Ruling — Riverboat

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Riverboatbg-227515-en-1e

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

2. Sort the Riverboats by their capacities (numbers at the bottom) and effects and set each pile face up alongside the matching boat art above the 'New Orleans' board.[1]

3. Move the top tile of each pile onto the game board, placing it on the matching boat art.[1]

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

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

6. Place the five Phase tiles near the game boards, in reach of all players.[1]

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

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

9. Shuffle the Opportunity cards and place them face down next to the 'New Orleans' board.[1]

10. Draw four Opportunity cards from the pile and place them face up on the four designated card spaces on the game board.[1]

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

12. Take a random player mat and place it in front of you.[2]

13. Take a Harbor Master token and place it on the appropriate space (for the number of players) on your mat's Harbor track.[2]

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

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

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

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

Now you know — make it count.

🔧 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 219 ms · ask 2910 ms · total 3135 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3135 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048916, "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": 0.047619, "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": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "If you have the Cultivation Phase tile, as the bonus , take the leftmost Worker from the Round track (thus counting down a Round) and immediately place it on your player mat, in an empty Field of your choice. This Worker does not count towards the (up to) 8 Workers you are about to place (see below)", "headingPath": "During this Phase, you will prepare your Fields for planting by placing Workers based on the Cultivation cards revealed.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Phase Tile Bonus: Receive 1 Coin from the general supply. Phase Action: Place Crop tiles under your Workers. Coin Ability: Choose a 1-hex or 2-hex Crop tile from the draw pile. If you have the Planting Phase tile, as the bonus , take 1 Coin from the general supply (if any remain) and place it in you", "headingPath": "2. Planting Phase · During this Phase, you will plant Crops in the Fields that you prepared during the Cultivation Phase.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1038}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "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": 4, "score": 0.030303, "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": 11, "score": 0.029851, "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": 9, "score": 0.029412, "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}]
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}]
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 0.89321 of 1208 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 21:05 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)	Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins	p.5	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Central Display · Setup	p.3	0.047619 (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)	During this Phase, you will prepare your Fields for planting by placing Workers based on the Cultivation cards revealed.	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	2. Planting Phase · During this Phase, you will plant Crops in the Fields that you prepared during the Cultivation Phase.	p.7	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Details on Placing a Crop Tile:	p.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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Personal Display	p.4	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	5. Scoring Phase	p.11	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 Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Harvesting Bonus	p.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))	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)	Central Display · Setup	p.3	#2	0.047619 (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)	5. Scoring Phase	p.11	#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
#3	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	#3	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
#4	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Score Track · Final scoring · Harbor Scoring · Agents Bonus Scoring · Winner	p.12	#17	0.013158 (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)	Personal Display	p.4	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	2. Planting Phase · During this Phase, you will plant Crops in the Fields that you prepared during the Cultivation Phase.	p.7	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	End of a Round · Course of Play	p.5	#10	0.014493 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Riverboat — Rulebook (corpus doc 1038)	Start of a Round · Five Phases of a Round · Coins	p.5	#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

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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 219 ms · first delta 1064 ms · total 3135 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 219 ms · ask 2910 ms · gateway work 3135 ms · total 3135 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3014
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 390
tok/sec: 194.5 tok/sec — 390 output tokens in 2.005 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 20s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 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.