You asked
How many resource cards does each player hold at the start, and may I trade with the bank on my first turn?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e
I looked through Catan's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
After you roll for resource production, you may trade with other players (domestic trade Y ) or with the bank (maritime trade Y ). You may trade as long as you have resource cards. If you decide not to trade during your turn, no one can trade. You may trade with another player between your turns, bu
If you roll a '7' for resource production, none of the players receive resources. Instead: Each player counts their resource cards. Any player with more than 7 resource cards (i.e., 8 or more) must choose and discard half of them. Return discards to the supply stacks. If you hold an odd number of ca
On your turn, you can trade resource cards with any of the other players. You can announce which resources you need and what you are willing to trade for them. The other players can also make their own proposals and counteroffers. Important: Players may only trade with the player whose turn it is. T
On your turn, you may trade resources with the other players (after rolling for resource production). You and the other players negotiate the terms of your trades-such as which cards will be exchanged. You may trade as many times as you can, using single or multiple cards. However, you cannot give a
Unless you're using the Starting Set-Up for Experienced Players, the oldest player goes first. On your turn, you can do the following in the order listed: Illustration C Illustration D You must roll for resource production Y (the result applies to all players). You may trade Y resource cards with ot
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 99 ms · ask 2985 ms · total 3088 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3088 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 14, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "After you roll for resource production, you may trade with other players (domestic trade Y ) or with the bank (maritime trade Y ). You may trade as long as you have resource cards. If you decide not to trade during your turn, no one can trade. You may trade with another player between your turns, bu", "headingPath": "trade", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "If you roll a '7' for resource production, none of the players receive resources. Instead: Each player counts their resource cards. Any player with more than 7 resource cards (i.e., 8 or more) must choose and discard half of them. Return discards to the supply stacks. If you hold an odd number of ca", "headingPath": "rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "On your turn, you can trade resource cards with any of the other players. You can announce which resources you need and what you are willing to trade for them. The other players can also make their own proposals and counteroffers. Important: Players may only trade with the player whose turn it is. T", "headingPath": "a) Domestic Trade Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "On your turn, you may trade resources with the other players (after rolling for resource production). You and the other players negotiate the terms of your trades-such as which cards will be exchanged. You may trade as many times as you can, using single or multiple cards. However, you cannot give a", "headingPath": "domestiC trade", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Unless you're using the Starting Set-Up for Experienced Players, the oldest player goes first. On your turn, you can do the following in the order listed: Illustration C Illustration D You must roll for resource production Y (the result applies to all players). You may trade Y resource cards with ot", "headingPath": "turn overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "You can also trade without the other players! During your turn, you can always trade at 4:1 by putting 4 identical resource cards back in their stack and taking any 1 resource card of your choice for it. If you have a settlement or city on a harbor Y , you can trade with the bank more favorably: at ", "headingPath": "b) Maritime Trade Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "You may build on your turn after you have rolled for resource production and finished trading. To build, you must turn in the specified combinations of resource cards (see the Building Costs Cards Y ). Return the resource cards to the supply stacks. You can build as many items and buy as many cards ", "headingPath": "Build (BuildinG)", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If you roll a '7,' no one receives any resources. Instead, every player who has more than 7 resource cards must select half (rounded down) of their resource cards and return them to the bank. Then you must move the robber Y . Proceed as follows: You must move the robber Y immediately to the number t", "headingPath": "a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row recorded
- Aug 21, 2026 10:38 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | trade | p.14 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer | p.11 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | a) Domestic Trade Y | 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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | domestiC trade | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | turn overview | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | b) Maritime Trade Y | p.4 | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | Build (BuildinG) | 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | a) Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber Y | 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 |
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 74 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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | b) Maritime Trade Y | p.4 | #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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | domestiC trade | p.7 | #4 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | turn overview | p.4 | #5 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | resourCe trade | p.11 | #14 | 0.013514 (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 Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | a) Domestic Trade Y | p.4 | #3 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | maritime trade | p.9 | #10 | 0.014286 (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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer | p.11 | #2 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) | trade | p.14 | #1 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
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 |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 99 ms · first delta 2983 ms · total 3088 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 99 ms · ask 2985 ms · gateway work 3088 ms · total 3088 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 1832
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 200.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.045 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s ago)
- answerer host (measured by rulesage)
- reachable (for 24h, checked 1s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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 1), 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.