Ruling — Imperial Settlers

You asked

Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Imperial Settlersbg-154203-en-1e

Before anyone takes a turn, the table is laid out as follows: 1. The score board is placed on the table where it can be easily seen by all players [1]. 2. The round marker is placed on the 'I' space of the round track [1]. 3. Common cards are shuffled and placed face down in easy reach of all players [1]. 4. Each player chooses a Faction and takes its components, which include a Faction board, a Faction marker, and a deck of 30 Faction cards [1]. 5. Players place their Faction boards in front of them [1]. 6. Players shuffle their Faction cards and place them nearby in a face down deck [1]. 7. Each player places his Faction marker on the '0' space of the Victory Point track [1]. 8. All Resource and Worker markers and additional tokens are placed in easy reach to create the general supply [1]. 9. A First player is randomly selected, and that player takes the First player marker [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers — Rulebook · p.5 · LOCATION PLACEMENT ORDER · Now you're ready to begin the game!

🔧 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 234 ms · ask 7255 ms · total 7499 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7499 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The game consists of 5 rounds, each divided into the following four phases: Lookout phase 1. Players acquire new cards. Players receive Resources, Workers, Raze tokens, etc. produced by their faction. The main phase of the round. Players use their cards, Resources, Workers, etc. to take actions to e", "headingPath": "Now you're ready to begin the game! · Production phase · Action phase · Cleanup phase · LOOKOUT PHASE · To execute the Lookout phase, follow these steps:", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player draws the top card from his own Faction deck and adds it to his hand. Then draw the top 5 cards from the Common deck and place them face-up in the center of the playing area. Players are now ready to select cards. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player will ", "headingPath": "ADVANCED LOOKOUT PHASE · RULES FOR BUILDING A FACTION DECK · Example of the Lookout Phase in a 3-player game", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Robbers - When you activate its Action and choose the player commanding the Japanese who has Deals with your or other enemy Locations (due to the Trade Route card), you can cancel such a Deal instead of discarding a Deal from under an enemy Faction board. Ruins - This Location has no building cost s", "headingPath": "CARD CLARIFICATIONS · ALTERNATE LOOKOUT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "This is the main phase of the game in which players take their actions to build and/or raze Locations, make Deals, use Action Locations and exchange Workers for Resources. Starting with the First player and continuing clockwise, each player performs one action at a time. The Player can take any avai", "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE · Available actions: · Defense tokens · CLEANUP PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Tom is playing the Japanese faction. During the round he activated two of his Action Locations: The Stalls (using 1 Food) and the Casino (using 1 Worker). After he passes he still has 2 Food and 1 Worker left over. The Japanese can store any number of Food, so Tom saves 2 Food on his Faction board a", "headingPath": "Example of Cleanup phase · GAME END · Ties", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "In this phase, players will acquire various Goods available in the game (Resources, Workers, tokens, cards, VPs). During the Production phase, players collect Goods from 3 different sources: Faction board - this is the Faction's basic Production providing the player with a specified number of Worker", "headingPath": "PRODUCTION PHASE · Example of Production phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "For players who don't like negative interaction in games, there is also a Peaceful variant. Use the standard rules with the following changes: In the first step of the Lookout phase, each player not only draws 1 Faction card, but also 1 Common card before they continue to the drafting part. During t", "headingPath": "PEACEFUL VARIANT", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Note: Before the first game, cards should be unpacked and sorted according to their type - separate Common cards and cards of each Faction into individual stacks. After the game we recommend to keep each type of cards separately to speed-up the setup for future games. The following rules refer to a ", "headingPath": "LOCATION PLACEMENT ORDER · Now you're ready to begin the game!", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "LOCATION PLACEMENT ORDER · Now you're ready to begin the game!", "sharpsignalDocId": 469}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 469 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 469 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 05:50

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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	Now you're ready to begin the game! · Production phase · Action phase · Cleanup phase · LOOKOUT PHASE · To execute the Lookout phase, follow these steps:	p.6	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	ADVANCED LOOKOUT PHASE · RULES FOR BUILDING A FACTION DECK · Example of the Lookout Phase in a 3-player game	p.12	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	CARD CLARIFICATIONS · ALTERNATE LOOKOUT PHASE	p.12	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	ACTION PHASE · Available actions: · Defense tokens · CLEANUP PHASE	p.7	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	Example of Cleanup phase · GAME END · Ties	p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	PRODUCTION PHASE · Example of Production phase	p.6	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	PEACEFUL VARIANT	p.12	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	LOCATION PLACEMENT ORDER · Now you're ready to begin the game!	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 Imperial Settlers — Rulebook (corpus doc 469)	LOCATION PLACEMENT ORDER · Now you're ready to begin the game!	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 234 ms · first delta 5900 ms · total 7499 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 234 ms · ask 7255 ms · gateway work 7499 ms · total 7499 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4266
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 224
tok/sec: 146.2 tok/sec — 224 output tokens in 1.532 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 2s 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 399), 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.