RuleSage cited table rulings
← Brass: Birmingham

You asked

During the Canal Era, may I build an industry in a location my network reaches only through a rail link I have not built?

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

Asked with: Brass: Birminghambg-224517-en-1e

I looked through Brass: Birmingham'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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook · p.6 · Network During Canal Era:
You may not build rail Links. You may build canal Links on undeveloped canal lines I . You may build a maximum of 1 canal Link for £ 3.
RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook · p.6 · Network During Rail Era:
You may not build canal Links. You may build rail Links on undeveloped railroad lines J . You may build 1 rail Link for £ 5. In a single Network action, you may build 2 rail Links for £ 15, if you also consume 1 beer. This beer must be consumed from a Brewery (not a Merchant beer). Remember: If cons
RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook · p.7 · BEGINNER TIPS
Do not be afraid of taking loans. Your income level at the end of the game is not worth VPs. It is not uncommon for experienced players to win the game despite having a low income level. Level 2 or greater Industry tiles are not removed at the end of the Canal Era, so could score twice if built earl
RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook · p.6 · Canal Era Building
You may have a maximum of 1 Industry tile per location, but may have an Industry tile in the same location as other players. Industry tiles with a to the left of their slot on your Player Mat may not be built.
RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook · p.5 · CONNECTED LOCATIONS
Two locations are considered 'connected' to each other if you can trace a route of Link tiles (owned by any player) from one location D to the other E . Coal is required to build rail Links and certain Industry tiles. To consume coal, a rail Link or Industry tile must be connected to a source of coa
🔧 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 178 ms · ask 1134 ms · total 1316 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 1316 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You may not build rail Links. You may build canal Links on undeveloped canal lines I . You may build a maximum of 1 canal Link for £ 3.", "headingPath": "Network During Canal Era:", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "You may not build canal Links. You may build rail Links on undeveloped railroad lines J . You may build 1 rail Link for £ 5. In a single Network action, you may build 2 rail Links for £ 15, if you also consume 1 beer. This beer must be consumed from a Brewery (not a Merchant beer). Remember: If cons", "headingPath": "Network During Rail Era:", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Do not be afraid of taking loans. Your income level at the end of the game is not worth VPs. It is not uncommon for experienced players to win the game despite having a low income level. Level 2 or greater Industry tiles are not removed at the end of the Canal Era, so could score twice if built earl", "headingPath": "BEGINNER TIPS", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "You may have a maximum of 1 Industry tile per location, but may have an Industry tile in the same location as other players. Industry tiles with a to the left of their slot on your Player Mat may not be built.", "headingPath": "Canal Era Building", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Two locations are considered 'connected' to each other if you can trace a route of Link tiles (owned by any player) from one location D to the other E . Coal is required to build rail Links and certain Industry tiles. To consume coal, a rail Link or Industry tile must be connected to a source of coa", "headingPath": "CONNECTED LOCATIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Discard 1 card for every single action you perform, including passing. Only Build actions need a specific card. You can perform the same action twice in a turn. For instance, you may place 1 or 2 rail Links with the Network action, then use the Network action again to place 1 or 2 rail Links. During", "headingPath": "THINGS TO REMEMBER", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Brass: Birmingham tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in the West Midlands during England's Industrial Revolution, between the years 1770-1870. During the game, you will expand your empire by establishing canals and rails, and building and developing various industries, including Cotton Mills", "headingPath": "AN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "You may build multiple Industry tiles in each location. Industry tiles with a to the left of their slot on your Player Mat may not be built. To remove these tiles (and access the higher-level tiles) you must perform the Develop action.", "headingPath": "Rail Era Building", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}]
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 86 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 86 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 21:36 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Network During Canal Era: p.6 0.032787 (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)) 135
#2 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Network During Rail Era: 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
#3 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) BEGINNER TIPS p.7 0.031746 (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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Canal Era Building p.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)) 209
#5 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) CONNECTED LOCATIONS p.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)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) THINGS TO REMEMBER p.7 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) AN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Rail Era Building 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)) 235

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 66 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Network During Canal Era: p.6 #1 0.032787 (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
#2 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Network During Rail Era: p.6 #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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#3 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Rail Era Building 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
#4 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) ACTIONS LIST p.4 #29 0.011236 (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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) UNDERSTANDING YOUR NETWORKS p.7 #11 0.014085 (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
#6 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) BEGINNER TIPS p.7 #3 0.031746 (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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) Canal Era Building p.6 #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
#8 RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) THINGS TO REMEMBER p.7 #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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 178 ms · first delta 1201 ms · total 1316 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 178 ms · ask 1134 ms · gateway work 1316 ms · total 1316 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1681
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
187.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.048 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 22h, 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.
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
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 17), 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.