men to explore the far corners of the earth, and led to the discovery of new worlds. At that time, the value of spices even rivaled that of gold! In the old days, they carried", "headingPath": "To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "To claim a Point card, you must have all of the cubes shown on the point card in your caravan. Return those cubes to the bowls. Take the Point card and place it face down in front of you. After claiming a Point card, fill the empty slot by sliding the cards to the left, creating an empty slot just t", "headingPath": "Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Century Spice Road is played over a series of rounds. Each player will take one turn each round (starting with the first player and going clockwise) . On a player's turn, they must perform 1 of the following actions: Play: Play a card from your hand Acquire: Acquire a Merchant card Rest: Take all pr", "headingPath": "Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "When playing an 'Upgrade 2' card, you MAY upgrade a cube on your caravan 1 level and then upgrade a cube 1 level again. It is not mandatory to upgrade all cubes from an upgrade card. Example: You may upgrade a yellow cube to a red cube and then upgrade another yellow cube to a red cube, or you can u", "headingPath": "Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:", "sharpsignalDocId": 188}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 188 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 188 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 14:44

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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:	p.1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Claim · Caravan Limit · Cube Limit · Game End · Credits	p.2	0.032258 (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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards	p.1	0.031746 (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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Upgrade Cards · Trade Cards · Acquire · Rest	p.2	0.03125 (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 Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	Taking a Turn · Play · Spice Cards	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Century: Spice Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 188)	To set up a game of Century , follow these steps in order:	p.1	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 220 ms · first delta 1992 ms · total 1999350 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1994612 ms · retrieval 220 ms · ask 4513 ms · gateway work 4738 ms · total 1999350 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1995
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 373
tok/sec: 138.4 tok/sec — 373 output tokens in 2.695 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 28s 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 106), 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.