Ruling — Creature Comforts

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Creature Comfortsbg-304051-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Place the game board on the table.[1]

2. Set the River dial in its place at a random rotation so that the dividing lines on the dial line up with the three gaps in the surrounding plank.[1]

3. Place the Hilltop tile in its spot.[1]

4. Create the Valley card stacks face down (Forest stack and Meadow stack).[1] Each stack should have the Spring cards on the bottom, the Summer cards on top of those, and the Fall cards on top of those, with the order within each season being random.[1] When ready, flip the whole stack over so only the current card (Spring for both) is visible.[1]

5. For a short game (suitable for beginners or younger players), remove one random Spring and one random Summer card from both the Forest and Meadow stacks.[1]

6. Create supply piles of all six Goods (Wood, Stone, Grain, Mushrooms, Yarn, Fruit) and supply piles of Coins, Stories, and Lessons Learned.[1]

7. Create a shuffled face-down deck of Comfort cards and deal four face up into the slots of the Owl's Nest.[1][2]

8. Create a shuffled face-down stack of Improvement cards and deal one Improvement face up into each ladder slot, keeping the four Improvement tokens (Wheelbarrows and Almanacs) nearby.[1]

9. Shuffle the Traveler deck face down and place it in the Inn.[1][2]

10. Choose a player to start as the Early Bird (the starting player, which rotates each month).[1]

11. Give the Early Bird the Worm token and the four Village dice.[1]

12. Check the chart to see if anyone starts with a bonus Coin.[1][2][3]

13. Each player chooses their Family and takes the Home board, four Workers, four Cottages, and two Family dice of their color.[2][3]

14. Each player places their four Cottages onto the slots on their Home board.[2][3]

15. Each player draws three Comfort cards, keeps two, and discards one into a shared face-up discard pile.[2][3]

16. Flip the next Traveler in the Inn face up.[2]

17. Activate 'Immediate' powers.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook · p.4 · GENERAL SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook · p.16 · SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …

[3] RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook · p.5 · PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 300 ms · ask 4252 ms · total 4554 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4554 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Place the game board on the table. Set the River dial in its place at a random rotation, ( so that dividing lines on the dial line up with the three gaps in the surrounding plank ). Place the Hilltop tile in its spot. 1 Create the Valley card stacks face down ( Forest stack and Meadow stack ). Each ", "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "( Each player does this ) Choose your Family, and take the Home board , four Workers , four Cottages , and two Family dice of your colour. A Place your four Cottages on the slots on your Home board. B Draw three Comfort cards from the deck. Choose two to keep in your hand ( Comforts in your hand are", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Lay out the game board , with the River Dial and Hilltop in place. Create Forest and Meadow Valley card stacks in their spots so when face up they are Spring/Summer/Fall from the top down. Make supply piles of all resource tokens . Shuffle the Comforts deck and deal four into the Owl's Nes t. Shuffl", "headingPath": "SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Starting with the Early Bird and proceeding clockwise, each player takes their turn. On your turn: Place your two Family dice ( without altering them ) on the Hilltop with the four Village dice. These six dice are now the pool of dice available for you to assign . A Assign dice from Hilltop to locat", "headingPath": "STEP 5: PLAYER TURNS", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "All players do this at the same time . Place your workers into any locations you wish. Only one of your own workers may be in each location, but workers from multiple players may share a location. It doesn't matter who places when, and you are free to change your mind and move your workers around un", "headingPath": "STEP 3: PLACEMENT · STEP 4: VILLAGE DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Some Travelers have a power that activates at the End of the Month . If that's true for the current Traveler, carry it out now. Discard the top Forest and Meadow cards on the Valley stacks from the game, revealing the new ones for the upcoming month and progressing further through the seasons. If th", "headingPath": "STEP 6: UPKEEP", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029877, "snippet": "When the game ends, first all players may freely craft any Comforts from their hand if they have the resources to do so. Then all players tally up their scores to see who built the most comfortable home for the long winter ahead! Flip your Home board over, and use the score track to tally your point", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When the game ends, first all players may freely craft any Comforts from their hand if they have the resources to do so. Then all players tally up their scores to see who built the most comfortable home for the long winter ahead! Flip your Home board over, and use the score track to tally your point", "headingPath": "SCORING · COMFORT CARDS · IMPROVEMENTS · COTTAGE SLOTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!", "sharpsignalDocId": 708}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 708 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 708 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 0.89033 of 1623 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 4, 2026 10:50 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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	GENERAL SETUP	p.4	0.048652 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!	p.5	0.048412 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …	p.16	0.046898 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 5: PLAYER TURNS	p.8	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
#5	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 3: PLACEMENT · STEP 4: VILLAGE DICE	p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 6: UPKEEP	p.13	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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)		p.14	0.029877 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	SCORING · COMFORT CARDS · IMPROVEMENTS · COTTAGE SLOTS	p.14	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 21 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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	GENERAL SETUP	p.4	#1	0.048652 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …	p.16	#3	0.046898 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)		p.14	#7	0.029877 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 5: PLAYER TURNS	p.8	#4	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
#5	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	SCORING · COMFORT CARDS · IMPROVEMENTS · COTTAGE SLOTS	p.14	#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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 3: PLACEMENT · STEP 4: VILLAGE DICE	p.7	#5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	STEP 6: UPKEEP	p.13	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!	p.5	#2	0.048412 (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 Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	GENERAL SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	SETUP · 1. NEW TRAVELER · 2. FAMILY DICE · 3. PLACEMENT · 4. VILLAGE DICE · 5. PLAYER TURNS · …	p.16	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Creature Comforts — Rulebook (corpus doc 708)	PLAYER SETUP · Now you are ready to begin!	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 300 ms · first delta 1917 ms · total 4554 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 300 ms · ask 4252 ms · gateway work 4554 ms · total 4554 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4096
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 509
tok/sec: 200.1 tok/sec — 509 output tokens in 2.544 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 22h, checked 1s 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: 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 641), 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.