You asked
How do I setup the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAnswered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Brass: Lancashire has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
The original rules did not have a static list of cards that were removed during setup. To play with the classic deck setup, apply the following rules changes: Ignore step 2 in 'Board Setup'. Instead of step 4 in 'Board Setup': Insert the Deck tile near the bottom of the Draw Deck, so that there are
Brass was originally designed by Martin Wallace as a 3-4 player game. However, in 2009, a 2-player variant was developed by members of the Brass community. This used a customised map and setup; with all other rules remaining the same. Roxley's 2018 ruleset makes this Community 2-player variant obsol
Take a Player Mat. Take £ 30 from the Bank N . Choose a coloured Character tile. Place the matching coloured Link tiles in your player area O . Q Stack the matching coloured Industry tiles (which consist of Cotton Mills P , Ports , Shipyards R , Iron Works S , and Coal Mines T ) on their Place your
Take the lowest level tile of the chosen industry from your Player Mat L and place it (the side with the black top half face down) on an undeveloped space in your chosen build location, obeying the following rules: If possible, place it on a space displaying only that industry's icon M . Otherwise,
For each action, you may choose to perform one of the following (you may perform the same action twice): Build Place one of your Industry tiles onto the board, paying the appropriate cost and consuming any required coal / iron. Note: Only Build requires a specific card. Network Expand your canal or
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 214 ms · ask 5267 ms · total 5490 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 5490 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 7, "score": 0.032522, "snippet": "The original rules did not have a static list of cards that were removed during setup. To play with the classic deck setup, apply the following rules changes: Ignore step 2 in 'Board Setup'. Instead of step 4 in 'Board Setup': Insert the Deck tile near the bottom of the Draw Deck, so that there are ", "headingPath": "Classic 3-4 Player Deck Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031545, "snippet": "Brass was originally designed by Martin Wallace as a 3-4 player game. However, in 2009, a 2-player variant was developed by members of the Brass community. This used a customised map and setup; with all other rules remaining the same. Roxley's 2018 ruleset makes this Community 2-player variant obsol", "headingPath": "Community 2-Player Variant", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Take a Player Mat. Take £ 30 from the Bank N . Choose a coloured Character tile. Place the matching coloured Link tiles in your player area O . Q Stack the matching coloured Industry tiles (which consist of Cotton Mills P , Ports , Shipyards R , Iron Works S , and Coal Mines T ) on their Place your ", "headingPath": "PLAYER AREA SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Take the lowest level tile of the chosen industry from your Player Mat L and place it (the side with the black top half face down) on an undeveloped space in your chosen build location, obeying the following rules: If possible, place it on a space displaying only that industry's icon M . Otherwise, ", "headingPath": "A C T I O N S", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "For each action, you may choose to perform one of the following (you may perform the same action twice): Build Place one of your Industry tiles onto the board, paying the appropriate cost and consuming any required coal / iron. Note: Only Build requires a specific card. Network Expand your canal or ", "headingPath": "ACTIONS LIST", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Place the board A face up displaying the Full Map, which is used for all player counts (2-4). Do not use the Alternate Map, which features fewer locations and the icon in the top left. Remove all cards and Distant Cotton Market tiles that do not show your player count and return them to the box. The", "headingPath": "BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Roxley strongly recommends you play using the updated and streamlined rules outlined in this manual. But in case you are feeling nostalgic, you can play the original game by implementing the rule changes below .", "headingPath": "CLASSIC RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Discard any card from your Hand, and place it face up onto your Discard Pile. Place a Link tile on an undeveloped line on the board L . The placed Link tile must be adjacent to a location that is a part of your network (see 'Your Network'). M 11", "headingPath": "To perform the Network action:", "sharpsignalDocId": 88}]
- citations (raw)
- []
- 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
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 1812 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 1799 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 1783 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Oct 30, 2026 02:39
retrieval — what the search arm returned
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 rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | Classic 3-4 Player Deck Setup | p.7 | 0.032522 (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 Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | Community 2-Player Variant | p.7 | 0.031545 (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 Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | PLAYER AREA SETUP | p.3 | 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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | A C T I O N S | p.5 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | ACTIONS LIST | p.4 | 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) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | BOARD SETUP | p.3 | 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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | CLASSIC RULES | p.7 | 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) | 211 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Brass: Lancashire — Rulebook (corpus doc 88) | To perform the Network action: | p.6 | 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) | 245 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 214 ms · first delta n/a · total 5490 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 214 ms · ask 5267 ms · gateway work 5490 ms · total 5490 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s 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.
disposition
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
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 19), 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.