Ruling — Power Grid: Factory Manager

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Power Grid: Factory Managerbg-44163-en-1e

The game is played over 5 rounds.[1] The objective is to earn as much money as possible; the player with the most money at the end of 5 rounds wins.[2]

Each round is divided into the following 5 phases:

1. Auction the new player order: This phase is played in reverse player order, starting with the player with the highest player order tile.[3] New player order tiles are drawn from a face-down stack and placed face up.[3] The player with the highest old player order tile chooses a tile and bids using available workers.[3] Other players bid in clockwise order until only one player remains.[3] The winner places the tile in their play area and places their bid workers on the tile, where they remain unavailable until phase 4.[3] The last player receives the remaining tile for a bid of zero workers.[3] After all players have tiles, the draw stack and old player order tiles are shuffled and placed next to the playing area.[3] The playing order for all following phases of the round is based on the new player order tiles acquired.[3]

2. Preparing the market: (No specific steps provided).

3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers: The player with the lowest player order tile starts this phase.[4] Players take turns using available workers to either buy a factory tile from the market and place it on an empty space on their factory floor, or tear down an existing tile.[4] To tear down a tile, a player uses an available worker to move the tile next to the factory board, temporarily placing the worker on it; at the end of the turn, the tile is placed in the box and the worker becomes available again.[4] After all players have taken actions with active workers, a player may hire up to 2 seasonal workers for 7 Elektro (subject to discounts).[5] Seasonal workers function like normal workers and last until the end of phase 3 of the following round.[5] When all players have completed their turns, any remaining factory tiles in the market are returned to the storage board.[5]

4. Bureaucracy and new energy price: In player order, each player places all workers in the space for available workers beside their factory.[6] Players then check all factory tiles to update three scales: production, storage, and energy consumption.[6] Players also place enough workers into their canteen to operate all machines.[6] Energy consumption is calculated by adding white numbers next to the energy symbol and subtracting dark numbers on factory tiles (minimum value of 1).[6] Production is the sum of dark numbers next to the production symbol.[6] Storage is the sum of dark numbers on storage tiles.[6] The number of workers needed in the canteen is calculated by adding white numbers next to the worker symbol and subtracting dark numbers.[6] Additionally, players adjust the energy price.[6]

5. Distribute income: (No specific steps provided).

[1] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.4 · Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.

[2] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.2 · Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:

[3] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.4 · 1. Auction the new player order

[4] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.5 · 3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers

[5] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.5 · 3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers

[6] RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook · p.5 · 4. Bureaucracy and new energy price

So says the rulebook. So plays the table.

🔧 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 4386 ms · total 4483 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4483 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "The game is played over 5 rounds. Each round is divided into the following 5 phases: 1 Auction the new player order 2 Preparing the market 3 Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers 4 Bureaucracy and new energy price 5 Distribute income", "headingPath": "Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "This phase is played in reverse player order. The player with the highest player order tile begins the phase. Draw a new player order tile from the face-down draw stack for each player and place them face up in the playing area. The remaining two player order tiles are not used in this turn and rema", "headingPath": "1. Auction the new player order", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "He can, if he wants, offer one or more available workers (if he, for example, wants to have fewer factory tiles added to the market - see phase 2 'Preparing the market'). After every player has acquired a new player order tile, shuffle the draw stack together with the old player order tiles and plac", "headingPath": "1. Auction the new player order", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Every large international company began as small factory. Each player chooses a color and takes the 7 workers and 3 markers in that color, a factory board, and 18 Elektro. Each player takes a set of factory tiles (either set A, B, C, D or E - letters on the backside) and places the 3 storage tiles a", "headingPath": "Prepar ation", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Place the other 3 tiles face up in the market area. Shuffle the 8 energy price tiles face down and randomly remove 3 from the game, placing them back into the game box. Place the remaining 5 tiles in a face down draw stack. Place the energy price marker on space 1 of the energy price track (price: 1", "headingPath": "Prepar ation", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "Welcome to the world of the entrepreneurs. In Factory Manager, each player has a factory and tries to earn as much money as he can during the game. Thus, at the end the player with most money wins. To do so, a player must plan carefully, effectively use his workers and acquire the best machines and ", "headingPath": "Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The player with the lowest player order tile starts this phase. The player can use his available workers to buy a factory tile from the market area and place it into his factory floor OR to tear down a factory tile inside his factory floor. He takes all his actions before the next player in player o", "headingPath": "3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The central mechanism of factory manager is selecting the factory tiles for the market and purchasing these tiles for the factories. You find a detailed description of the market mechanism on supplement B: 'the market mechanism' . Each player chooses one factory tile from any of the 6 columns for ea", "headingPath": "2. Preparing the market", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. Auction the new player order", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4. Bureaucracy and new energy price", "sharpsignalDocId": 1189}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1189 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1189 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 0.93013 of 2433 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:13 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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.	p.4	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))	283
#2	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	1. Auction the new player order	p.4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	1. Auction the new player order	p.4	0.047883 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Prepar ation	p.3	0.046154 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Prepar ation	p.3	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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:	p.2	0.030415 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers	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
#8	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	2. Preparing the market	p.4	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 13 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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.	p.4	#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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	1. Auction the new player order	p.4	#2	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
#3	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	4. Bureaucracy and new energy price	p.5	#12	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
#4	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers	p.5	#9	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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers	p.5	#7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:	p.2	#6	0.030415 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Prepar ation	p.3	#4	0.046154 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	1. Auction the new player order	p.4	#3	0.047883 (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 Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Playing the game Being an Entrepreneur 101.	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	Introduction · Components · Foreword by Friedemann:	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	1. Auction the new player order	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers	p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	3. Buying & placing factory tiles, tearing down factory tiles, and hiring seasonal workers	p.5	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Power Grid: Factory Manager — Rulebook (corpus doc 1189)	4. Bureaucracy and new energy price	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 96 ms · first delta 1344 ms · total 4483 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 4386 ms · gateway work 4483 ms · total 4483 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3356
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 621
tok/sec: 201.4 tok/sec — 621 output tokens in 3.083 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 6s 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 1119), 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.