Ruling — La Città

← La Città

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: La Cittàbg-554-en-1e

Depending on the player experience level, the setup is as follows:

For Beginners (5 Players):

1. Place the board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Sort the hexagonal building tokens by type into stacks next to the board.[1]

3. Place the terrain tiles on the board as shown in the figure.[2]

4. Place the food tokens and gold coins next to the board.[2]

5. Shuffle the "voice of the people" cards thoroughly and place them face down on the board next to the four brown circles.[2]

6. Each player takes one gold coin.[2]

7. Each player takes a summary card.[2]

8. Place the starting player token next to the board.[2]

9. Each player takes two of his castle tokens and places them on the board as shown in the initial setup figure.[2]

10. Each player takes six citizens and places three on each of his castles on the board.[2]

11. Each player counts the food symbols on the farm lands next to his castles, takes the corresponding number of food tokens from the supply, and places them in his play area.[2]

12. Choose a starting player using any method preferred.[2]

For Experienced Players:

1. One player shuffles the terrain tiles face down and places them face down on all empty triangular spaces on the board, then turns them all face up.[3]

2. Choose a starting player.[3]

3. The starting player takes one of his castles, places it on a hexagon of his choice (on one of the paths on the board), and places 3 citizen figures on it.[3]

4. If the castle is next to farm land, the starting player takes food tokens equal to the number of food symbols on the farm land areas.[3]

5. The player to the right of the starting player takes a turn, and then the player to his right, and so on, in counter-clockwise order.[3]

6. Each player places a castle, puts 3 citizens on it, and takes food tokens if appropriate, ensuring there are at least 3 empty hexagons between the castle, along a path, and all other castles.[3]

7. When all players have placed their first castle, the last player places a second castle on the board, puts 3 citizens on it, and takes any appropriate food tokens.[3]

8. This second round of placement proceeds in clockwise order (the player to the left of the last player, then the player to his left, etc.).[3]

9. The initial placing of castles is complete when all players have placed two castles.[3]

10. The player to the left of the player who placed the last castle becomes the new starting player and starts the first year.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook · p.2 · PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.

[2] RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook · p.4 · n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:

[3] RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook · p.4 · Setup for experienced players

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 175 ms · ask 13990 ms · total 14171 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 14171 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "I One player shuffles the terrain tiles face down and then places the tiles face down on all the empty triangular spaces on the board. After all have been placed face down, he turns them all face up. The different colored paths have special meaning when playing with fewer than four players. For deta", "headingPath": "Setup for experienced players", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Shuffle the voice of the people cards thoroughly and place them face down on the board next the the four brown circles. There are 3 extra cards so that players cannot count cards for the last year. n Place the food tokens and the gold coins next to the board. Gold coins Each player takes 1 gold coin", "headingPath": "n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "The winner is the player with the most victory points (citizen figures and cities with 3 colors of arches) at the end of the game (after 6 game years). Each year is played in 8 phases: 1 change the starting player 2 lay out the voice of the people cards 3 quarry earnings (in gold coins) 4 population", "headingPath": "The goal · the sequence of the phases in a game year · 1 change the starting player · 2 lay out the voice of the people cards · 3 quarry earnings (in gold coins) · 4 population growth", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Before the first game, carefully remove all tiles and tokens from their frames. Note: the board has several large triangular land areas, separated by the hexagonal paths on which the players will start and expand their cities. The large land areas have different terrain characteristics, randomly det", "headingPath": "PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The player takes one of his castle tokens and places it on an empty hexagonal space on the board. Note: players place their castles so there are at least 3 empty hexagons between the castle, along a path, and all other cities (whether the city belongs to the player or to an opponent). The player mov", "headingPath": "· Start a new city. · · Build a small building. · -Farm house (no arch) · -Quarry (no arch) · - Fountain (blue arch)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "With two players, the players may only build on the light green hexagons. The brownish and yellowgreen hexagons are not in the game. Note: the 8 red lines mark the borders between the different terrains along the edge of the board to make it clear where players can get the different resources. With ", "headingPath": "rule changes: · Contents", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each player is an Italian prince and begins the game with two cities. The first building in each city is the castle. Each castle is home to 3,000 people at the beginning of the game. These people are represented by 3 small figures called citizens. During the game, each player's goal is to increase t", "headingPath": "AN INTRODUCTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Building a new building is very simple: the player plays the card that allows the building to be built, takes the building token from the supply, and places it on an empty hexagon next to the castle or any other building in the city. -The player then takes a spare citizen figure from the castle in t", "headingPath": "How to build a building · Important building rules · The costs", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup for experienced players", "sharpsignalDocId": 1069}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1069 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1069 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 0.90968 of 2015 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 20:53 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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	Setup for experienced players	p.4	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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:	p.4	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
#3	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	The goal · the sequence of the phases in a game year · 1 change the starting player · 2 lay out the voice of the people cards · 3 quarry earnings (in gold coins) · 4 population growth	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	· Start a new city. · · Build a small building. · -Farm house (no arch) · -Quarry (no arch) · - Fountain (blue arch)	p.3	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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	rule changes: · Contents	p.1	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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	AN INTRODUCTION	p.1	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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	How to build a building · Important building rules · The costs	p.3	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 21 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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	Setup for experienced players	p.4	#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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:	p.4	#2	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	The goal · the sequence of the phases in a game year · 1 change the starting player · 2 lay out the voice of the people cards · 3 quarry earnings (in gold coins) · 4 population growth	p.3	#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 La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.	p.2	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	· Start a new city. · · Build a small building. · -Farm house (no arch) · -Quarry (no arch) · - Fountain (blue arch)	p.3	#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
#6	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	rule changes: · Contents	p.1	#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
#7	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	AN INTRODUCTION	p.1	#7	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
#8	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	How to build a building · Important building rules · The costs	p.3	#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
[1]	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	PREPARATION · n Place the board in the middle of the table. · n Sort the hexagonal building tokens.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	n Prepare the 27 voice of the people cards · · Food tokens · Initial board setup for beginners for 5 players · III Take food tokens · example:	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK La Città — Rulebook (corpus doc 1069)	Setup for experienced players	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 175 ms · first delta 10938 ms · total 14171 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 175 ms · ask 13990 ms · gateway work 14171 ms · total 14171 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4384
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 598
tok/sec: 191.1 tok/sec — 598 output tokens in 3.130 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 7s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 8s 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 999), 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.