Ruling — Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Clash of Cultures: Monumental Editionbg-299659-en-1e

1. Set up the game board according to the provided images.[1]

2. Place each player's starting Region faceup, ensuring the correct side is used based on the map setup (noting the placement of the Mountain and Forest spaces).[1]

3. For certain Civilizations, replace the normal starting Region with the alternate starting Region shown on their Civilization board, orienting them with the Plains space in the usual location.[1]

4. In 3- and 4-player games, randomly determine seating positions around the game board.[1]

5. Each player selects a color and places the following in front of them: [1]

* A Player board and Player aid.[1]

* Cubes in their color to form a supply.[1]

* City pieces in their color: 7 Settlements, 5 Temples, 5 Academies, 5 Fortresses, 5 Ports, 5 Obelisks, 5 Markets, and 5 Observatories.[1]

* Units pieces in their color: 16 Infantry, 4 Ships, 4 Settlers, 4 Elephants, 4 Cavalry, and 1 Leader.[1]

* 5 Resource markers (Food, Wood, Ore, Ideas, Gold).[1]

* A random Civilization board.[1]

* The 3 Leader cards matching their Civilization.[1]

6. Return any Leaders and boards from other Civilizations to the box.[1]

7. Each player places a cube from their supply on the Farming Advance and Mining Advance.[1]

8. Each player places 3 cubes from their supply in the three spaces of their Event tracker at the top right of their Player board.[1]

9. Each player starts their first city by placing a Settlement on the Plains space of their starting Region.[2]

10. Place a Mood token next to the city, Happy-side up, and place a Settler in the space near the city.[2]

11. Shuffle the Objective cards and place them facedown as the Objective deck.[2]

12. Shuffle the Event cards and place them facedown as the Event deck (include additional expansion cards if playing with the expansion).[2]

13. Shuffle the Action cards and place them facedown as the Action deck.[2]

14. Shuffle the Wonder cards and place them facedown as the Wonder deck.[2]

15. Each player draws 1 Action card and 1 Objective card from the top of the decks and places them in their hidden hand.[2]

16. Place Barbarian Settlements (Grey), Barbarian Units (Grey), Culture tokens, Mood tokens, and dice in a common supply (include black ships if playing with the expansion).[2]

17. Place the Round track beside the game board, using the front side unless playing the 'Variable End Game' variant.[2]

18. Place the Round marker on the first space (Age 1, Round 1).[2]

19. Randomly determine a first player and give them the First Player marker.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · Game Setup · -P B S

[2] RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER AID

One rule clearer, zero feelings hurt.

🔧 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 246 ms · ask 7375 ms · total 7623 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7623 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Set up the game board in accordance with the images shown below. Each player's starting Region is placed faceup (pay attention to which side the Mountain space is on). Note: The starting Regions are two-sided. The difference between the two sides is the placement of the Mountain and the Forest space", "headingPath": "Game Setup · -P B S", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player starts their first city on the board by placing a Settlement on the Plains space of their starting Region. Place a Mood token next to the city, Happy-side up to show that the city is Happy, and place a Settler in the space near the city. Shuffle the Objective cards and place them facedow", "headingPath": "PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": " The Game is divided into 6 Ages, with each Age divided into 3 Rounds followed by a Status Phase. During each Round, each player will take a turn in which they must perform 3 Main Actions. The first player takes the first turn, followed by the other players in clockwise order, until each player has", "headingPath": "PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "At the start of the game, only the starting Regions are revealed. You reveal the other Regions by moving Units into them. While both Armies and Settlers can be used to explore a Region, only a Settler can Found a city. Ships can also explore unrevealed Regions, but with slightly different rules as e", "headingPath": "Exploration · Exploring with Land Units", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Perform these 2 steps in order: Place a Barbarian Settlement and a Barbarian Infantry on an empty, non-Barren Land space. The space must be exactly 2 Land spaces away from one of your cities and at least 2 spaces away from the rest of your cities. If that's not possible, it must be placed adjacent t", "headingPath": "Barbarians Spawn · Barbarians Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "When you perform this Action, Found a new city by removing one of your Settlers from the board and replacing it with one of your Settlement pieces. You can Found a city on a space which meets all of the following criteria: Must be a Land space Not Barren Contains no city Contains no enemy Units Cont", "headingPath": "Action: Found city · Action: Activate city · Activate City: Collect", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Perform these 2 steps in order: Place 2 Pirate Ships on Sea spaces without any player Ships. If possible, one of the Pirate Ships must be placed adjacent to one of your cities. You may place both Pirate Ships in the same Sea space. If the supply doesn't have enough Pirate Ships for you to place, you", "headingPath": " Pirates Spawn and Raid ·  Attacking Pirates", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "As there are no other Sea spaces to connect to, the only remaining rule is that the Sea space must then touch the edge of the map, which it will regardless of how it is rotated. In this case, you may decide on the orientation of the Region. Later, a Settler moves into region (h), which has only one ", "headingPath": "Exploring with Land Units · Exploring with Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup · -P B S", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 352}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 352 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 352 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 0.88905 of 2100 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 4, 2026 13:07 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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	0.048916 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources	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
#4	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Exploration · Exploring with Land Units	p.20	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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Barbarians Spawn · Barbarians Move	p.26	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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Action: Found city · Action: Activate city · Activate City: Collect	p.11	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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	 Pirates Spawn and Raid ·  Attacking Pirates	p.27	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
#8	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Exploring with Land Units · Exploring with Ships	p.21	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))	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 69 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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	#1	0.048916 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Exploration · Exploring with Land Units	p.20	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID · Game Structure · Winning the Game · Gaining / Spending Resources	p.8	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Runestones (Rituals) · EVENTS · SHORTER GAME · VARIABLE END GAME · RANDOM LEADERS	p.35	#24	0.012346 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)		p.1	#12	0.025165 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Action Cards · Objective Cards	p.19	#16	0.013889 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	OPEN WONDERS · ALTERNATE HISTORY	p.35	#9	0.028898 (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 Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	Game Setup · -P B S	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 352)	PLAYER AID	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 246 ms · first delta 4265 ms · total 7623 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 246 ms · ask 7375 ms · gateway work 7623 ms · total 7623 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3652
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 663
tok/sec: 201.5 tok/sec — 663 output tokens in 3.290 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 54s 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 280), 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.