You asked
Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Merchants & Maraudersbg-25292-en-1e
At the start of play, players follow these steps: 1. Select a color and take the 6 cubes and miniatures of that color [1]. 2. Take one Treasure Chest for stashed Gold [1]. 3. Randomly draw a Captain from the Captain Card deck without revealing it [1]. 4. Secretly choose a ship (Sloop or Flute) by placing it in your hand [1]. 5. Simultaneously reveal your Captain and chosen ship [1]. 6. Take the Ship Card corresponding to your chosen ship [1]. 7. Place the Ship Card and your Captain Card on your Player Board [1]. 8. Place your ship miniature in the home-port of your Captain on the Game Board [1]. 9. Draw a Glory Card [1]. 10. Place a cube on each 'hit-location' on your ship card to match its values [1]. 11. Take 10 Gold [1]. 12. Determine the starting player by drawing one Captain card from all players' Captain cards; the owner of that card is the starting player [1].
🔧 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 462 ms · ask 9340 ms · total 9815 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 9815 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Draw Event Card. Player Actions (in turn). Once all players are finished, begin a new turn by drawing a new Event Card. The start player draws an Event Card. If the card has any NPC icons at the top, these are resolved first (see 'NPC Movement' on page 13). Then the text of the Event Card is read al", "headingPath": "Turn Sequence · Draw Event Card · Actions · Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The game ends immediately if either of the following occurs: There are no more Event Cards at the beginning of a turn. A Captain dies, and there are no more Captains left to draw. In both cases, the winning player is the one who has the mostGlory Points. Resolve ties as explained in 'Winning The Gam", "headingPath": "Time Limits and Game Length · Dice and Skill Checks", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Crew Combat takes place immediately after one player boards another (or as a result of some rumors or missions). Every round both Captains roll their Leadership skill simultaneously. Each success inflicts a hit to the enemy crew. The maximum amount of hits you can inflict in a round is equal to how ", "headingPath": "Crew Combat", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "If there are two cards below it, then randomly draw one of them to determine who the replacement will be. Example: The 'Dutch Naval Ship' and its Admiral Philips van Almonde is drawn during the game. A brown Frigate with a Dutch Naval Token below it is placed in Curaçao. After a few turns a second '", "headingPath": "Bringing NPCs Into Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The game includes five different Ships: Sloops, Flutes, Frigates, Galleons and Man-o-Wars. Each ship has its own miniature with the exception of Galleons and Mano-Wars, which share the same miniature. Each kind of ship has a Ship Card which displays its characteristics. Ships have five important cha", "headingPath": "The Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "In order to determine hit-location, a die is rolled for each cannon that hits its target. All locations except 'Hull' have a number next to them and when that number is rolled, the location is hit. For every rolled, the target decides which of the five locations is hit (unless the attacker chooses t", "headingPath": "Hit-Locations & Damage", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Game Board is divided into 17 Sea-Zones . 16 of these have a port associated with them, represented by a national icon from one of the 4 nations in the game (Dutch, English, French and Spanish). MostSea-Zones have a unique advantage or disadvantage which is written in each Sea-Zone. This Sea-Zon", "headingPath": "The Game Board · Setting up the Game Board.", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Each player gets a Player Board. The Player Board is used to keep track of Cards, Gold, Cargo, and the condition of your ship. At the start of play, each player follows the following steps: Select the color you wish to play and take the 6 cubes and miniatures of that color. Also take one of the Trea", "headingPath": "The Player Board · Start Player · Merchant or Marauder?", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Player Board · Start Player · Merchant or Marauder?", "sharpsignalDocId": 517}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 517 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 517 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 06:02
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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | Turn Sequence · Draw Event Card · Actions · Move | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | Time Limits and Game Length · Dice and Skill Checks | p.4 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | Crew Combat | p.14 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | Bringing NPCs Into Play | p.12 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | The Ships | p.4 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | Hit-Locations & Damage | p.14 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | The Game Board · Setting up the Game Board. | p.6 | 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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | The Player Board · Start Player · Merchant or Marauder? | 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
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 Merchants & Marauders — Rulebook (corpus doc 517) | The Player Board · Start Player · Merchant or Marauder? | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 462 ms · first delta 8155 ms · total 9815 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 462 ms · ask 9340 ms · gateway work 9815 ms · total 9815 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3927
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 236
- tok/sec
- 147.9 tok/sec — 236 output tokens in 1.596 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
- 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 449), 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.