RuleSage cited table rulings
← Merchant of Venus (Second Edition)

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Merchant of Venus (Second Edition)bg-131646-en-1e

I looked through Merchant of Venus (Second Edition)'s rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.8 · Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game
Select a Player Color: Each player chooses one available color and takes the dashboard sheet, mission tokens, merchant spaceport/drill tokens, and plastic merchant ship corresponding to that color. Select Pilot: Merchant of Venus offers four pilots, each associated with a culture: Human, Eeepeeep (o
RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.29 · Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game
Experienced players looking to engage with Merchant of Venus in completely new ways can explore the following three variants. Players who wish to play a faster-paced version of Merchant of Venus should set up the game as instructed in steps 1-9 on page 6. Then, beginning with step 10, perform the fo
RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.30 · Epic Game · Production Rounds
Players looking to maximize profits across an epic session of Merchant of Venus can play this game variant lasting well past round 30. Before starting an epic game, players should mutually decide how long the game should run (such as 40, 50, or even 60 rounds). If the players cannot agree, simply ro
RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.8 · Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading
Each new game round (with the exception of the first round) begins with the first player advancing the round marker one space on the game round track and resolving the effect of the game round's corresponding icon: Passenger Icon: The first player randomly draws a passenger token from the stockpile
RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.10 · Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle
In order to use certain abilities, a player must assign dice to boxes on his dashboard sheet. To do so, he simply takes any of his rolled speed dice and places them in the appropriate spaces of his dashboard sheet. A player can only assign dice during his Movement phase, and only dice rolled during
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 118 ms · ask 2581 ms · total 2701 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2701 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Select a Player Color: Each player chooses one available color and takes the dashboard sheet, mission tokens, merchant spaceport/drill tokens, and plastic merchant ship corresponding to that color. Select Pilot: Merchant of Venus offers four pilots, each associated with a culture: Human, Eeepeeep (o", "headingPath": "Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Experienced players looking to engage with Merchant of Venus in completely new ways can explore the following three variants. Players who wish to play a faster-paced version of Merchant of Venus should set up the game as instructed in steps 1-9 on page 6. Then, beginning with step 10, perform the fo", "headingPath": "Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "Players looking to maximize profits across an epic session of Merchant of Venus can play this game variant lasting well past round 30. Before starting an epic game, players should mutually decide how long the game should run (such as 40, 50, or even 60 rounds). If the players cannot agree, simply ro", "headingPath": "Epic Game · Production Rounds", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each new game round (with the exception of the first round) begins with the first player advancing the round marker one space on the game round track and resolving the effect of the game round's corresponding icon: Passenger Icon: The first player randomly draws a passenger token from the stockpile ", "headingPath": "Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "In order to use certain abilities, a player must assign dice to boxes on his dashboard sheet. To do so, he simply takes any of his rolled speed dice and places them in the appropriate spaces of his dashboard sheet. A player can only assign dice during his Movement phase, and only dice rolled during ", "headingPath": "Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "If a player has acquired the License to Drill racial technology, he can place drill tokens on asteroid spaces as his ship passes over or lands on them. Only one drill token can be present on any particular asteroid space at one time. At the beginning of every even-numbered game round, each player re", "headingPath": "Drills · Pilots · Upgrading Pilots", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The orange player wishes to move to the Jungle World but wants to avoid the piloting hazard. At the start of his Movement phase, he declares a heading by rotating his ship to face the direction he wishes to move. Next he rolls three speed dice with results of 6, 3, and 2 for a movement value of 11--", "headingPath": "Movement Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "When the last player ends his turn in round 30, the game ends. Each player then determines his final score by taking the following steps: Sell Merchant Spaceports: Each player removes all his merchant spaceports from the board, collecting c200 from the bank for each spaceport he removes. Count Fame:", "headingPath": "End of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1177}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1177 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1177 boosted
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row recorded
Sep 6, 2026 12:52 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game p.8 0.048131 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game p.29 0.047875 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Epic Game · Production Rounds p.30 0.045805 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Beginning a New Round · Player Turns · Movement Phase · 1. Declare Heading p.8 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
#5 RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle p.10 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Drills · Pilots · Upgrading Pilots p.25 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Movement Example p.10 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) End of the Game p.18 0.029911 (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 56 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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Epic Game · Production Rounds p.30 #3 0.045805 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Encounter Deck p.30 #15 0.026398 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Optional Rules · Title & Intel Cards in Play · Asteroid System Telegate · Maximum Production · Demand p.28 #10 0.028898 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) End of the Game p.18 #8 0.029911 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Assigning Dice · Navigation · Throttle p.10 #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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Winning the Game p.18 #9 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
#7 RULEBOOK Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Green Player's Play Area · Playing the Game p.8 #1 0.048131 (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 Merchant of Venus (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1177) Game V ariants · Light Speed Game · Solo Challenge Game p.29 #2 0.047875 (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

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
timing split
retrieval 118 ms · first delta 2554 ms · total 2701 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 118 ms · ask 2581 ms · gateway work 2701 ms · total 2701 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3387
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
180.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.050 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 44s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 23h, checked 5s 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
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1107), 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.