Ruling — Caverna: The Cave Farmers

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Caverna: The Cave Farmersbg-102794-en-1e

Setup

1. Each player chooses a color and takes the Home board, 5 Dwarfs, and 3 Stables of that color.[1][2]

2. Place 2 of the 5 Dwarfs side by side in the "Entry-level dwelling" on your Home board, and keep the remaining 3 Dwarfs and Stables next to your Home board as your personal supply.[1][2]

3. Take one of each of the 2 different Overview cards.[1][2]

4. Randomly determine the player who gets the Starting player token.[1][2]

5. Distribute Food based on turn order: the Starting player and the player to his left each get 1 Food, the third player gets 2 Food, and each other player gets 3 Food.[1][2]

6. Place the two single-sided basic game boards (with Round spaces 1 to 3 and 4 to 12) next to each other.[1][2]

7. Shuffle the 7 Harvest markers and place them face-down (with the grey rune symbol facing up) on Round spaces 6 to 12, one marker per space; in a 2-player game, remove one Harvest marker with a green leaf and distribute the remaining 6 markers among Round spaces 6 to 12, leaving space 9 empty.[1][2]

8. Place the "Harvest events" card next to the game boards.[1][2]

9. Place the third basic game board to the left of the first two, turned to the appropriate side depending on the number of players (1 to 3, or 4 to 7 players).[1][2]

10. Place the required additional game boards to the left of the basic ones (a larger board for 5 or 6 to 7 players, and a smaller board for 3 or 7 players).[1][2]

11. Place the supply boards for the Furnishing tiles near the other game boards.[3][2]

12. Place the Furnishing tiles on the appropriate spaces on the supply boards and keep some "Dwelling" tiles as a reserve.[4][3]

13. Shuffle the 12 Action space cards (or 11 for a 2-player game, removing the "Exploration" card) and arrange them into a face-down stack: stage 4 cards at the bottom, then stage 3 cards, then stage 2 cards, then the round 4 card, and finally the stage 1 cards on top.[4][3]

14. Sort landscape tiles by type into separate stacks of single and twin tiles.[4][3]

15. Separate remaining components into piles for animals and building materials, and keep Weapon strength markers in a pile.[5][3]

Work Phase

1. Beginning with the Starting player and in clockwise order, take turns to pick up a single Dwarf from your cave and place it on an unoccupied Action space.[6]

2. Place Dwarfs in ascending order of their Weapon strength, beginning with unarmed Dwarfs and followed by armed Dwarues.[6]

3. Carry out the depicted action immediately.[6]

4. Each Action space can only be used by one Dwarf in a round.[6]

5. When taking building materials (Wood, Stone, or Ore), place tokens in your personal supply in view of other players; Animals must be placed directly on your Home board.[6]

6. Play continues until all Dwarfs of all players have been placed.[6]

Harvest Time

1. During Harvest time, players must sustain their families through three sub-phases.[7]

2. Sub-phase 1 (Field phase): Remove 1 Grain or Vegetable token from each sown Field on your Home board and place it in your personal supply.[7]

3. Sub-phase 2 (Feeding phase): Pay 2 Food per Dwarf in your cave (offspring born during the current round from a 'Family growth' action only consume 1 Food for this round).[7]

4. If you do not have enough Food, you may convert goods into Food or take Begging markers.[7]

[1] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.2

[2] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.2 · Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces

[3] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3

[4] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3 · The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles

[5] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3 · The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers

[6] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.8 · 3. Work phase

[7] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.9 · 5. Harvest time

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 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 102 ms · ask 10617 ms · total 10720 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 10720 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Beginning with the Starting player and in clockwise order , take turns to pick up a single Dwarf from your cave and place it on an unoccupied Action space. Then carry out the depicted action immediately . Play continues until all Dwarfs of all players have been placed in this fashion. Please note th", "headingPath": "3. Work phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "This is the setup for a 3-player game. Especially in a 3-player game, players tend to forget about the additional game board. Place the supply boards near the other game boards as you see fi t. The supply boards are double-sided. One side is used in the Introductory game , the other side is used in ", "headingPath": "The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.04598, "snippet": "At the end of the game, the player with the most Gold points wins. In the following example, we will have a look at the ways you can score points. The numbers in parentheses are the points gained in the example. Each animal is worth 1 Gold point. There are Dogs, and the Farm animals Sheep, Donkeys, ", "headingPath": "Let us have a look at the scoring pad · Flow of play · The course of a round", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "This is the setup for a 3-player game. Especially in a 3-player game, players tend to forget about the additional game board. Place the supply boards near the other game boards as you see ﬁ t. There is a sufﬁ cient number of ordinary “Dwelling” tiles (costing 4 wood and 3 stone). You do not need to ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.044904, "snippet": "We will explain the game for 2 to 7 players fi rst. The solo rules will be explained on the last page. Each player chooses a color and takes the Home board and the 5 Dwarfs and 3 Stables of that color. Place 2 of the 5 Dwarfs side by side in the 'Entrylevel dwelling' on your Home board. Keep the rem", "headingPath": "Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.041757, "snippet": "Turn over the top Action space card from the stack and put it on the empty Round space with the lowest number. (The Round spaces are numbered 1 to 12.) The new Action space adds to the number of available actions. It can be used by any player in the Work phase of this and all subsequent rounds. From", "headingPath": "1. Add a new Action space", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The Starting player token is not passed at the end of the round. In order to become Starting player, you have to use the 'Starting player' action. (If no one does this, the Starting player token stays where it is.) You do not only become Starting player on that Action space, but you also get all the", "headingPath": "6. Action space: Starting player · Details on the 'Imitation' action", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Your Home board consists of two parts . On the left side, there is a Forest that you will cut down during the course of the game. On the right side, there is a Mountain with an entrance to your cave system, which currently consists of two Caverns. One of these is the 'Entry-level dwelling' and has b", "headingPath": "Goal of the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Work phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5. Harvest time", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 229 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 229 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 0.88104 of 2732 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 16:14 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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	3. Work phase	p.8	0.04866 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles	p.3	0.046402 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Let us have a look at the scoring pad · Flow of play · The course of a round	p.6	0.04598 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	0.045055 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces	p.2	0.044904 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	1. Add a new Action space	p.7	0.041757 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	6. Action space: Starting player · Details on the 'Imitation' action	p.22	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
#8	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Goal of the game	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

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 55 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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	3. Work phase	p.8	#1	0.04866 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	#4	0.045055 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles	p.3	#2	0.046402 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	5. Harvest time	p.9	#20	0.0241 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers	p.3	#27	0.014085 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	#10	0.027313 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.2	#11	0.027273 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces	p.2	#5	0.044904 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles	p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers	p.3	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	3. Work phase	p.8	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	5. Harvest time	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 102 ms · first delta 3801 ms · total 10720 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 102 ms · ask 10617 ms · gateway work 10720 ms · total 10720 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3940
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 903
tok/sec: 132.0 tok/sec — 903 output tokens in 6.842 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 49s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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: 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 155), 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.