Ruling — Merchants of the Dark Road

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Merchants of the Dark Roadbg-300217-en-1e

Each player has a total of 13 turns throughout the game.[1] The start player takes the first turn, then each other player takes a turn in clockwise order.[1] This sequence continues until the end of the game is triggered, which occurs when there are no night dice left for any player.[1][2][3]

When it is your turn, you must perform these four steps in order:

1. Use a night die from your main reserve to bump a locked night die into your action pool, then take the special action of that locked slot.[1]

2. Move your wagon pawn clockwise around the Ringway a number of spaces equal to the value of any 1 die in your action pool.[1]

3. Activate 1 or both of the districts that are now adjacent to your wagon pawn, using the dice from your action pool.[1][4]

4. Perform any necessary upkeep on the kingdom board, and reroll your night dice if your main reserve is now empty.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.8 · Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …

[2] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.4 · Overview · Concepts to Know · DICE VALUES

[4] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.9 · STEP 3: ACTIVATE · Districts · Buildings

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 104 ms · ask 4083 ms · total 4190 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4190 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "'The Great Watchmaker has set the world of Lumi rotating but slowly, so that each cycle of day and night lasts an entire year. The spring dawn, the summer day, the autumn dusk, and the winter night each last for thirteen weeks. By this schedule we plan and profit! Winter's dark has just settled, but", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "The players must carry out these steps individually. Determine a start player (Player 1) by any method. Then, in clockwise seating order, each player chooses a player color and takes the matching wagon board, wagon pawn, prestige marker, and player screen. 13 Place your wagon pawn on the Ringway spa", "headingPath": "Merchant Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "'By Requirement of the Queen's Minister of Roads: All Traffic, Foot, Vehicle, and Mounted, Must Proceed in a Well-Ordered Fashion According to Such Signage as the Minister Has Posted.' -scroll announcing one-way signs along the Ringway Choose one die from your action pool to count as your movement. ", "headingPath": "STEP 2: MOVE · Horseshoes · Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Andrea chooses a '0' (blank) night die from her main reserve and uses it to bump the '2' night die from her first locked slot into her action pool. Andrea now gets to take the special action. As a result, she takes a basic instrument good tile and places it on her wagon. 'You want fame? I have it fo", "headingPath": "Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "When there are no night you have each game. When there are no night dice left for any player, the game is over. dice left for any player, the game is over. Illuminated dice are rare and allow you Illuminated dice are rare and allow you to take extra actions in a single turn. to take extra actions in", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Travel to Outlying Towns “Welcome, traveler! Knock the snow from your boots “Welcome, traveler! Knock the snow from your boots and come into our feasting halls, tucked beneath and come into our feasting halls, tucked beneath the boughs, where for a few days you can forget the boughs, where for a few", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Choose a companion. Declare your chosen route, highway or shortcut (3 lanterns), and destination town. In clockwise order, each other player declares, 'yes' or 'no,' whether they will travel in your caravan. Take 1 travel die from the supply for every traveler in the caravan (including yourself). If", "headingPath": "Step 1: Prepare the Caravan · Step 2: Resolve an Event · Step 3: Visit Towns · Step 4: Receive Good Fortune", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Concepts to Know “Winter’s long gloom may be upon us, but do not be lonely, for our roads connect each home to every other. And what is even the darkest road but a course along which life, praise, and profit may flow?” —From Queen Lumi’s Winternight Speech These concepts are here to help you better ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Overview · Concepts to Know · DICE VALUES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "STEP 3: ACTIVATE · Districts · Buildings", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1002 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1002 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 0.92179 of 716 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:25 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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …	p.8	0.048412 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Merchant Setup	p.7	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
#3	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 2: MOVE · Horseshoes · Example:	p.9	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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Example:	p.21	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
#5	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.14	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
#7	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Step 1: Prepare the Caravan · Step 2: Resolve an Event · Step 3: Visit Towns · Step 4: Receive Good Fortune	p.24	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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.4	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))	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 53 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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …	p.8	#1	0.048412 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …	p.6	#21	0.013514 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Travel to Outlying Towns · 1. Prepare the Caravan · 2. Resolve an Event · 3. Visit Towns · 4. Receive Good Fortune · STEP 1: PREPARE THE CARAVAN	p.14	#23	0.013158 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.4	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Step 1: Prepare the Caravan · Step 2: Resolve an Event · Step 3: Visit Towns · Step 4: Receive Good Fortune	p.24	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Overview · Concepts to Know · DICE VALUES	p.4	#25	0.0125 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 3: ACTIVATE · Districts · Buildings	p.9	#9	0.02895 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Merchant Setup	p.7	#2	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))	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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Overview · Concepts to Know · DICE VALUES	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 3: ACTIVATE · Districts · Buildings	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 104 ms · first delta 3037 ms · total 4190 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 104 ms · ask 4083 ms · gateway work 4190 ms · total 4190 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4311
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 214
tok/sec: 197.6 tok/sec — 214 output tokens in 1.083 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 21s 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: 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 932), 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.