Ruling — Riverboat

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Riverboatbg-227515-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Place the two game boards in the center of the playing area.[1]

2. Sort Riverboats by capacities and effects, setting each pile face up alongside the matching boat art above the 'New Orleans' board, and move the top tile of each pile onto the game board.[1]

3. Shuffle 1-hex, 2-hex, and 3-hex Crop tiles into separate, face-down piles.[1]

4. Fill the 'Scoring and Crop Supply' board with face-up Crop tiles drawn from the appropriate piles.[1]

5. Place the five Phase tiles near the game boards.[1]

6. Place one Worker on each of the four spaces of the Round track.[1]

7. Shuffle Cultivation cards and place them face down near the game/boards.[1]

8. Shuffle Opportunity cards and place them face down next to the 'New Orleans' board, then draw four Opportunity cards and place them face up on the four designated card spaces on the game board.[1]

9. Place Barns, Wells, Surveyors, and Coins near the game boards as a general supply.[1]

10. Each player takes a random player mat and places it in front of them.[2]

11. Place a Harbor Master token on the appropriate space on your mat's Harbor track.[2]

12. Take 13 Workers, 2 Surveyors, and 3 Coins and place them in a personal supply near your mat.[2]

13. Randomly determine a player to go first and hand them the First Player marker.[2]

The Rounds

1. The game lasts four rounds.[3]

2. At the start of a round, set up the game board by placing face-up Crop tiles on empty spaces of the 'Scoring and Crop Supply' board, ensuring there is a Riverboat tile of each type on the 'New Orleans' board, and placing a face-up Opportunity card on each of the four card spaces on the 'New Orleans' board.[4]

3. The player with the First Player marker chooses one Phase tile to receive a bonus and go first during that Phase; players continue selecting tiles in clockwise order until all tiles are selected.[4]

4. Resolve each of the five Phases of the Round (Cultivation, Planting, Harvesting, Shipping, and Opportunity Scoring) one by one.[3]

5. During each Phase, play proceeds clockwise around the table, beginning with the player who selected the corresponding Phase tile.[4]

6. At the end of Rounds 1, 2, and 3, return Phase tiles and pass the First Player marker to the player to the left (in a three-player game, pass it to the player farthest behind on the Victory Point track).[3]

7. The game ends at the end of Round 4.[3]

Scoring

1. After completing Round 4, award Victory Points for the following:

* 1 VP for each remaining Coin.[5]

* 7 VP for each color of Field spaces on a player mat completely covered with Crop hexes and/or Barns.[5]

* 2 VP for each unscored Estate Feature (Barn, Well, or Surveyor).[5]

* Harbor Scoring: The player whose Harbor Master traveled farthest on their Harbor track receives full value for each Riverboat tile passed or arrived at (value equals capacity); all other players receive half value (rounded up).[5]

* Agents Bonus Scoring: 1st place receives 20 VP, 2nd place receives 10 VP, and 3rd place receives 5 VP (you must have at least 1 Agent in New Orleans to score).[5]

2. The winner is the player with the most Victory Points.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook · p.3 · Central Display · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook · p.4 · Personal Display

[3] RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook · p.5 · End of a Round · Course of Play

[4] RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook · p.5 · Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins

[5] RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook · p.12 · Score Track · Final scoring · Harbor Scoring · Agents Bonus Scoring · Winner

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 91 ms · ask 5769 ms · total 20891 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 15028 ms · generation 5863 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The Round ends after the five Phases are complete. At the end of Rounds 1, 2, and 3, return your Phase tiles, pass the First Player marker to the player to the left of the current holder, and proceed with the next Round (see 'Start of a Round' above). NOTE : In a three-player game, at the end of Rou", "headingPath": "End of a Round · Course of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Your chosen tile must be fully covered by Workers. The color of Field(s) that you play onto does not matter, and your tile may be part of multiple Field colors. Once a Crop tile is placed, it may not be moved again. You do not have to match the type of Crops shown to other Crop tiles you have played", "headingPath": "Details on Placing a Crop Tile:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Set up the game board for the upcoming Round: Place face-up Crop tiles on the empty spaces of the 'Scoring and Crop Supply' board, of the appropriate size (1, 2, or 3 hexes). (See also 1 on page 3.) Make sure there is a Riverboat tile of each type on the 'New Orleans' board (if tiles remain). (See a", "headingPath": "Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "Place the two game boards in the center of the playing area. Sort the Riverboats by their capacities (numbers at the bottom) and effects (note that there are two versions of the 2 and 3 tiles) and set each pile face up alongside the matching boat art above the 'New Orleans' board. Move the top tile ", "headingPath": "Central Display · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Take a random player mat and place it in front of you. The four player mats differ in the Field layout (colored hexes) and the player color shown on the shed at the bottom of a mat. Leave some space at the top and beside your mat for other components to be placed. Take a Harbor Master token and plac", "headingPath": "Personal Display", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Wells: Place a Well onto a Crop hex (with or without a Worker on it) of a type on which you have not placed a Well yet. Wells score for the contiguous group of the same Crop including the Crop hex with the Well (see 'Scoring Phase', page 11). You may have at most one Well per Crop type. Surveyors: P", "headingPath": "Harvesting Bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "NOTE : You start the game with only two Surveyors and there are only three ways to get new ones: from Riverboats (capacities 5, 6, and 7), from scoring the Harvesting Bonus (see page 9), and from taking an Opportunity card from the card space with the Surveyor. After scoring or passing, the next pla", "headingPath": "5. Scoring Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029643, "snippet": "By Michael Kiesling For 2-4 players, ages 10 and up Playing time: 90 minutes The Upper Midwest, early 19th Century: It is a hard life farming along the Upper Mississippi, but it is an era of innovation and expansion, and the technological advances in riverboat technology are expanding the opportunit", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Central Display · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Personal Display", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "End of a Round · Course of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Score Track · Final scoring · Harbor Scoring · Agents Bonus Scoring · Winner", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1038 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1038 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 0.89931 of 2622 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 02:58 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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	End of a Round · Course of Play	p.5	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Details on Placing a Crop Tile:	p.7	0.047643 (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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins	p.5	0.047643 (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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Central Display · Setup	p.3	0.045724 (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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Personal Display	p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Harvesting Bonus	p.9	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	5. Scoring Phase	p.11	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)		p.1	0.029643 (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 19 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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	End of a Round · Course of Play	p.5	#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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Central Display · Setup	p.3	#4	0.045724 (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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins	p.5	#3	0.047643 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Score Track · Final scoring · Harbor Scoring · Agents Bonus Scoring · Winner	p.12	#11	0.014286 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Details on Placing a Crop Tile:	p.7	#2	0.047643 (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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	During this Phase, you will prepare your Fields for planting by placing Workers based on the Cultivation cards revealed.	p.6	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Personal Display	p.4	#5	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
#8	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	5. Scoring Phase	p.11	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Central Display · Setup	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Personal Display	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	End of a Round · Course of Play	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins	p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Score Track · Final scoring · Harbor Scoring · Agents Bonus Scoring · Winner	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 91 ms · first delta 1671 ms · total 20891 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 15028 ms · retrieval 91 ms · ask 5769 ms · gateway work 5863 ms · total 20891 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3100
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 825
tok/sec: 201.5 tok/sec — 825 output tokens in 4.094 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 22h, checked 7s 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 968), 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.