RuleSage cited table rulings
← Ora et Labora

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Ora et Laborabg-70149-en-1e

I looked through Ora et Labora's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook · p.2
DETAILS Gameplay Determine who will receive the starting player marker in the first round. Give that player either the or starting player marker (the starting player marker for the other Irish French variant is not used). Turn the starting player marker over so that the side with 1 coin is showing.
RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook · p.8 · The two player game · The Long Two Player Game
The grapes (only in the France variant) and stone goods indicators enter the game in rounds 11 and 18 respectively, which means that stone does not enter the game until the second full rotation of the production wheel (indicated by a 2 in a spiral symbol). Once you have finished your turn it is the
RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook · p.8 · The long two player game · The Solo Game · Remove the grapes and stone indicators from the game entirely. · Gameplay
During your effectively three actions in a row, you can buy up to two landscapes (districts and plots); one during your first action and another in either your second or third action. There is no bonus round like in the three or four player game. As with the regular two player game, the long version
RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook · p.7 · The Short Multiplayer Game
You can also play a game of Ora et Labora in just one hour. Use the short game gameboard for both three and four player games. Use the front side of the production wheel (the one whose numbers go 0, 2, 3, 4, …). Unlike the longer version, each player leaves the two landscape spaces in the upper left
RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook · p.7 · The Two Player Game · The two player game
Use the one to two player game board. Remove all building cards from the game that have a 3+ or 4 symbol in their bottom right corners. Use the back side of the production wheel (the one whose numbers go 0, 1, 2, 2, …). Place the A through D building cards onto the indicated spaces around the edges
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 107 ms · ask 1701 ms · total 1811 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 1811 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "DETAILS Gameplay Determine who will receive the starting player marker in the first round. Give that player either the or starting player marker (the starting player marker for the other Irish French variant is not used). Turn the starting player marker over so that the side with 1 coin is showing. ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "The grapes (only in the France variant) and stone goods indicators enter the game in rounds 11 and 18 respectively, which means that stone does not enter the game until the second full rotation of the production wheel (indicated by a 2 in a spiral symbol). Once you have finished your turn it is the ", "headingPath": "The two player game · The Long Two Player Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "During your effectively three actions in a row, you can buy up to two landscapes (districts and plots); one during your first action and another in either your second or third action. There is no bonus round like in the three or four player game. As with the regular two player game, the long version", "headingPath": "The long two player game · The Solo Game · Remove the grapes and stone indicators from the game entirely. · Gameplay", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "You can also play a game of Ora et Labora in just one hour. Use the short game gameboard for both three and four player games. Use the front side of the production wheel (the one whose numbers go 0, 2, 3, 4, …). Unlike the longer version, each player leaves the two landscape spaces in the upper left", "headingPath": "The Short Multiplayer Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Use the one to two player game board. Remove all building cards from the game that have a 3+ or 4 symbol in their bottom right corners. Use the back side of the production wheel (the one whose numbers go 0, 1, 2, 2, …). Place the A through D building cards onto the indicated spaces around the edges ", "headingPath": "The Two Player Game · The two player game", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Each player, in clockwise order, then gets to carry out At the end of the round, the one action gets to carry out a starting player . second action · So a round in the three player game consists of 4 actions while a four player game round consists of 5 actions. 5) At the end of the round, pass the s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "(Their functions are shown in the card's function box as well as in detail in the glossary.) Bonus Round In Three And Four Player Games As soon as the production wheel beam moves past the E space (indicated by the corresponding building symbol and ) for the second time, the 25 th and final round of ", "headingPath": "The Settlement Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "You may buy a landscape once per turn and once per settlement phase (see below). There are rectangular districts as well as square plots . The topmost tile on both piles is available for purchase. Their prices are shown at bottom right. (You must place the landscape as soon as you buy it; you may no", "headingPath": "Extra Action Buy a landscape · Districts · Plots · When placing plots: · Starting Player Change · Next Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 342}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 342 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 342 boosted
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row recorded
Aug 29, 2026 16:31 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) 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
#2 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The two player game · The Long Two Player Game p.8 0.047379 (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 Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The long two player game · The Solo Game · Remove the grapes and stone indicators from the game entirely. · Gameplay p.8 0.046176 (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 Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Short Multiplayer Game p.7 0.045805 (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 Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Two Player Game · The two player game p.7 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
#6 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) p.2 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
#7 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Settlement Phase p.6 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
#8 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) Extra Action Buy a landscape · Districts · Plots · When placing plots: · Starting Player Change · Next Round p.5 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 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 24 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Short Multiplayer Game p.7 #4 0.045805 (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 Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) p.2 #6 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 Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Neutral Player p.8 #17 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
#4 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The two player game · The Long Two Player Game p.8 #2 0.047379 (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
#5 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) Extra Action Buy a landscape · Districts · Plots · When placing plots: · Starting Player Change · Next Round p.5 #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
#6 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The long two player game · The Solo Game · Remove the grapes and stone indicators from the game entirely. · Gameplay p.8 #3 0.046176 (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
#7 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) p.2 #1 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
#8 RULEBOOK Ora et Labora — Rulebook (corpus doc 342) The Two Player Game · The two player game p.7 #5 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

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
timing split
retrieval 107 ms · first delta 1677 ms · total 1811 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 107 ms · ask 1701 ms · gateway work 1811 ms · total 1811 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4468
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
187.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.048 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 31s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 24h, checked 4s 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 270), 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.