Ruling — Merchant of Venus (Second Edition)

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Merchant of Venus (Second Edition)bg-131646-en-1e

To prepare a standard game of Merchant of Venus, follow these steps:

1. Remove encounter tokens, culture tokens, demand tokens, spaceport and factory deed markers, factory goods tokens, shield tokens, and ship class sheets from the game and return them to the box.[1]

2. Unfold the board and place it centrally on the table, ensuring the 'Standard Game' side is faceup.[1]

3. Shuffle the First Contact cards, then place one First Contact card facedown in each system on the board.[1]

4. Separate the market tokens, goods tokens, and racial technology tokens, then group the tokens by culture next to each culture's supply area on the left side of the board.[1]

Additional Setup Options:

* Solo Challenge: Remove the Title and Intel cards from the Encounter deck, then follow normal setup rules with a change to step 10 regarding preparing the Bank and Starting Funds.[2] Sort Challenge cards by color into five separate facedown piles, shuffle each pile, draw the top card, and return the remaining cards to the box; then place each Challenge card faceup next to the round track so the round indicator aligns with the corresponding game round.[2]

* Light Speed Variant: Follow steps 1-9 of the normal setup, then from step 10: sort credit tokens into piles by denomination and place them near the board; give each player credits equal to the number of players multiplied by 100; randomly select a first player and give them the First Player card; upgrade each player's Pilot card to level 2 and set both laser and shield dials to '3'; have each player reveal one First Contact card (proceeding counterclockwise) and place it in their play area with IOU tokens and the culture's goods, technology, and market tokens; allow players to perform unlimited buy actions for goods from their revealed cultures; place the round marker on space '16'; randomly select five passenger tokens and place them faceup on their starting cultures; and have players select starting spaces for their ships (proceeding clockwise).[3]

* Mission Cards: During setup, each player receives one Mission card and places it faceup to the left of their dashboard sheet; if the card designates a destination system, the player places one mission token in that system.[4]

* Demand Tokens Option: Shuffle and place all demand tokens facedown next to the passenger tokens.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.6 · Merchant Ship Assembly · The Asteroid System · Anomalies · Markets · Galactic Base · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.29 · Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges

[3] RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.29 · Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game

[4] RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.27 · Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy

[5] RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.28 · Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 242 ms · ask 5230 ms · total 5474 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5474 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 29, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "To set up a solo challenge game, remove the Title and Intel cards from the Encounter deck. Then, follow the normal setup rules on page 6 with the following change to step 10: Prepare the Bank and Starting Funds: The player selects two options from the table below. The 'Max' column indicates the maxi", "headingPath": "Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Experienced players looking to engage with Merchant of Venus in completely new ways can explore the following three variants. Players who wish to play a faster-paced version of Merchant of Venus should set up the game as instructed in steps 1-9 on page 6. Then, beginning with step 10, perform the fo", "headingPath": "Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "Select a Player Color: Each player chooses one available color and takes the dashboard sheet, mission tokens, merchant spaceport/drill tokens, and plastic merchant ship corresponding to that color. Select Pilot: Merchant of Venus offers four pilots, each associated with a culture: Human, Eeepeeep (o", "headingPath": "Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "Each new game round (with the exception of the first round) begins with the first player advancing the round marker one space on the game round track and resolving the effect of the game round's corresponding icon: Passenger Icon: The first player randomly draws a passenger token from the stockpile ", "headingPath": "Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "When players have become familiar with Merchant of Venus , they may wish to explore the following game options. Players who wish to enhance player interaction can separate the following cards from the Encounter deck during setup: Archeologist Infamous Confirmed Location · Slaver Drill Baron Star Map", "headingPath": "Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "In order to use certain abilities, a player must assign dice to boxes on his dashboard sheet. To do so, he simply takes any of his rolled speed dice and places them in the appropriate spaces of his dashboard sheet. A player can only assign dice during his Movement phase, and only dice rolled during ", "headingPath": "Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.030886, "snippet": "Name Destination Board Panel Indicator (where the destination system is located) Objective Fame Flavor Text During game setup, each player receives one Mission card and places it faceup to the left of his dashboard sheet. mission tokens If a player's Mission card designates a destination system, he ", "headingPath": "Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If a player has acquired the License to Drill racial technology, he can place drill tokens on asteroid spaces as his ship passes over or lands on them. Only one drill token can be present on any particular asteroid space at one time. At the beginning of every even-numbered game round, each player re", "headingPath": "Drills · Pilots · Upgrading Pilots", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Merchant Ship Assembly · The Asteroid System · Anomalies · Markets · Galactic Base · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 29, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 29, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 27, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 28, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1177 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1177 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 0.93269 of 1976 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 4, 2026 19:49 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges	p.29	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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game	p.29	0.048387 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game	p.8	0.046239 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading	p.8	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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand	p.28	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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle	p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy	p.27	0.030886 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Drills · Pilots · Upgrading Pilots	p.25	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 56 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges	p.29	#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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game	p.29	#2	0.048387 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy	p.27	#7	0.030886 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading	p.8	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Encounter Deck	p.30	#23	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
#6	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Epic Game · Production Rounds	p.30	#15	0.014286 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Merchant Ship Assembly · The Asteroid System · Anomalies · Markets · Galactic Base · Setup	p.6	#12	0.027072 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand	p.28	#5	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))	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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Merchant Ship Assembly · The Asteroid System · Anomalies · Markets · Galactic Base · Setup	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Solo Challenge Setup · Challenges	p.29	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game	p.29	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Mission Card Anatomy · Missions · Second Mission · Reward Card Anatomy	p.27	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177)	Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand	p.28	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 242 ms · first delta 2857 ms · total 5474 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 242 ms · ask 5230 ms · gateway work 5474 ms · total 5474 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3732
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 509
tok/sec: 199.4 tok/sec — 509 output tokens in 2.553 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 1s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 2s 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 1107), 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.