Ruling — The Guild of Merchant Explorers

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Guild of Merchant Explorersbg-350933-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:

1. Each player receives a matching map, 13 village tokens, and 36 explorers in one color.[1]

2. Place the Exploration Board in the middle of the table with the "II," "III," and "I/II/III" era cards in their matching spots.[1]

3. Shuffle and place the Exploration Deck, Investigate Deck, and Treasure Deck face down beside the Exploration Board.[1]

4. Place the 16 discovery towers, 32 trading posts, 40 treasure tokens, and coins in a reachable supply.[1]

5. Shuffle 6 matching goal cards and deal 3 faceup below the Exploration Board.[1]

6. During each turn, one player reveals the top card of the Exploration Deck and places it on its matching space on the Exploration Board.[2]

7. All players simultaneously place explorers from their supply onto their own map according to the action on the revealed card.[2][3]

8. Explorers must be placed according to the "Golden Rules of Exploration": at the start of the game, you can only explore spaces adjacent to your capital space, but on future turns, you can also explore spaces adjacent to previously placed explorers or discovered villages.[2][3]

9. When an era card is revealed for the first time, each player draws 2 investigate cards from the Investigate Deck, chooses 1, places it on the left side of their map matching the current era, and discards the other.[4]

1/2. Players take the explore action on the chosen investigate card.[4]

3. If a ruin space is explored for the first time, place a treasure token under the explorer and immediately draw a treasure card from the Treasure Deck to resolve any immediate effects.[5]

4. If two city spaces are connected by an unbroken chain of explorers, villages, and/or the capital space without trading posts, complete a "trade route" by multiplying the values of the cities and earning that amount, then place a trading post on one of the cities.[5]

5. Continue taking turns until the Exploration Deck is empty, marking the end of the era.[2]

6. At the end of an era, players remove all explorers from their maps and return them to their personal supply, but leave villages, trading posts, treasure tokens, and discovery towers where they are.[2]

7. At the start of each new era, a player shuffles the appropriate explore cards to create a new Exploration Deck.[2]

8. The game ends at the end of Era IV.[6]

9. The player with the most coins wins; in the event of a tie, the player with the most discovery towers wins, followed by the player with the most villages.[3][6]

[1] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.3 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.5 · Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map

[3] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.4 · Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …

[4] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.6 · Explore Cards · EXPLORE 2 GRASSLAND SPACES · EXPLORE 2 DESERT SPACES · EXPLORE 1 MOUNTAIN SPACE · EXPLORE 3 SEA SPACES (IN A STRAIGHT LINE) · EXPLORE ANY 2 ADJACENT SPACES · …

[5] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.7 · Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts

[6] RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook · p.8 · Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty

So says the rulebook. So plays 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 83 ms · ask 6793 ms · total 20477 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 13599 ms · generation 6878 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "As soon as you take an explore action and meet the requirements of a goal, place an explorer from your supply on the card. If you are the first player to complete this goal, earn equal to the larger amount on the card. If 2 or more players complete the same goal for the first time during the same tu", "headingPath": "Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Give each player a matching map. For your first game, we recommend Avenia. Then, give each player a set of 13 village tokens and 36 explorer cubes in one color. Return any unused maps and player token sets to the box. Place the Exploration Board in the middle of the table and place the \"II,\" \"III,\" ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Each turn, one player reveals the top card of the Exploration Deck and places it on its matching space on the Exploration Board. All players now place explorers from their supply onto their own map according to the action on the card. Once everyone has completed the explore action and resolved any e", "headingPath": "Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Each player aims to earn coins ( ) by exploring their map to discover villages, complete trade routes, uncover ruins, and visit discovery towers over the course of 4 eras. Any time you earn , take them from the supply and keep them value side down beside your board until the end of the game. Players", "headingPath": "Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "None of the following rules can be broken with any explore actions. Y ou must place each explorer adjacent to one of your villages or one of your explorers. These spaces must be without explorers, villages, or discovery towers. Always place explorers one at a time. Explore and resolve map features a", "headingPath": "Golden Rules of Exploration", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The ruins of Tigomé hold ancient treasures that will aid you in your adventure or earn you . Except for treasure cards with an immediate effect, treasure cards are scored at the end of the game. Immediately place 1 explorer on any space adjacent to your previously placed explorers or villages, follo", "headingPath": "Treasure Cards · Investigate Cards · CONTINUOUS PATH · EXPLORE UP TO 4 SEA SPACES · EXPLORE SPACES IN A STRAIGHT LINE · DOUBLE OR TRIPLE THE VALUE OF ANY COINS YOU EARN", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030282, "snippet": "Each map represents a province of Tigomé. While the basic rules of play remain the same, some provinces have additional ways to explore and earn . Home to the capital city of Tigomé, this province is known for its many villages and cities filled with friendly people. The large central island feature", "headingPath": "Maps · Avenia · Aghon · Kazan · Cnidaria · Goals", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Ruin spaces are usually on sea terrain, but some ruin spaces are on grassland, desert, and mountain spaces and are considered be a part of these regions. When you explore a ruin space for the first time, place a treasure token under your explorer on that space. Immediately draw a treasure card from ", "headingPath": "Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Explore Cards · EXPLORE 2 GRASSLAND SPACES · EXPLORE 2 DESERT SPACES · EXPLORE 1 MOUNTAIN SPACE · EXPLORE 3 SEA SPACES (IN A STRAIGHT LINE) · EXPLORE ANY 2 ADJACENT SPACES · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty", "sharpsignalDocId": 395}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 395 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 395 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 0.91591 of 2081 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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty	p.8	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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Setup	p.3	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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map	p.5	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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Golden Rules of Exploration	p.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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Treasure Cards · Investigate Cards · CONTINUOUS PATH · EXPLORE UP TO 4 SEA SPACES · EXPLORE SPACES IN A STRAIGHT LINE · DOUBLE OR TRIPLE THE VALUE OF ANY COINS YOU EARN	p.10	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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Maps · Avenia · Aghon · Kazan · Cnidaria · Goals	p.9	0.030282 (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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts	p.7	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

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 14 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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Setup	p.3	#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
#2	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map	p.5	#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
#3	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts	p.7	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Maps · Avenia · Aghon · Kazan · Cnidaria · Goals	p.9	#7	0.030282 (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 The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Explore Cards · EXPLORE 2 GRASSLAND SPACES · EXPLORE 2 DESERT SPACES · EXPLORE 1 MOUNTAIN SPACE · EXPLORE 3 SEA SPACES (IN A STRAIGHT LINE) · EXPLORE ANY 2 ADJACENT SPACES · …	p.6	#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
#6	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Treasure Cards · Investigate Cards · CONTINUOUS PATH · EXPLORE UP TO 4 SEA SPACES · EXPLORE SPACES IN A STRAIGHT LINE · DOUBLE OR TRIPLE THE VALUE OF ANY COINS YOU EARN	p.10	#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
#7	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …	p.4	#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
#8	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty	p.8	#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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Setup	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Revealing Cards from /the Exploration Deck · End of an Era · Exploring Your Map	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Goal · About /the Maps · Blank spaces. · Coin spaces. · Ruin spaces. · City spaces with values (2, 3, 4, or 5). · …	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Explore Cards · EXPLORE 2 GRASSLAND SPACES · EXPLORE 2 DESERT SPACES · EXPLORE 1 MOUNTAIN SPACE · EXPLORE 3 SEA SPACES (IN A STRAIGHT LINE) · EXPLORE ANY 2 ADJACENT SPACES · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Ruin spaces · Cities and trading posts	p.7	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK The Guild of Merchant Explorers — Rulebook (corpus doc 395)	Completing Goals · End of /the Game · Solo Mode · Set Your Difficulty	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 83 ms · first delta 2292 ms · total 20477 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 13599 ms · retrieval 83 ms · ask 6793 ms · gateway work 6878 ms · total 20477 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3670
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 593
tok/sec: 131.5 tok/sec — 593 output tokens in 4.511 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 7s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 6s 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 324), 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.