Ruling — Civilization: A New Dawn

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Civilization: A New Dawnbg-233247-en-1e

To set up a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn, follow these steps:

1. Select Leader and Player Color: Each player takes one random leader sheet.[1][2]

2. Each player chooses a player color and takes the cities, caravans, control tokens, tech dial, diplomacy cards, and focus cards of that color.[1][2]

3. Each player rotates the pointer on his or her tech dial to “0”.[1][2]

4. Construct Focus Bars: Each player places the focus bar of his or her color below his or her leader sheet.[1][2]

5. Each player takes the five focus cards that display “I” on the back and places them faceup in the slots below the focus bar in the order listed on the player's leader sheet.[1][2]

6. Each player places a caravan on his or her “Foreign Trade” card.[1][2]

7. Construct Map: For the first game, players construct the map using a predetermined map by placing tiles outlined in red, then adding tiles outlined in yellow if playing with at least three players, and adding tiles outlined in blue if playing with four players.[3]

8. For the first game, each player chooses a capital city and places it on the capital city icon closest to him or her; the color of this capital city is the color the player will use for the first game.[3]

9. For future games, use advanced map-building rules: deal one random capital-city tile to each player and return unused ones to the box.[4]

10. Take two random natural wonder tiles and two random city-state tiles, shuffle them, and use a die roll to determine if all core tiles use side A (roll 1-3) or side B (roll 4-6).[4]

11. Form the core by placing these core tiles one at a time in the center of the table in the specified order and orientation, then place a trade token on each of the four tiles.[4]

12. Shuffle the remaining unplaced tiles and deal two to each player, returning the rest to the box.[4]

13. Populate Map: For each space on the map with an icon, take one matching token and place it on that space; barbarian tokens must display the same letter as the barbarian icon, and city-state tokens must share the same icon and black frame (diamond or circle) as the city-state icon.[1][2]

14. Place City-State Cards: For each city-state token on the map, place both copies of that city-state’s diplomacy card on top of each other next to the map in view of all players, then return unused city-state diplomacy cards to the box.[1][2]

15. Set Direction Token and Event Dial: A random player places the barbarian direction token against any edge of the map.[5]

16. That same player places the event dial next to his or her leader sheet with the pointer pointing to the helmet with the star; this player is the first player.[5]

17. Separate Wonder Cards: Separate world wonder cards by type into four piles based on color and icon.[5]

18. If playing with three players, return one random ancient-era card from each pile to the box; if playing with two players, return one random ancient-era and one random medieval-era card from each pile to the box.[5]

19. Create Wonder Decks: For each pile, place randomized modern-era cards facedown, then randomized medieval-era cards on top, then randomized ancient-era cards on top; finally, flip the top card of the deck faceup and place the deck in view of all players.[5]

20. Organize Wonder Tokens: Place all world wonder tokens that match the type icon and color of each wonder deck next to that deck.[5]

21. Deal Victory Cards: Place three random victory cards faceup next to the map and return the remaining cards to the box.[5]

22. Create Supply: Place the trade tokens and the remaining resource tokens in piles near the map to form the supply.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook · p.4

[2] RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook · p.3 · FOR THE FIRST GAME

[4] RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook · p.14 · ADVANCED MAP BUILDING

[5] RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook · p.5

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 246 ms · ask 5619 ms · total 5872 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5872 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "SETUP To set up a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn, players perform the following steps: 1. Select Leader and Player Color: Each player takes one random leader sheet. Then, each player chooses a player color and takes the cities, caravans, control tokens, tech dial, diplomacy cards, and ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "To set up a game of Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn , players perform the following steps: Select Leader and Player Color: Each player takes one random leader sheet. Then, each player chooses a player color and takes the cities, caravans, control tokens, tech dial, diplomacy cards, and focus ca", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "The players use a predetermined map for their first game to make learning easier. Before proceeding to setup on the next page, the players construct the map shown below. Each tile is labeled with a number and letter; the numbers on the map below correspond to the tile numbers. The first-game map use", "headingPath": "FOR THE FIRST GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "Set Direction Token and Event Dial: A random player places the barbarian direction token against any edge of the map (it does not matter which direction each number points). Then, that player places the event dial next to his or her leader sheet with the pointer pointing to the helmet with the star.", "headingPath": "Blue Player's Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "6. Set Direction Token and Event Dial: A random player places the barbarian direction token against any edge of the map (it does not matter which direction each number points). Then, that player places the event dial next to his or her leader sheet with the pointer pointing to the helmet with the st", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "For all games after the first game, players use the advanced map-building rules to construct their own maps. These rules add a level of strategy and provide a different map for every game. The players construct an initial landmass, called the core , and then they take turns adding tiles to it, placi", "headingPath": "ADVANCED MAP BUILDING", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A player's turn consists of three steps: Choose a Card: The player chooses one of the five cards in his or her focus row and offsets it to indicate that it was the chosen card. Resolve the Card: The player resolves the chosen card's effect. Reset the Card: The player picks up the chosen card, shifts", "headingPath": "THE PLAYER TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029727, "snippet": "advanced map building, 14 agendas meaning of icons, 19 setup, 5 winning the game, 12 attack, 11 barbarian direction token barbarian movement, 12 setup, 5 barbarians defending, 11 moving, 12 spawning, 12 building cities, 9 building world wonders, 10 capital cities losing world wonder, 11 moving carav", "headingPath": "INDEX", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FOR THE FIRST GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ADVANCED MAP BUILDING", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 752}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 752 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 752 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 0.91669 of 3001 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 21:25 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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	SETUP	p.4	0.048131 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	FOR THE FIRST GAME	p.3	0.047371 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	Blue Player's Components	p.5	0.045921 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		p.5	0.045228 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	ADVANCED MAP BUILDING	p.14	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
#7	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	THE PLAYER TURN	p.6	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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	INDEX	p.14	0.029727 (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 43 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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	FOR THE FIRST GAME	p.3	#3	0.047371 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	INDEX	p.14	#8	0.029727 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	ADVANCED MAP BUILDING	p.14	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		p.5	#5	0.045228 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	INDEX	p.14	#11	0.027313 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	THE PLAYER TURN	p.6	#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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	SETUP	p.4	#2	0.048131 (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 Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	FOR THE FIRST GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)	ADVANCED MAP BUILDING	p.14	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Civilization: A New Dawn — Rulebook (corpus doc 752)		p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 246 ms · first delta 1175 ms · total 5872 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 246 ms · ask 5619 ms · gateway work 5872 ms · total 5872 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3298
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 893
tok/sec: 193.9 tok/sec — 893 output tokens in 4.605 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 11s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s 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 686), 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.