Ruling — Catan Card Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Catan Card Gamebg-278-en-1e

Setup

1. Sort the cards by the symbols on their backs: 9 cards with a red coat-of-arms (starting cards for one player), 9 cards with a blue coat-of-arms (starting cards for the other player), 11 Region Cards, 7 road cards, 5 settlement cards, 7 city cards, and 10 Event Cards.[1]

2. Place the 62 cards with no symbols on their back (Expansion Cards) in five roughly equal "expansion stacks".[1]

3. Shuffle the Event Cards and place them face-down in the middle of the table.[1]

4. Place the four stacks of Development Cards in a row between you and your opponent.[1]

Turn Sequence

1. The first player begins, and players then alternate turns.[2]

2. At the start of your turn, roll the Event and Production Dice simultaneously.[2]

3. Resolve the effects of the Event Die first, as the event affects both players.[2]

4. Both players receive production: all Region Cards in both principalities with a number matching the Production Die roll produce one resource.[2]

5. Take actions as many times as you wish and in any order: Build, Trade Resources, or Play Action Cards.[2]

* To play a Region Expansion (green text), pay the resource cost and play the card face-up in an empty building site in a settlement or city.[3]

* To play a City Expansion (red text), pay the resource cost and play the card face-up in an empty building site in a city.[3]

* Action Cards (yellow text) can be played any number of times during your turn, provided the total score of both players is at least seven Victory Points (except for Scout cards).[4] You play the card face-up and follow its instructions, then place it in the discard pile.[4]

* Trading can be done with your opponent through negotiated terms,[4] or with "Foreign Merchants" by paying three of the same resource to get one of your choice (this rate can be improved to 2:1 with a "Trade Fleet").[4]

6. Draw replacement cards: When finished taking actions, trading, and building, you may draw cards to ensure you have a number of cards equal to your Hand Limit.[2] You may choose to discard a card to the bottom of a stack and draw a new card from that same stack.[5] You may either take the top card for free or pay two resources of any type to search the stack and take any card there.[5]

7. Pass the Dice: Your turn ends when you pass the dice to your opponent.[5][2]

End of the Game

1. The game ends as soon as either player reaches 12 Victory Points on their turn.[5]

2. The player who reaches 12 Victory Points is the winner.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME

[2] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.32 · TURN SEQUENCE

[3] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.14 · Region Expansions · City Expansions

[4] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.16

[5] RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook · p.18 · Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 100 ms · ask 5966 ms · total 6069 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6069 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Trading Sometimes, the production die just won’t give you the resources you need. Fortunately you can trade! There are two ways you can trade resources: Trade with your Opponent You may offer to trade resources with your opponent. The terms of the exchanges may be negotiated freely. In other words, ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.047183, "snippet": "(or stacks) you choose. Then, if you wish, you may choose one more card to discard to the bottom of a stack and draw a new card from the same stack. As above, you may either take the top card for free or you can pay two resources of any type to search the stack and take any card there. Once you have", "headingPath": "Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "to the center of the table without shuffling. Important: When you choose your starting cards: • You may not change the order of the cards in the stack! • It is probably best to start with cards that have green text fields. Why? Because “Action Cards” (with yellow text fields) can’t be played until t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.0463, "snippet": "After the first player begins, players alternate turns. At the start of your turn, you roll the Event and Production Dice (simultaneously). You then take the following actions in the order listed below: Event: The Event Die is resolved first! Resolve the effects of the event first. The event affects", "headingPath": "TURN SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "The Card Almanac contains detailed descriptions of all the cards. These are not the Game Rules! You don't need to read the whole Almanac before your first game, you can refer to it if questions come up during play. Once you have an idea of how the game is played, you may want to familiarize yourself", "headingPath": "End of the Game · ACTION CARDS (YELLOW TEXT FIELDS) · Alchemist (Action-Neutral; 2 in deck) · Arsonist (Action-Attack; 2 in deck) · Counter Card: Bishop", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.045262, "snippet": "Sometimes an Action Card will result in you adding cards to your hand. If it is your turn, you don’t have to discard these extra cards until you get to step four of your turn, when you check your hand limit and draw cards. But, if it is not your turn when one of these Action Cards is played, you wil", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In order to build up your principality, you will need raw materials. These resources come from your Region Cards. Each turn a die roll will determine which regions produce. Each time the number rolled matches the number on one of your regions, you receive one of that resource. You don't collect reso", "headingPath": "SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.029462, "snippet": "You can use this card to protect yourself from the Black Knight. The attacker, instead of being affected only on a '6,' is now affected on a roll of a 3, 4, 5, or 6. In other words, the Black Knight's chances of victory are now only 33%. This card must be played before the attacker makes his die rol", "headingPath": "Herb Woman ( Action-Defense; 2 in deck) · Merchant (Action-Attack; 2 in deck) · Scout (Action-Defense; 2 in deck) · Spy (Action-Attack; 3 in deck)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 32, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TURN SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Region Expansions · City Expansions", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1140}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1140 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1140 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 0.90357 of 2043 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:11 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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.16	0.048139 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game	p.18	0.047183 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.5	0.046402 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	TURN SEQUENCE	p.32	0.0463 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	End of the Game · ACTION CARDS (YELLOW TEXT FIELDS) · Alchemist (Action-Neutral; 2 in deck) · Arsonist (Action-Attack; 2 in deck) · Counter Card: Bishop	p.19	0.045928 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.17	0.045262 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	SETTING UP THE GAME	p.6	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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Herb Woman ( Action-Defense; 2 in deck) · Merchant (Action-Attack; 2 in deck) · Scout (Action-Defense; 2 in deck) · Spy (Action-Attack; 3 in deck)	p.21	0.029462 (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 40 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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game	p.18	#2	0.047183 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	TURN SEQUENCE	p.32	#4	0.0463 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME	p.3	#13	0.027973 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Region Expansions · City Expansions	p.14	#12	0.028219 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	End of the Game · ACTION CARDS (YELLOW TEXT FIELDS) · Alchemist (Action-Neutral; 2 in deck) · Arsonist (Action-Attack; 2 in deck) · Counter Card: Bishop	p.19	#5	0.045928 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.20	#14	0.02758 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.16	#1	0.048139 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.5	#3	0.046402 (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 Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	GAME COMPONENTS · SETTING UP THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	TURN SEQUENCE	p.32	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Region Expansions · City Expansions	p.14	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)		p.16	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Catan Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1140)	Strength Points · Pass the Dice · End of the Game	p.18	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 100 ms · first delta 2881 ms · total 6069 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 100 ms · ask 5966 ms · gateway work 6069 ms · total 6069 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3393
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 624
tok/sec: 201.8 tok/sec — 624 output tokens in 3.092 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 8s 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 1070), 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.