Ruling — Merchants of the Dark Road

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Merchants of the Dark Roadbg-300217-en-1e

To setup the game, players can work together to carry out the following steps:

1. Place the board, made up of six interlocking pieces, in the center of the table.[1]

2. Attach the magnetic market wheel.[1]

3. Place the dice, coins, lanterns, blazing quartz, horseshoes, and goods within reach of all players as the supply, stacking goods by type with their basic sides face up.[1]

4. Choose 4 building tiles (either side) and assign them randomly to the building spaces on the kingdom board.[1]

5. Roll 1 market die to randomly determine a type of goods, then rotate the market wheel so that the matching section is valued at $5.[1]

6. Place 1 market die on each of the first five sections, valued at $5 / $4 / $3 / $2 / $1 (leaving the $1 section closest to the $5 section empty).[1]

7. Set the faces of all 5 market dice to show the types of goods that match their sections.[1]

8. Separate the commissions into six stacks based on the names of the outlying towns, shuffle each stack separately, and place all six stacks face up in the Queen's Commissions area.[1]

9. Place the ruins marker in the bottom-left space of the ruins tablet in the Ruins of Yin area and place the ruins die nearby.[1]

10. Separate the event cards into two decks (the highway deck and the shortcut deck), shuffle each deck separately, and place both decks face down near the Travel area.[1]

11. Place 5 coins from the supply at the bottom of the good fortune track in the Travel area.[1]

12. Stack the wagon upgrade tiles in any order on the matching space of the good fortune track.[1]

13. Shuffle the deck of companion cards and place it face down near the Travel area.[1]

14. Reveal the top 3 companion cards and place them face up in a row next to the deck.[1]

15. Add 1 travel die from the supply to the card farthest from the deck.[1]

16. Place the dark market marker in the south space of the dark market ring in the Dark Market area.[1]

Individually, players must also perform these steps:

1. Determine a start player (Player 1).[2]

2. In clockwise seating order, each player chooses a player color and takes the matching wagon board, wagon pawn, prestige marker, and player screen.[2]

3. Place your wagon pawn on the Ringway space that is between the Ringway Inn and the Great Bazaar on the kingdom board.[2]

4. Place your prestige marker, blank side face up, on the '2' space of the prestige track on the kingdom board.[2]

5. Take 5 coins from the supply and place them behind your player screen.[2]

6. Take 7 night dice and 1 illuminated die from the supply, then:

* Place 3 night dice in your 3 locked slots, with values set to '1', '2', and '3'.[2]

* Roll the other 4 night dice and place them in your main reserve.[2]

* Roll the illuminated die and place it in your special reserve.[2]

7. Draw 1 deed card from the top of the face-down deck, look at it, and keep it face down behind your player screen.[2]

8. Take 1 horseshoe from the supply and place it in your inventory.[2]

9. Take a starting good from the supply (basic side up) based on your position in clockwise seating order and current market values:

* Player 1: A good with a current value of $5.[2]

* Player 2: A good with a current value of $4 and 1 coin.[2]

* Player 3: A good with a current value of $3 and 2 coins.[2]

* Player 4: A good with a current value of $2 and 3 coins.[2]

10. Take a starting hero card at random and place it face up in one of the hero slots above your wagon board, gaining the bonus shown.[2]

11. Take a steed card at random and place it face up to the right of your wagon board.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.6 · World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …

[2] RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook · p.7 · Merchant Setup

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 257 ms · ask 6323 ms · total 6586 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6586 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "'The Great Watchmaker has set the world of Lumi rotating but slowly, so that each cycle of day and night lasts an entire year. The spring dawn, the summer day, the autumn dusk, and the winter night each last for thirteen weeks. By this schedule we plan and profit! Winter's dark has just settled, but", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "The players must carry out these steps individually. Determine a start player (Player 1) by any method. Then, in clockwise seating order, each player chooses a player color and takes the matching wagon board, wagon pawn, prestige marker, and player screen. 13 Place your wagon pawn on the Ringway spa", "headingPath": "Merchant Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046671, "snippet": "The players can work together to carry out these steps. 2. 2 3. 3 4. 4 5. 5 Place the board, made up of six interlocking pieces, in the center of the table. Attach the magnetic market wheel. Place the dice, coins, lanterns, blazing quartz, horseshoes, and goods within reach of all players as t", "headingPath": "World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "Gain 1 illuminated die from the supply. Gain 1 illuminated die from the supply. Roll the die and place it in your special reserve. Roll the die and place it in your special reserve. Note: This is the primary way to gain Note: This is the primary way to gain new illuminated die.new illuminated die. B", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030886, "snippet": "This variant allows for less luck of the draw during game setup. Instead of dealing steed cards and starting hero cards randomly, draft them in the following manner. Shuffle the steed cards, then reveal a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one. Place these cards face up in a row on ", "headingPath": "Drafting Variant · Private Concern Variant · Blazing Quartz Mine · Icebreaker Harbor · The Oracle of Lumi · Otho's Lanternworks · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Griffin chooses a '1' night die from his main reserve and uses it to bump the '2' night die from his second locked slot into his action pool. Griffin now gets to take the special action of that slot (slot #2). Craft a basic good. To do this, refer to the crafting chart to determine which basic good ", "headingPath": "Example: · SLOT #1 · SLOT #2 · SLOT #3", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If you chose the companion with the extra travel die, add that the companion with the extra travel die, add that die too.die too. STEP 2: RESOLVE AN EVENT 1. 1. Reveal the top card of the event deck that matches Reveal the top card of the event deck that matches the chosen route and read it aloud. t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Reveal the top card of the event deck that matches the chosen route and read it aloud. Roll all of the travel dice in the current pool, group the dice by their face values, and place them next to the event card. Each traveler must take 1 travel die. The order in which those travelers get to take t", "headingPath": "STEP 2: RESOLVE AN EVENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Merchant Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1002}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1002 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1002 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 0.89272 of 2899 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 24, 2026 07:13 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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …	p.8	0.048412 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Merchant Setup	p.7	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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …	p.6	0.046671 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.15	0.046402 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Drafting Variant · Private Concern Variant · Blazing Quartz Mine · Icebreaker Harbor · The Oracle of Lumi · Otho's Lanternworks · …	p.19	0.030886 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Example: · SLOT #1 · SLOT #2 · SLOT #3	p.8	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
#7	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.14	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
#8	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 2: RESOLVE AN EVENT	p.14	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

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 53 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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …	p.6	#3	0.046671 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Playing the Game · 1. Plan · 2. Move · 3. Activate · 4. Rest · STEP 1: PLAN · …	p.8	#1	0.048412 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 4: RECEIVE GOOD FORTUNE	p.15	#10	0.029083 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	STEP 3: ACTIVATE · Districts · Buildings	p.9	#16	0.013889 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Step 1: Prepare the Caravan · Step 2: Resolve an Event · Step 3: Visit Towns · Step 4: Receive Good Fortune	p.24	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)		p.15	#4	0.046402 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Drafting Variant · Private Concern Variant · Blazing Quartz Mine · Icebreaker Harbor · The Oracle of Lumi · Otho's Lanternworks · …	p.19	#5	0.030886 (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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Merchant Setup	p.7	#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 Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	World Setup · 1. 1 · Assemble the Kingdom Board · Build the Resource Pools · Erect the Buildings · Open the Great Bazaar · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Merchants of the Dark Road — Rulebook (corpus doc 1002)	Merchant Setup	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 257 ms · first delta 1781 ms · total 6586 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 257 ms · ask 6323 ms · gateway work 6586 ms · total 6586 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3873
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 940
tok/sec: 200.2 tok/sec — 940 output tokens in 4.696 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 12s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 3s 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 932), 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.