Ruling — Fall of Rome

← Fall of Rome

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Fall of Romebg-260428-en-1e

For the standard game, setup involves the following steps:

1. Give 1 Reference card and 1 random Role card with its matching pawn (top left of the Role card) to each player.[1]

2. Return the remaining Reference cards, Role cards, and pawns to the box.[1]

3. Separate the Player cards by type (City, Event, Revolt).[1]

4. Set aside Revolt cards.[1]

5. Randomly add a number of Event cards to the City cards based on the number of players.[1]

6. Shuffle these cards and deal a number of them faceup to each player to form starting hands (4 cards for 2 players; 3 cards for 3 players; 2 cards for 4 players; 2 cards for 5 players).[1]

7. If playing with the Vestalis role, shuffle and stack the remaining Event cards facedown to form an Event deck; otherwise, return the remaining Event cards to the box.[1]

8. Each player keeps their Player cards and Role card faceup on the table.[1]

9. Each player chooses one of their City cards and places their pawn and 2 legions from the supply in the matching city (if a player has no City card, they may place their pawn and legions in any city on the board).[1]

10. Choose the game's difficulty level by using 5, 6, or 7 Revolt cards for an Introductory, Standard, or Heroic game, respectively, and return any remaining Revolt cards to the box.[1]

11. Divide the remaining Player cards into facedown piles, as equal in size as possible, so that the number of piles matches the number of Revolt cards chosen.[1]

12. Shuffle 1 Revolt card into each pile facedown.[1]

13. Stack these piles to form the Player deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom, and place the Player deck facedown on the board in the Player deck space.[1]

14. Put the 5 red-bordered Roma cards in the Barbarian discard pile.[2]

For the Solitaire Challenge, set up the game as normal with these changes:

1. Remove the Mercator Role card and the 'Do ut des' Event card from the game.[3]

2. Deal 3 Role cards to yourself in a row from left to right and take the matching pawns to form a team of 3 roles.[3]

3. Place the green pawn (normally used for the Mercator) on top of the leftmost Role card to indicate which role takes the first turn.[3]

4. Return the remaining Role cards and pawns to the box.[3]

5. Before adding Event cards, shuffle all the City cards.[3]

6. Deal 3 cards to form your starting hand and deal 3 cards faceup to the side of the board to form the 'treasury'.[3]

7. Shuffle 4 Event cards into the remaining City cards.[3]

8. Place 1 pawn (and its 2 legions) into each of the 3 cities that match the 3 City cards in your hand.[3]

For the Roma Caput Mundi Challenge, set up the game as normal with these changes:

1. When choosing the difficulty level, use 4, 5, or 6 Revolt cards for an Introductory, Standard, or Heroic game, or 7 Revolt cards for a Legendary game.[4]

2. Do not place a fort in Roma; keep that fort in the supply.[4]

3. If you are dealt a Roma card and choose to start the game in Roma, the 2 legions you normally start with are not placed and remain in the supply.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook · p.3 · Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play

[2] RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook · p.9 · FINE POINTS AND REMINDERS

[3] RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook · p.10 · SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot

[4] RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook · p.10 · ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play

Settled. Play on.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 84 ms · ask 6339 ms · total 6425 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6425 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "When playing Pandemic: Fall of Rome as a single player, you assume the burden of Emperor and command 3 different roles. Set up the game as normal, with the following changes: { Remove the Mercator Role card and the 'Do ut des' Event card from the game. Th ey are not used in the Solitaire challenge. ", "headingPath": "SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "A ft er you have had a chance to play the game a few times using the standard rules (with or without the 'Solitaire Challenge' variant), you may wish to test your skills with this variant. In the Roma Caput Mundi Challenge, players must respect the law that Roman legions cannot enter Roma. Set up th", "headingPath": "ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "49 Barbarian Cards 7 Reference Cards 100 Barbarian Cubes (20 Anglo-Saxons/Franks, 22 Vandals, 20 Huns, 24 Visigoths, 14 Ostrogoths) 3 Battle Dice 16 Legions 1 Board Give 1 Reference card and 1 random Role card with its matching pawn (top le ft of the Role card) to each player. Return the remaining R", "headingPath": "Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Regina Foederata @ Setup: Stack all unused Event cards facedown to form an Event deck. @ At any time, discard a City card matching a color of your city to draw 1 card from your Event deck. @ During the Draw 2 Player Cards step, you may draw 3 Player cards; put 1 of them back on top of the deck. Remo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player turn is divided into 3 steps: Do 4 Actions Draw 2 Player Cards (and resolve Revolts) Invade Cities A ft er doing the Invade Cities step, your turn ends. Th e player on your le ft takes the next turn. Players should freely give each other advice, letting everyone offer opinions and ideas.", "headingPath": "PLAY · DO 4 ACTIONS · March · Sail · Fortify · Recruit Army", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Roll up to 1 battle die for each legion in your city (maximum 3 dice) and apply the results of your roll to your city. Th ere must be at least 1 barbarian in your city for you to do this action. Remove 1 legion. Remove 1 barbarian (appears on 2 sides of the dice). Remove 1 barbarian and 1 legion. Re", "headingPath": "Battle", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "During any turn, any player may play an Event card. Playing an Event card is not an action. Th e player who plays the Event card decides how to use it. Many Event cards present a standard option as well as a more powerful 'corrupt' option that causes decline. If you choose to do the standard option,", "headingPath": "EVENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030159, "snippet": "{ Setup: Stack all unused Event cards facedown to form an Event deck. { At any time, discard a City card matching a color of your city to draw 1 card from your Event deck. { During the Draw 2 Player Cards step, you may draw 3 Player cards; put 1 of them back on top of the deck. Remove 1 legion from ", "headingPath": "Vestalis · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FINE POINTS AND REMINDERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 483}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 483 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 483 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.90273 of 2457 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 20, 2026 15:37 UTC

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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 Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot	p.10	0.048916 (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 Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play	p.10	0.047643 (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 Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play	p.3	0.045695 (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 Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)		p.12	0.045476 (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 Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	PLAY · DO 4 ACTIONS · March · Sail · Fortify · Recruit Army	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
#6	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Battle	p.4	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
#7	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	EVENT CARDS	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
#8	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Vestalis · CREDITS	p.12	0.030159 (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

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 25 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot	p.10	#1	0.048916 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Vestalis · CREDITS	p.12	#8	0.030159 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)		p.12	#4	0.045476 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)		p.2	#17	0.013158 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play	p.3	#3	0.045695 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	FINE POINTS AND REMINDERS	p.9	#11	0.029199 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)		p.12	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play	p.10	#2	0.047643 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	Resolve Initial Invasion · Prepare Player Components 3 · Prepare Player Deck · Begin Play	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	FINE POINTS AND REMINDERS	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	SOLITAIRE CHALLENGE · Setup · Play · Treasury · Plot	p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Fall of Rome — Rulebook (corpus doc 483)	ROMA CAPUT MUNDI CHALLENGE · Setup · Play	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 84 ms · first delta 2309 ms · total 6425 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 84 ms · ask 6339 ms · gateway work 6425 ms · total 6425 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3649
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 796
tok/sec: 198.5 tok/sec — 796 output tokens in 4.011 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 27s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 8s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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 414), 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.