Ruling — Civolution

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Civolutionbg-400602-en-1e

For a standard game of 2 to 4 civilizations, the setup is as follows:

1. Construct the continent by fitting the 8 continent tiles in a random order and orientation into the frame of the score track until the frame is completely filled.[1]

2. Shuffle the 24 sites face down and place one of them face down in each of the octagonal recesses of the continent.[1]

3. Distribute the 18 material tiles across the land territories of the continent.[1] For a first play, place the Wood material tile face up onto the 'Start' material tile space in the Forest and the Papyrus material tile face up onto the 'Start' material tile space in the Grassland; shuffle the remaining material tiles face down by territory type and place one face-down matching tile onto each of the remaining 16 land territories.[1]

4. Shuffle the 20 event cards and place 4 of them face down as a face-down event stack onto the righthand event card space, returning the rest to the game box.[2]

5. Place the 100-point tokens as a supply onto the 100-point token display of the progress board.[3][2]

6. In games with two or three civilizations, use blocking tokens (flipped to the blocking side up) to cover certain spaces:

* In a 2-player game, cover the [icon] space and the [icon] space in the goal chip display, as well as both yellow spaces and both yellow spaces of the phase sequence.[3][2]

* In a 3-player game, cover the [icon] space in the goal chip display and both yellow spaces of the phase sequence.[2]

* To cover encampments in 2 or 3 player games, take territory tokens, flip them back side up, and cover the 10 encampments showing the [icon] (in 2-player) or the 4 encampments showing the [icon] (in 3-player) with a token matching its territory type; flip the remaining territory tokens face up and place them as a general hunting token supply in the hunting token display on the progress board.[4]

7. Place dice onto the spaces of the dice display:

* In a 2-player game, place 3 activation dice and 3 fate dice.[4]

* In a 3-player game, place 4 activation dice and 4 fate dice.[4]

* In a 4-player game, place 5 activation dice and 5 fate dice.[4]

8. Each civilization takes a console, unfolds it, and places it in front of itself.[4]

9. Each civilization chooses a player color and receives all game components of that color, then:

* Places one of the sets of 15 module tiles in its corresponding recess on the right side of the console, ensuring level-I sides are up.[4]

* Takes 6 activation dice from the game box, turns them so each shows a different value (1 through 6), and places them onto the corresponding dice spaces on the right side of the console.[4]

* Takes 1 fate die and places it next to the console.[4]

* Places a stage-4 tile and a stage-5 tile inactive side up above the top left edge of the console (stage 4 above stage 3, stage 5 above stage 4).[4]

* Places 4 settlements, 3 farms, and 2 boats in their recesses on the left side of the console.[4]

* Places 7 stackable discs of their color onto the game boards: one onto space 0 of the score track, one onto the left space of the Favor of Agera track, and one onto space 0 of each of the 5 progress tracks on the progress board.[5][4]

10. For the first few plays, civilizations receive starting cards by taking a random starting marker card (numbered 1-6) from a shuffled set, then selecting one research card from each of the 5 research card decks that matches the number on their marker card; the remaining research cards are shuffled by deck and placed as face-down research stacks next to the game boards.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.7 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.6 · 1 weather indicator · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.6

[4] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[5] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[6] RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook · p.9 · Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 329 ms · ask 9610 ms · total 9943 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9943 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "10 In games with two or three civilizations, you must cover encampments in the territories of the continent with blocking tokens . To do this, take the territory tokens and flip them back side up. In a 2-player game , cover the 10 encampments that show the /gid01780 icon or the icon by placing onto ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 39, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Set the game up as in a 2-player game , but carry out setup steps 12 to 16 only for yourself as a single civilization. Afterwards, set up V.I.C.I's play area next to your console as follows: Take the 22 cards for the solo mode . Place the 7 display cards (with a purple mark and a number in the top r", "headingPath": "Solo mode: Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Place the 7 stackable discs of your color onto the game boards: one disc onto space 0 of the score track, a one disc onto the left space of the Favor of Agera track (at the bottom of the sequence board ), b and one disc onto space 0 of each of the 5 progress tracks on the progress board . The discs ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Now, each civilization receives its starting cards. Depending on how well you know the game, you can do this in one of two ways: 13 For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bott", "headingPath": "Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "Components Setup How to play the game How do you gain success points?", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Option A (newcomers): For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bottom left (1 to 6). Shuffle these and give each civilization one at random. Return any excess starting marker ca", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.04374, "snippet": "14 First, set up the research display as described on the previous page. Then, have each civilization draw 2 cards from each of the 5 face-down research stacks into its hand. Afterwards, shuffle the starting marker cards and give each civilization 3 of them. Return any excess starting marker cards f", "headingPath": "Setting up the research display: · Option B (advanced): · Option A (newcomers):", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030679, "snippet": "The following describes the game setup for 2 to 4 civilizations. For the solo mode, see page 39. Weather spaces a b c d e f g h i In a 2-player game, cover the space and the space in the goal chip display. Also cover both of the yellow spaces and both of the yellow spaces of the phase sequence. Hunt", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1 weather indicator · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 319 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 319 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 0.91248 of 2925 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 22, 2026 18:08 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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	0.047712 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Solo mode: Setup	p.39	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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	0.047123 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:	p.9	0.046032 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.3	0.045475 (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))	69
#6	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.9	0.045455 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setting up the research display: · Option B (advanced): · Option A (newcomers):	p.10	0.04374 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.6	0.030679 (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 80 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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	#3	0.047123 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Solo mode: Setup	p.39	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	#1	0.047712 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.6	#8	0.030679 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.3	#5	0.045475 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:	p.9	#4	0.046032 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.7	#14	0.025709 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	1 weather indicator · Setup	p.6	#9	0.030622 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	1 weather indicator · Setup	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319)	Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 329 ms · first delta 5345 ms · total 9943 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 329 ms · ask 9610 ms · gateway work 9943 ms · total 9943 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2608
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 913
tok/sec: 201.5 tok/sec — 913 output tokens in 4.530 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 57s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 9s 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 247), 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.