Ruling — Inventors of the South Tigris

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Inventors of the South Tigrisbg-378387-en-1e

I looked through Inventors of the South Tigris'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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.7 · setup: PLAYER Boards

Each player takes the indicated coloured Die from the Main Supply and places it on the matching colour space at the bottom of the Study on their Player Board. Its value does not matter. 13 This player places a Charcoal Die in their Study. Each player places the indicated coloured Die and 5 White Dic

RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.15 · player turns: invent

When choosing to Invent, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1-2 of their available Dice onto a Camel space. 1 Select which Device Board they will be using to Invent a Device. This must be a Device Board in the left column that hasn't already been Invented. The total value of the Dice th

RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.6 · setup: PLAYER Boards

Have each player select a player colour, then follow these steps to set up each Player Board area: Give each player 1 Player Board and 1 of each Tower Tile. Note the small numbers in the top-right corner of each Tower Tile. The fronts show numbers 1-5, while the backs show numbers 6-10. Have each pl

RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.16 · player turns: build

When choosing to Build, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1-2 of their available Dice onto a Camel space. 1 Select which previously Invented Device in the left column they will Build. The total value of the Dice they just placed must be equal to or higher than the value required by tha

RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.26 · Setup · Gameplay Overview

Set up Inventors as you would for a 4-Round 2-player game (including the Dummy Player), with a few changes. Do not follow the player setup on pages 6-7 for your opponent. Instead, assign them a player colour, giving them only the following items: Separate the 15 Scheme Cards by their type. Shuffle a

🔧 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 189 ms · ask 3196 ms · total 15249 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 11862 ms · generation 3387 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 7, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Each player takes the indicated coloured Die from the Main Supply and places it on the matching colour space at the bottom of the Study on their Player Board. Its value does not matter. 13 This player places a Charcoal Die in their Study. Each player places the indicated coloured Die and 5 White Dic", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "When choosing to Invent, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1-2 of their available Dice onto a Camel space. 1 Select which Device Board they will be using to Invent a Device. This must be a Device Board in the left column that hasn't already been Invented. The total value of the Dice th", "headingPath": "player turns: invent", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.04612, "snippet": "Have each player select a player colour, then follow these steps to set up each Player Board area: Give each player 1 Player Board and 1 of each Tower Tile. Note the small numbers in the top-right corner of each Tower Tile. The fronts show numbers 1-5, while the backs show numbers 6-10. Have each pl", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "When choosing to Build, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1-2 of their available Dice onto a Camel space. 1 Select which previously Invented Device in the left column they will Build. The total value of the Dice they just placed must be equal to or higher than the value required by tha", "headingPath": "player turns: build", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.044589, "snippet": "Set up Inventors as you would for a 4-Round 2-player game (including the Dummy Player), with a few changes. Do not follow the player setup on pages 6-7 for your opponent. Instead, assign them a player colour, giving them only the following items: Separate the 15 Scheme Cards by their type. Shuffle a", "headingPath": "Setup · Gameplay Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.043927, "snippet": "If playing with 2 players, a few quick steps need to be resolved for the Dummy Player at the start of each Round: Turn over the top Dummy Card from the top of the Draw Pile, placing it on top of any previously drawn Dummy Cards. 1 Place Influence of the Dummy Player's colour in the indicated Guilds.", "headingPath": "start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "When choosing to Test, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1 White Die from the Main Supply onto an available Camel space. Its value does not matter. 1 Always do this first. It can be easy to forget! Place 1 of their available coloured Dice onto a Device Board with an empty Die space of ", "headingPath": "player turns: test", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "4 Each player places their 25 Influence nearby their Player Board. 5 Each player places their 4 Tents on the spaces near the top of their Player Board (or on their Tent Tile with fewer than 4 players). 6 Each player shuffles their 6 Invention Tiles, placing them faceup randomly across the 6 spaces i", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}]

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 1221 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 1221 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 20, 2026 09:24 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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.7	0.048139 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: invent	p.15	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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	0.04612 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: build	p.16	0.045002 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup · Gameplay Overview	p.26	0.044589 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income	p.13	0.043927 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: test	p.17	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
#8	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	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 45 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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	#3	0.04612 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: Main Board	p.4	#13	0.027783 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income	p.13	#6	0.043927 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: free actions · 1. Playing Device Cards · 2. Discarding Device Cards · 3. Using Craftspeople · Important Rule: Each Craftsperson can only be used once per task.	p.22	#9	0.029287 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: invent	p.15	#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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup · Gameplay Overview	p.26	#5	0.044589 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup card - goals	p.30	#14	0.027222 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	#8	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 189 ms · first delta 3249 ms · total 15249 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 11862 ms · retrieval 189 ms · ask 3196 ms · gateway work 3387 ms · total 15249 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3852
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 183.7 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.049 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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: 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

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 1151), 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.