Ruling — Homesteaders

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Homesteadersbg-26566-en-1e

Homesteaders is an auction and resource management game played in 10 rounds.[1][2] The game progresses through three stages: The Settlement (rounds 1-4), The Town (rounds 5-8), and The City (rounds 9-10).[1][2]

Setup

1. Place the Auction board, Resources, Workers, Silver, Trade, Debt, Rail Line, and Point chits within reach of all players.[3]

2. Give each player a player screen, a Homestead tile, matching player markers, 1 Worker, and 6 Silver.[3]

3. Place one player marker at the start of the Railroad Development track; the other marker is used for bidding.[3]

4. Sort auction tiles into three piles: 'Auction 1' (face up, ordered by round number), 'Auction 2' (face down: City tiles on bottom, then Town, then Settlement on top), and 'Auction 3' (for 4 player games, face down: City, then Town, then Settlement).[3]

5. Sort buildings and place 'Settlement' and 'Auction/Town' buildings in the Building Supply; place 'Town' and 'City' buildings in separate piles.[3]

6. Randomly choose a starting player and give them the Start Player marker.[3]

Phases of Each Round

The phases of each round are: Allocate Workers, Collect Income, Pay Workers, Bidding, and Building.[4]

1. Allocate Workers: Players simultaneously allocate Workers among available worker slots on their buildings; extras are left idle on the Homestead tile.[4] Players may reallocate all Workers every turn.[4]

2. Collect Income: Each player collects all Automatic income from buildings and Rail Lines, and any Worker income from occupied worker slots.[4]

3. Pay Workers: Each player must pay 1 Silver to the bank for each Worker on their tiles, even if idle.[4] Players may use the Marketplace, spend Gold, or take Debt to pay.[4]

4. Bidding:

* Beginning with the Start Player and continuing clockwise, players take turns making bids or passing.[5]

* Players bid by placing a bid token on an available auction on the space corresponding to their bid.[5]

* All bids must be higher than any opponent's previous bid on that auction; the minimum bid is 3.[5]

* If a player is outbid, they must either make a new valid bid or pass on their next turn.[5]

* If a player is currently winning an auction, they do nothing on their turn.[5]

* When a player passes, they advance their marker on the Railroad Development Track and take the corresponding reward.[5] Once a player passes, their turn is skipped for the rest of the auction.[5]

* The Bidding phase ends when all players have either passed or are the high bidder on an auction.[5]

* Auction tiles with no bids are discarded.[5]

* (In 2-player games): The start player places a neutral bid token on an auction item at level '5' before making their own bid.[6]

5. Building: Players spend resources to develop a building on the land they won during the auction.[1]

Ending the Game

The game ends after 10 rounds, followed by a Final Income and Scoring round.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.3

[2] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.3 · Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:

[3] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.2 · Component list

[4] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.4 · round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …

[5] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.4 · a. Bidding

[6] RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook · p.5 · 2 Player game bidding

Rule found, game on.

🔧 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 96 ms · ask 5193 ms · total 5292 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5292 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "Buildings have the following properties: Homesteaders is an auction and resource management game in which players bid on land and develop buildings. The game will be played in 10 rounds. Each round features an income phase, where players acquire resources, and an auction phase, in which players bid ", "headingPath": "Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Beginning with the Start Player and continuing clockwise around the table, players take turns making bids on the available auctions or passing. Players bid by placing their bid token on any available auction,on the space corresponding to their bid. The minimum bid is 3, and all bids must be higher t", "headingPath": "a. Bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Beginning with the player who won Auction 1, and then followed by the winners of Auction 2 and Auction 3, players must pay for the Auction, and then they may build a building of the type listed on the auction tile. The auction tile is then discarded. Players MAY NOT hold the auction tile for future ", "headingPath": "B. Building", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "After the 10th round there is a Final Income and Scoring round in which players repeat the Income phase one final time, and then use the Marketplace as much as they like in order to pay off Debt and convert their Trade chits, Silver, and resources into Victory Points. Each player calculates their sc", "headingPath": "FINAL SCORING ROUNd · Trade and the Marketplace · Spending Gold", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The phases of each round are as follows: Allocate Workers Collect Income Pay Workers Bidding Building At the beginning of each round, players retrieve their bid markers from the auction board, and the top tile of each of the face down auction piles is revealed for this round. Remove old auction tile", "headingPath": "round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "1 Set the Auction board, Resources, Workers, Silver, Trade, Debt, Rail Line, and Point chits within reach of all players. Give each player a player screen, a Homestead tile and matching player markers, 1 Worker, and 6 Silver. Each player places 1 player marker at the start of the Railroad Developmen", "headingPath": "Component list", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030622, "snippet": "Homesteaders - English - 3 Game rounds Buildings Homesteaders is an auction and resource management game in which players bid on land and develop buildings. The game will be played in 10 rounds. Each round features an income phase, where players acquire resources, and an auction phase, in which play", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Before the start player places their bid token for the round, they also place the neutral bid token on any auction item. The level at which the neutral bid token is placed is determined below. You may want to use a second token to keep track of the neutral bid level. You can do this on auction space", "headingPath": "2 Player game bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Component list", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "a. Bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2 Player game bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 1036}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1036 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1036 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 0.88496 of 2434 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 14:24 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 Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:	p.3	0.046244 (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 Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	a. Bidding	p.4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	B. Building	p.5	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
#4	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	FINAL SCORING ROUNd · Trade and the Marketplace · Spending Gold	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …	p.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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list	p.2	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
#7	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)		p.3	0.030622 (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 Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	2 Player game bidding	p.5	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 14 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 Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	2 Player game bidding	p.5	#8	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
#2	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)		p.3	#7	0.030622 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:	p.3	#1	0.046244 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	a. Bidding	p.5	#10	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …	p.4	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list	p.2	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Q: I'm broke! What should I do? · Q: If a building produces some income, plus more from a Worker slot, do I get the normal income if I don't put a worker on the worker slot? · Q: When can I use Trade chits? · Q: How many Trade chits can I use per turn? · Q: When can I move my Workers around to new buildings? · Q: Do I have to pay all my Workers? · …	p.8	#9	0.029958 (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 Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	a. Bidding	p.4	#2	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list · Game rounds · Players build a city over three stages:	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	Component list	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	round phases · 2) Income · 3) Auction · 1) setup · a. Allocate Workers · b. Collect Income · …	p.4	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	a. Bidding	p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Homesteaders — Rulebook (corpus doc 1036)	2 Player game bidding	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 96 ms · first delta 1541 ms · total 5292 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 96 ms · ask 5193 ms · gateway work 5292 ms · total 5292 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3620
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 735
tok/sec: 201.3 tok/sec — 735 output tokens in 3.651 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 27s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 7s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 966), 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.