Ruling — Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game

← Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Gamebg-77130-en-1e

General Setup

1. Carefully punch out the cardboard components, keeping them away from small children and animals.[1]

2. Assemble the civilization sheets, trade dials, economy dials, and plastic connectors.[1]

3. Each player draws a civilization sheet at random and places it faceup in front of them (players may optionally select civilizations if all agree).[1]

4. Return any unused civilization sheets to the box.[1]

5. Each player chooses a player color.[1]

6. Each player takes the following in their player color: eight plastic figures (6 armies and 2 scouts), three city markers (1 capital and 2 cities), four military tech markers, one deck of 36 tech cards, one reference sheet, and one setup card.[1]

7. Place the market board at one end of the table.[1]

8. On the market board, sort the unit cards by type (artillery, infantry, mounted, and aircraft), shuffle each deck, and place it on the marked space.[1]

9. Give each player one artillery, one infantry, and one mounted unit, placed facedown in a single pile near the player (known as the player's standing forces).[1]

10. Look at the four faceup wonder cards in the market spaces below the wonder deck, find the matching wonder marker for each, and place the marker in the space next to its wonder card.[2]

11. Separate the culture event cards into ancient (one column), medieval (two columns), and modern (three columns) decks, shuffle each deck separately, and place them facedown on their indicated space below the culture track on the market board.[2]

12. Each player takes the culture level marker showing their leader and places it on the start space of the culture track.[2]

13. Place one of each market resource token per player near the market board, returning extras to the box.[2]

14. Each player takes their home map tile (the tile with their civilization's leader on the back) and places it faceup in front of them, oriented as indicated in the setup diagram.[2]

15. Return any unused home tiles to the box.[2]

16. One player shuffles the neutral map tiles and deals them out facedown to form the rest of the map, as indicated by the diagram.[2]

17. Return any unused neutral map tiles to the box without looking at them.[2]

18. Place the great people markers facedown near the market board and mix them up.[2]

19. Repeat the mixing process for the hut markers and the village markers.[2]

20. Place the culture, wound, and coin tokens next to the market board in three separate stockpiles.[2]

21. Place the combat bonus cards, the Space Flight tech card, and the disaster markers faceup near the market board.[2]

22. Choose a player to go first (either by family history or at random) and give them the first player marker.[2]

23. Set up market resources.[2]

24. Build map.[2]

Player Setup

1. Each player chooses one of the four center squares on their home map tile to place their capital (for a first game, the square with the starting arrow is advised).[2]

2. The player places their capital city marker on the selected square, unwalled side up.[2]

3. Each player looks at their civilization sheet for any starting bonuses.[3]

4. Each player takes one of their army figures and one of their scout figures and places them (separately or together) in one or two of the city outskirts squares of their capital, ensuring they are not placed in water squares.[3]

5. Each player looks at the bottom of their civilization sheet to see what tech card they begin with, searches their tech deck for that card, and places it faceup in front of them in the bottom row of their tech pyramid.[3]

6. Each player stacks their government cards with the Despotism/Republic card on top, faceup with the Despotism side (unless Rome or Russia, which use their specific starting governments), and places the stack on the indicated space on their civilization sheet.[4]

7. Each player counts all trade symbols in the eight squares of their capital's city outskirts and sets their trade dial to that total.[4]

8. Each player sets their economy dial to '0' (or to the number of coins they have if they received any during setup).[4]

9. Each player places one city marker, their remaining five army figures, and their remaining scout figure by their civilization sheet to indicate they are ready to be built.[4]

10. The second city marker is set aside until the player learns the Irrigation tech

[1] RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.8 · preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …

[2] RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.10 · e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …

[3] RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.11 · 2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …

[4] RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.12 · 5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 229 ms · ask 7489 ms · total 7720 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7720 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "'The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.' -H. G. Wells Before playing Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game for the first time, carefully punch out the cardboard components, making sure to keep them away from small children and an", "headingPath": "preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Look at the four faceup wonder cards in the market spaces below the wonder deck, find the matching wonder marker for each, and place the marker in the space next to its wonder card. Separate the culture event cards into ancient (one column), medieval (two columns), and modern (three columns) decks. ", "headingPath": "e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Each player stacks their government cards so that the Despotism/ Republic card is on top of the cards, with the Despotism side faceup. They then place the stack of cards on the indicated space on their civilization sheet. Exceptions: Rome begins as a Republic , while Russia begins governed by Commun", "headingPath": "5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Each player looks at their civilization sheet to see what, if anything, they receive as a bonus at the start of the game. The bonuses are summarized below: America gains a random great person. America places the great person in the outskirts of their capital at the end of setup. (For a player's firs", "headingPath": "2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "Each player takes their lower ranked (one stripe on one side, two stripes on the other) military tech markers for artillery, infantry, and mounted units and places them in the area below the appropriate unit deck so that the sides with one stripe are faceup. They each then take their aircraft milita", "headingPath": "b. miliTary Tech markers · c. builDinG markers · D. wOnDer carDs (nOT useD in The learninG Game)", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "(Numbers refer to General Setup steps.) (Arrows indicate tile orientation.) tWo players three players", "headingPath": "seTup DiaGram · map seTup by number Of players", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "This section explains each phase of the turn in detail. During this phase, players can expand their civilizations and change their civilizations' form of government. The first player has the first opportunity to perform those actions during the Start of Turn Phase. After the first player has perform", "headingPath": "Game Turn in DeTail · 1. sTarT Of Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When a player learns a tech with a unit upgrade on it, they check to see if they already know a better upgrade for that unit type. If not, they find the military tech marker for their improved unit type and place it below the appropriate unit deck on the market board to show that their units of that", "headingPath": "upGraDinG uniTs", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 479}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 479 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 479 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 0.91515 of 3618 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 9, 2026 18:16 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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …	p.8	0.048916 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …	p.10	0.047131 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview	p.12	0.047123 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …	p.11	0.045476 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	b. miliTary Tech markers · c. builDinG markers · D. wOnDer carDs (nOT useD in The learninG Game)	p.8	0.045009 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	seTup DiaGram · map seTup by number Of players	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))	101
#7	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	Game Turn in DeTail · 1. sTarT Of Turn	p.13	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
#8	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	upGraDinG uniTs	p.21	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 57 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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …	p.8	#1	0.048916 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …	p.11	#4	0.045476 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview	p.12	#3	0.047123 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	Game Turn in DeTail · 1. sTarT Of Turn	p.13	#7	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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	The resources that may appear on a tech card include:	p.32	#11	0.027382 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)		p.9	#18	0.013333 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …	p.10	#2	0.047131 (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 Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	seTup DiaGram · map seTup by number Of players	p.9	#6	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	preparinG fOr The firsT Game · The GOlDen rule · General seTup · 1. chOOse civilizaTiOns anD cOlOrs · 2. DisTribuTe player cOmpOnenTs · Players also receive: · …	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	e. wOnDer markers (nOT useD in The learninG Game) · f. culTure evenT carDs · G. culTure level markers · 4. seT up markeT resOurces · 5. builD map · 6. shuffle ranDOm markers · …	p.10	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	2. Gain civilizaTiOn bOnuses · america · china · eGypT · Germany · rOme · …	p.11	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 479)	5. seT sTarTinG GOvernmenTs · 6. seT TraDe Dial · 7. seT ecOnOmy Dial · 8. place unbuilT fiGures · Game Turn Overview	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 229 ms · first delta 2540 ms · total 7720 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 229 ms · ask 7489 ms · gateway work 7720 ms · total 7720 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3239
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 200.4 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.109 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 36s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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.

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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 410), 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.