Ruling — Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America

← Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North Americabg-155873-en-1e

The game is played over several rounds, with each round consisting of five phases.[1] The game progresses through three Steps: Step 1 begins the game;[2] Step 2 begins at the beginning of Phase 5 (Bureaucracy) after at least one player has connected a certain number of cities to his network;[2][3] and Step 3 begins at the beginning of the next phase after the Step 3 card is drawn from the power plant stack.[3]

The five phases of each round are:

1. Determine Player Order: Players determine the order for the round.[1] The first player is the player with the most cities in his network (the generator on the highest numbered space of the scoring track for connected cities); if tied, the player with the biggest power plant is first.[1] Remaining positions are determined using the same rules.[1] At the start of the game, player order is determined randomly.[4]

2. Auction Power Plants: Played in player order, beginning with the first player.[5] Each player may buy at most one power plant per round.[5][6] A player chooses one of the four power plants in the current market to start the auction and makes a bid.[5] Other players bid or pass in clockwise order.[5] The winner pays their highest bid to the bank and takes the power plant.[5]

3. Buy Resources: Played in reverse player order, beginning with the last player.[6] Players buy resource tokens they want, provided they can pay and store them on their power plants.[6] Each power plant can store up to twice as many resources as needed for production.[6]

4. Build Generators: Players may add any city inside the playing zone to their network as long as there is an empty space in the city for the current Step.[7] A player may only expand their network from their own connected cities.[7] The player pays building costs (10, 15, or 20 Elektro depending on the Step) plus connection costs between cities.[7] After connecting, the player places a generator in the new city.[7]

5. Bureaucracy: During this phase, players earn cash from the bank based on the number of cities they power.[6] Additionally, the resource market is resupplied with tokens based on the number of players and the current Step.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.4 · Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order

[2] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.9 · The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2

[3] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.12 · Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3

[4] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.2 · Preparation

[5] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.5 · Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · a. Choose a power plant for auction

[6] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.12 · Phase 1: Determine Player Order · Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · Phase 3: Buy Resources · Phase 4: Build Generators · 1. Earning cash · 2. Resupply the resource market · …

[7] RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook · p.7 · Phase 4: Build Generators

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 99 ms · ask 4113 ms · total 5957 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1742 ms · generation 4215 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "The game is played over several rounds. Each round of the game has five phases. In each phase, all players take their actions in the order specified for the phase before the game continues to the next phase. The five phases are: Determine Player Order Auction Power Plants Buy Resources Build Generat", "headingPath": "Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Place the board in the middle of the table. For the first game we suggest choosing North America. The map is separated into 7 areas, each with 7 cities. In each game, players choose a contiguous playing zone of connected areas depending on the number of players. This is the whole playing zone for AL", "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046452, "snippet": "The Trust needs his own space next to the game board, where it places its own power plants. The Trust gets 16 generators of its own color, plus one additional generator for player order (The trust does not place a generator on the scoring track for connected cities). The Trust does not get any money", "headingPath": "Preparation · General rules · Phase 1: Determine player order", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "North America: place the Step 3 card face-down under the supply stack and take the starting power plant that had been set aside (from 8) and set it face-down on top of the supply stack. Europe: place the Step 3 card face-down under the supply stack. This completes the game preparation. We hope you e", "headingPath": "10. Finish the preparations as follows :", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "In this phase, the players may increase their electricity networks by connecting new cities. Like phase 3, this phase is played in reverse player order beginning with the last player (the last generator on the player order). The phase ends after the first player finishes his turn. At the start of th", "headingPath": "Phase 4: Build Generators", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "Exception for the first round: because the player order was determined randomly at the beginning of the game, FOR ONE TIME ONLY players determine the player order again at the end of this phase. As all players will have bought one power plant, use the tied rule to determine player order for the next", "headingPath": "b. Pass the auction · Phase 3: Buy Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The game runs through three Steps and begins with Step 1. Step 2 begins when the first player has connected a certain number of cities to his network. Step 3 begins after the Step 3 card is drawn from the power plant stack. The game usually ends in Step 3, but in some cases may end in Step 2. This s", "headingPath": "The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The game ends immediately after Phase 4 (Build Generators) when at least one player has connected the indicated number of cities (or more) in his network, depending on the number of players. Players may use the oblong Game End barrier to place on the border in front of the matching space of the scor", "headingPath": "End of the Game and Winning the Game · Introduction", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · a. Choose a power plant for auction", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Phase 1: Determine Player Order · Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · Phase 3: Buy Resources · Phase 4: Build Generators · 1. Earning cash · 2. Resupply the resource market · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Phase 4: Build Generators", "sharpsignalDocId": 422}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 422 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 422 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 0.91199 of 1818 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 26, 2026 12:33 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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order	p.4	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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Preparation	p.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))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Preparation · General rules · Phase 1: Determine player order	p.10	0.046452 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	10. Finish the preparations as follows :	p.3	0.045695 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 4: Build Generators	p.6	0.045476 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	b. Pass the auction · Phase 3: Buy Resources	p.6	0.044563 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2	p.9	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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	End of the Game and Winning the Game · Introduction	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

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 26 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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order	p.4	#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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Preparation	p.2	#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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2	p.9	#7	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
#4	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · a. Choose a power plant for auction	p.5	#10	0.028571 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3	p.12	#14	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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 1: Determine Player Order · Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · Phase 3: Buy Resources · Phase 4: Build Generators · 1. Earning cash · 2. Resupply the resource market · …	p.12	#9	0.029643 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 4: Build Generators	p.7	#11	0.027433 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	10. Finish the preparations as follows :	p.3	#4	0.045695 (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 Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Playing the game · Phase 1: Determine Player Order	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	The 3 Steps of the Game · Step 1 · Step 2	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3	p.12	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Preparation	p.2	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · a. Choose a power plant for auction	p.5	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 1: Determine Player Order · Phase 2: Auction Power Plants · Phase 3: Buy Resources · Phase 4: Build Generators · 1. Earning cash · 2. Resupply the resource market · …	p.12	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Power Grid Deluxe: Europe/North America — Rulebook (corpus doc 422)	Phase 4: Build Generators	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 99 ms · first delta 1685 ms · total 5957 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1742 ms · retrieval 99 ms · ask 4113 ms · gateway work 4215 ms · total 5957 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3483
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 498
tok/sec: 201.8 tok/sec — 498 output tokens in 2.468 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 40s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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: 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 351), 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.