RuleSage cited table rulings
← Finspan

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

1. Perform standard Finspan setup [1]. 2. Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply [2]. 3. Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply [2]. 4. Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards and place it face down next to the starter fish cards [2]. 5. Place the achievement board near the general supply; use side A for first-time players, or either side for others [2]. 6. If using side B of the achievement board, randomly select one Week 1 tile, one Week 2 tile, and one Week 3 tile and place them on the board, ensuring their week-number lines match the lines on the board [1][2]. 7. Place coral tokens in the general supply [1]. 8. Each player places an ocean mat in front of them [3]. 9. Each player chooses a player color and gains 6 divers of that color [3]. 10. Each player places 1 egg token on each of the two starting egg spaces (printed on forage fish) in their ocean [3]. 11. Each player places 1 young token on the starting young space [3]. 12. Each player gains 2 random starter fish cards, placing them face up in a vertical line beside their ocean mat to form their hand, and returns any unused starter cards to the box [3]. 13. Each player draws 3 fish cards from the deck and adds them face up to their hand [3]. 14. Randomly select a first player and give them the first-player token [3]. 15. Each player places either side of any coral reef overlay on their ocean mat, covering the existing twilight zone [1]. 16. Each player gains a Sharks & Reefs player aid [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion · p.2 · GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.2 · SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS
[3] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.2 · PLAYER SETUP

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 242 ms · ask 9431 ms · total 9683 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9683 ms
retrieval refs (raw)
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "1 Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply. 2 Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply. These 10 cards have dark gray corners and a different back than other fish cards. 3 Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards", "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "After standard Finspan setup, perform the following: A Place the coral tokens in the general supply. B If using side B of the achievement board, randomly select 1 tile per matching slot. Important: Always ensure that the chosen tiles' week-number lines match the lines on the board. C Each player pla", "headingPath": "GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "A Place an ocean mat (your 'ocean') in front of you. B Choose a player color and gain the 6 divers of that color. C Place 1 egg token on each of the 2 starting egg spaces (printed on forage fish) in your ocean. Forage fish are the three fish printed on your ocean mat. D Place 1 young token on the st", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "1 Shuffle the new fish cards into the fish deck. 2 Shuffle the new starter fish cards in with the other starter fish. 3 Replace the original achievement board and scorepad with their new versions. 4 Shuffle the new achievement tiles in with the original tiles.", "headingPath": "INITIAL COMBINING OF PREVIOUS AND NEW COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Playing a fish involves choosing a fish card from your hand, paying its cost, and placing it on your ocean mat. Thematically, this represents you discovering this fish in an area of your ocean. Follow these steps to play a fish card: PLACE A DIVER. Place an available diver in the gray box at the upp", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Each turn, you will either play a fish or dive into your ocean. You will take 6 turns during each of the 4 weeks (a total of 24 turns per player during the entire game). You will typically spend the beginning of the game playing low-cost fish cards and laying eggs, the middle of the game playing hig", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Post it on the Finspan Tabletop Game Facebook group, on BoardGameGeek, or in the Finspan channel of the Stonemaier Games Discord server: stonemaiergames.com/discord", "headingPath": "HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE?", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "A school forms whenever 3 or more young share the same slot in your ocean. When this occurs, immediately return 3 young from that slot to the supply and replace them with 1 school token (shown as this icon in the game: ). At the end of weeks 1 through 3: a. Score points for this week's achievement. ", "headingPath": "IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
citations (raw)
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
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
Oct 28, 2026 22:22

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS p.2 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP p.2 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAYER SETUP p.2 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) INITIAL COMBINING OF PREVIOUS AND NEW COMPONENTS p.2 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 260
#5 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAY A FISH CARD p.4 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW p.4 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? p.8 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 164
#8 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) IMPORTANT NOTES SCHOOL TOKENS p.9 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS p.2 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAYER SETUP p.2 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 242 ms · first delta n/a · total 9683 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 242 ms · ask 9431 ms · gateway work 9683 ms · total 9683 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
setup

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 5), 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.