RuleSage cited table rulings
← TransAmerica

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: TransAmericabg-2842-en-1e

1. Place the game board in the middle of the table.[1]
2. Place 1 track as a barrier on the red double-line 1 on the scoring track.[1]
3. Place the remaining 84 tracks next to the board as a supply.[1]
4. Each player chooses a color, places the start marker in that color on the table before him, and places the locomotive in that color as a scoring marker on the engine house.[1]
5. With 2 or 3 players, remove the 10 city cards marked with dashed borders and place them back in the box.[1]
6. Shuffle all 35 (or 25) city cards and spread them out on the game board face-down.[1]
7. Each player takes 5 different colored cards (1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow, 1 green, 1 blue) and looks at them secretly.[1]
8. Choose a starting player by any method; this player places the starting player card before himself on the table.[1]
9. The starting player begins, and the others follow in clockwise order.[2]
10. In the first turn, each player places his start marker on the track junction of his choice, which may be on a city.[2]
11. Each player must lay at least one track in each turn.[2]
12. Per turn, each player may lay either 1 or 2 tracks on unoccupied single lines (over flat land) or 1 track on an unoccupied double line (as a bridge over a river or as a tunnel through a mountain).[2]
13. Each player may play track only on the track network that is connected to his start marker, meaning he must play next to his marker or next to track connected to his marker.[2]
14. Players may connect their networks to others and use the connected networks as their own.[2]
15. A player may lay track anywhere on his connected network.[2]
16. If a player lays two tracks, they may be placed together or in separate places in the network.[2]
17. The round ends when all 5 of a player's cities are connected,[2] or when all 84 tracks have been laid.[2]
18. At the end of a round, players who did not connect all their cities lose points for each missing track to their unconnected cities: 1 minus point for each missing track over a single line (flat land) and 2 minus points for each missing track over a double line (river or mountain).[2]
19. For each minus point, a player moves his locomotive one space in the direction of the barrier.[2]
20. The game ends after several rounds when at least one player's locomotive has passed the barrier.[3]
21. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner.[1][3]
[1] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook · p.1 · Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge
[2] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook · p.2 · Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · …
[3] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook · p.2 · Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 87 ms · ask 3915 ms · total 4005 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 4005 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "The starting player begins, and the others follow in clockwise order. In the first turn, each player places his start marker on the track junction of his choice. This may be on a city. The start marker is the starting point for each player's track network . From there, players build track: If the ye", "headingPath": "Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "·Remove all tracks from the board . ·Each player takes his start marker back. ·Shuffle the 35 (or 25) city cards as before. ·Each player takes 5 different colored city cards as before. ·The player with the starting player card gives it to the player on his left, who begins the new round. If, after t", "headingPath": "Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, please write us at RioGames@aol.com or visit our website at www.riograndegames.com Place the game board in the middle of the table. Place 1 track as a barrier on the red double-line 1 on the scoring track. The barrier marks the game end. Place the rem", "headingPath": "Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1299}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1299 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1299 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 0.89639 of 1969 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded
Sep 5, 2026 15:19 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · … p.2 0.048652 (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 TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game p.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)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge p.1 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

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 3 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · … p.2 #1 0.048652 (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 TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge p.1 #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
#3 RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game p.2 #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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation · A fast-paced track-laying game from Franz-Benno Delonge p.1 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Playing a round · example: · Notes: · End of a round · Exception: · Extremely rare: · … p.2 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK TransAmerica — Rulebook (corpus doc 1299) Preparation for the next round · Only after the 2nd round · End of the game p.2 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 87 ms · first delta 847 ms · total 4005 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 87 ms · ask 3915 ms · gateway work 4005 ms · total 4005 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1334
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
633
tok/sec
203.7 tok/sec — 633 output tokens in 3.108 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 22h, checked 4s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1229), 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.