You asked
What must be prepared before the first player takes a turn?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Terraforming Marsbg-167791-en-1e
Before the first player takes a turn, the following must be prepared: 1. Place the game board centrally on the table [1]. 2. Place the 9 ocean tiles on their reserved space [1]. 3. Place the temperature and oxygen markers on their starting positions [1]. 4. Place the generation marker on '1' on the TR track [1]. 5. Place resource cubes and remaining tiles so everyone can reach them [1]. 6. Ensure there are no Corporate Era cards in the project deck or among the corporation cards, then shuffle the project cards and place the project deck next to the board with space for a discard pile [1]. 7. The player who most recently won a game of Terraforming Mars is given the first player marker [1]. 8. Players choose colors and take corresponding player markers and a player board [1]. 9. Place player markers on the production tracks at 1 for each resource (in standard games) [1]. 10. Each player places one marker at the starting position (20) of the TR track [1]. 11. New players receive a Beginner Corporation card, 42 MegaCredits, and 10 project cards to form a starting hand [1]. 12. Experienced players shuffle 10 standard corporation cards (excluding Corporate Era corporations) and deal 2 to each remaining player [1]. 13. Deal 10 project cards to each remaining player [1]. 14. Players examine their options, choose which corporations they want to play, and choose which project cards to keep for their starting hand, paying 3 M€ for each card kept [1]. 15. Discard unused corporation cards back into the box and discard unbought project cards face down into the discard pile [2][1]. 16. Players reveal their chosen corporation in player order and collect their starting resources and production [2][1].
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 317 ms · ask 11186 ms · total 2080114 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 2068602 ms · generation 11512 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The cards not kept are discarded (put discarded corporations back in the box) cards are always discarded face down! In player order, players then reveal their chosen corporation, get their starting Start the game: The first generation starts without a player order phase and without a research phase ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "If more interaction is desired, the Draft variant may be used. During the Research phase the players draft 4 cards to buy from instead of just drawing 4 to buy from: Each player first gets 4 cards and chooses one to draft, putting it aside and passing the rest to the next player. Then you have 3 car", "headingPath": "Draft variant:", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Each player starts the game with a corporation card . During the game, players buy and play many project cards to get benefits of different kinds. The cards are divided into active cards (blue frame, see example), automated cards (green) and event cards (red), read more on page 10. Tag: Places the c", "headingPath": "CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Each player draws 4 cards and decides which of them he wants to buy to his hand. Each card costs 3 M€ to buy to the hand, and you may buy 0-4 cards. The rest of the 4 drawn cards are discarded face down on the discard pile. There is no hand limit. This phase is also skipped the first generation (see", "headingPath": "2) Research phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The first player marker shifts 1 step clockwise and the generation marker is moved up 1 step. This phase is skipped the first generation (see setup).", "headingPath": "1) Player Order phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Players take 1 or 2 actions each turn, or pass. Play proceeds clockwise around the table until all players have passed. The actions may be combined in any way the player chooses. The available actions are: Play a card from your hand (see page 9). Use a standard project (see page 10). Claim a milesto", "headingPath": "3) Action phase (see page 9)", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "As shown on page 8, there are 7 different actions that players may choose from on their turn. Players may do 1 or 2 actions on their turn, in any combination (for example 2 of the same action). By choosing 2 actions, a player can surprise the others, by doing more than they expected and beat them to", "headingPath": "ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "This describes the setup for the standard game for 2-5 players. See additional rules for other game variants on page 13. resources and production (if any), and then pay 3 M€ for each project card they keep. Be aware that your resources for the following few generations will be quite limited until yo", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 59}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 59 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 59 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 14:48
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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | SETUP | p.7 | 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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | Draft variant: | p.13 | 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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | CARDS | p.6 | 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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | 2) Research phase | p.8 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | 1) Player Order phase | p.8 | 0.030769 (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)) | 149 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | 3) Action phase (see page 9) | p.8 | 0.030303 (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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | ACTIONS | p.9 | 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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | SETUP | p.7 | 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
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 Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | SETUP | p.7 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars — Rulebook (corpus doc 59) | SETUP | p.7 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 317 ms · first delta 8520 ms · total 2080114 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 2068602 ms · retrieval 317 ms · ask 11186 ms · gateway work 11512 ms · total 2080114 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 2987
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 405
- tok/sec
- 137.7 tok/sec — 405 output tokens in 2.941 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
- 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 8), 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.