Ruling — Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Agricola: All Creatures Big and Smallbg-119890-en-1e

1. Place the game board in the middle of the playing area [1]. 2. Give each player a farm board and place them such that the forest is at the top and the path is at the bottom [1]. 3. Lay out the 4 special buildings ('Half-Timbered House', 'Open Stables', 'Shelter' and 'Storage Building') next to each other [1]. 4. Place the 4 farm expansions, 10 feeding troughs and 4 stall tiles off to the side [1]. 5. Sort the building materials and the animals to form the general supply [1]. 6. Give both players 9 borders [1]. 7. Place the remaining 8 borders next to the game board near the 'Expand' action space [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook · p.1 · cardboard pieces · wooden pieces · additionally · GAME 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 326 ms · ask 6134 ms · total 6481 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6481 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 1, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "1 game board 2 farm boards (one for each player) 4 farm expansions 4 'stall' tiles (with 'stables' on the reverse sides) 4 special buildings ('Half-Timbered House', 'Storage Building', 'Shelter' and 'Open Stables') 9 different goods tiles (3x '4 sheep'; 1x '4 stone', '4 reed', '4 wood', '4 pigs', '4", "headingPath": "cardboard pieces · wooden pieces · additionally · GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "1 1 d Special Building Special Building 1 At the end of the game, the success of your farm gets measured. This is what your farm might look like. (The text boxes give you a preview of the rules you need to keep an eye on in this game.) Separate your farm into pastures. The pastures let you keep shee", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · GOAL OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "At the start of each round, refill some of the action spaces on the game board with the goods printed on them (even if there are goods left on them from the previous round) . You can recognize these spaces by the refill arrow on them. Refill arrow Do not place any goods on action spaces without the ", "headingPath": "1. Refill Phase · 2. Work Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "If you choose an action space with goods on it, take all of those goods. You are not allowed to choose an action space without carrying out the associated action. Building materials you receive get added to your supply. Animals must be kept on your farm board . Animals you do not have room for immed", "headingPath": "2. Work Phase · 3. Home Phase · 4. Breeding Phase · START PLAYER · THE ACTION SPACES (GAME BOARD) · Start player and 1 wood · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "If you choose an action space with goods on it, take all of those goods. You are not allowed to choose an action space without carrying out the associated action. Building materials you receive get added to your supply. Animals must be kept on your farm board. Animals you do not have room for immedi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "by Uwe Rosenberg, for 2 players 13 and up You are farmers raising sheep, pigs, cows and horses. Three workers help you keep the animals on your farm. They build stalls, enclose pastures and upgrade your farm. Stalls get expanded into stables and your cottage becomes a HalfTimbered House. Each round,", "headingPath": "GAME OBJECT", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "It can happen in some games that animals and building materials become scarce. For this reason, the game includes cardboard tiles representing larger quantities of individual goods. They can of course be exchanged for individual goods again at any time. It is a different story with feeding troughs (", "headingPath": "I F T H E C O M P O N E N T S R U N O U T · GAME END AND SCORING · WINNING THE GAME · Half-Timbered House", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "and and Expand Expand unlimited Players take turns choosing actions from those indicated on the game board. A detailed explanation of the action spaces can be found on pages 6 and 7. once per action once per action also also Animals can be kept in pastures and in buildings. Feeding troughs improve t", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY · THE RULES OF RAISING ANIMALS unlimited Stall unlimited Stall · Keeping Animals in Pastures · Keeping Animals in Buildings", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "cardboard pieces · wooden pieces · additionally · GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 465}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 465 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 465 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 7, 2026 04:51

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 Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	cardboard pieces · wooden pieces · additionally · GAME SETUP	p.1	0.048652 (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 Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	GAME SETUP · GOAL OF THE GAME	p.2	0.046432 (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 Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	1. Refill Phase · 2. Work Phase	p.5	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
#4	RULEBOOK Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	2. Work Phase · 3. Home Phase · 4. Breeding Phase · START PLAYER · THE ACTION SPACES (GAME BOARD) · Start player and 1 wood · …	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
#5	RULEBOOK Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)		p.6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	GAME OBJECT	p.1	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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	I F T H E C O M P O N E N T S R U N O U T · GAME END AND SCORING · WINNING THE GAME · Half-Timbered House	p.8	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 Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	GAMEPLAY · THE RULES OF RAISING ANIMALS unlimited Stall unlimited Stall · Keeping Animals in Pastures · Keeping Animals in Buildings	p.3	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 Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small — Rulebook (corpus doc 465)	cardboard pieces · wooden pieces · additionally · GAME SETUP	p.1	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 326 ms · first delta 5202 ms · total 6481 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 326 ms · ask 6134 ms · gateway work 6481 ms · total 6481 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4892
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 166
tok/sec: 136.3 tok/sec — 166 output tokens in 1.218 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 4s 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): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 395), 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.