Ruling — Northgard: Uncharted Lands

← Northgard: Uncharted Lands

You asked

How do i play this game with 5 people?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Northgard: Uncharted Landsbg-274124-en-1e

To play with 5 people, follow these setup and gameplay steps:

1. Place the dice, fame, Resource (food, wood, lore), and Building tokens in a common reserve.[1]

2. Place the turn track on the table and the Year token on its first space.[1]

3. Place the Unrest cards in a face up deck.[1]

4. Shuffle all Early Development cards and take 10 cards (2 cards per player) to form a face down pile.[1]

5. Shuffle all Advanced Development cards and take 20 cards (4 cards per player) to form a second face down pile.[1]

6. Place the Early Development pile over the Advanced Development pile to form a single Development deck.[1]

7. Shuffle all Achievement cards and randomly take 5 cards (equal to the number of players), placing them face up on the table.[1]

8. Search for the corresponding starting Map tile for five players and place it at the center of the table.[1]

9. Shuffle the remaining Map tiles and place them in a face down pile.[1]

10. Each player chooses a color and takes the corresponding six Starting cards and fourteen units.[1]

11. Each player chooses a clan and takes one initial Clan card and two Clan upgrade cards.[1]

12. Each player shuffles their deck of six Starting cards plus their initial Clan card (seven cards total) and places them face down as their draw pile.[1]

13. Determine the starting player by rolling two dice; the player who rolls the most axes is the first player.[1]

14. Give starting resources to each player, starting with the first player and moving clockwise.[1]

15. Each player draws three Map tiles; the starting player places one tile orthogonally touching the starting tile(s) and places three of their units in an empty territory on that tile, continuing clockwise for all players.[1]

16. At the beginning of each year, each player draws four cards from their own deck.[2]

17. The first player draws cards from the Development deck equal to the number of players (5) and places them visible on the table.[2]

18. During the player turn phase, starting with the first player and following clockwise, players take turns playing one after another until all players have passed.[2]

19. During a turn, a player may choose one of several actions: play a card and resolve its action (including Flash cards), place a card in the active area without resolving it, place a card in the active area without resolving it and spend one resource to draw a new card, or place a card in the game box and spend two resources to draw two new cards.[2]

20. During the Harvest phase, starting with the first player, players gain fame and collect resources from controlled territories.[3]

21. During the Winter phase, starting with the first player, each player must pay resources for their units; if unable to pay, they must take an Unrest card.[3]

22. The game ends if any player controls at least three closed territories with at least one large building in each, or if it is the seventh year.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …

[3] RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook · p.7 · 3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …

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 239 ms · ask 5107 ms · total 5349 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5349 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "If you are exactly four players, you can split in two teams of two players. Teammates have to sit opposite each other, alternating team turns. Teammates can discuss their options and share between them their current fame score, but they are not allowed to show their hands of cards. Teammates' units ", "headingPath": "TEAM PLAY:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "\u0007 Place the dice and fame , Resource (food , wood , lore ) and Building tokens on the table, creating a common reserve in easy reach of all players. Place the turn track on the table, the Year token on its first space. Place the Unrest cards in a face up deck on the table. \u0007 Shuffle all the Early De", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once all players have placed one Map tile each, repeat the process once more , following these placement rules: A player's second Map tile must orthogonally touch any placed tile, it doesn't have to be the starting Map tile(s). Map tiles must be placed so that the border lines are continued (see For", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · D E C K B U I L D I N G", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Once the set up is done, the game begins. The game consists of a series of years, or rounds, divided in five phases. At the beginning of each year, each player draws four cards from their own deck. Whenever a player no longer has any cards in their draw pile, they must shuffle their discard pile and", "headingPath": "GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · \u0007 A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The current player picks a card from their hand and places it into the active area without resolving its effects OR remove it from the game (their choice) and spends an additional three to get an upgrade. They pick one of their Clan upgrade cards and place it in their hand. This card can be played i", "headingPath": "E. Upgrade · F. Pass", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Starting with the first player, players gain fame and collect resources in the territories they control. For each closed territory they control, each player receives . Territories spreading on two tiles only bring one , while larger territories (three tiles or more) bring two . The players gain addi", "headingPath": "3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The game can end in two different ways: This can happen during the End of Year phase of any year . In this case, the winner is the owner of those territories . If multiple players reach this condition at the same time, then the tie is broken first by the greatest number of (see below), then by the g", "headingPath": "END OF THE GAME AND WINNER · 1. \u0007 A PLAYER OWNS AT LEAST THREE CLOSED TERRITORIES WITH AT LEAST ONE LARGE BUILDING IN EACH. · 2.\u0007 THIS IS THE END OF THE SEVENTH YEAR. · VARIANTS · LONGER GAMES:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "10 Example The Red player has two , so they can build: • A Carv ed Stone, only in the space with the Carved Stone icon of territory B. • Or any one of the f our other types of small buildings in territory A or B (including on the Carved Stone space if desired). They cannot build a large building in ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · \u0007 A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1111}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1111 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1111 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 0.91836 of 2413 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 21:03 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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	TEAM PLAY:	p.16	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
#2	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME SETUP	p.4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME SETUP · D E C K B U I L D I N G	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …	p.6	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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	E. Upgrade · F. Pass	p.6	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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …	p.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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	END OF THE GAME AND WINNER · 1. A PLAYER OWNS AT LEAST THREE CLOSED TERRITORIES WITH AT LEAST ONE LARGE BUILDING IN EACH. · 2. THIS IS THE END OF THE SEVENTH YEAR. · VARIANTS · LONGER GAMES:	p.16	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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)		p.10	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 32 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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …	p.6	#4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME SETUP	p.4	#2	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …	p.7	#6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	Creature activation example #2 · VARIANT: MORE CREATURES! · PHASE 2 - PLAYER PASS	p.23	#21	0.012346 (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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	Example · L A R G E B U I L D I N G S	p.10	#11	0.014085 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	MODULE: CREATURES	p.18	#26	0.011628 (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 Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	E. Upgrade · F. Pass	p.6	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	TEAM PLAY:	p.16	#1	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	GAME PLAY · 1. START OF YEAR · 2. ACTIONS · A. Play card(s) · B. Wait · C. Replace a card · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Northgard: Uncharted Lands — Rulebook (corpus doc 1111)	3. HARVEST · A. Gain fame from closed territories · B. Collect resources and fame · C. Trade resources · 4. WINTER · A. Check the end of game conditions · …	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 239 ms · first delta n/a · total 5349 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 239 ms · ask 5107 ms · gateway work 5349 ms · total 5349 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3085
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 683
tok/sec: 201.4 tok/sec — 683 output tokens in 3.392 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 32s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 2s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
stream path: requested, but the gateway emitted no delta — the whole answer arrived at once (the child's stream flag off, or a non-streaming backend)
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 1041), 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.