Ruling — Messina 1347

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Messina 1347bg-238799-en-1e

The City of Messina

1. Separate the neighborhood hexes into three classes: A, B, and C.[1]

2. For A hexes, remove those that do not match the current number of players and form a stack of the appropriate A hexes.[1]

3. Add one B hex, chosen at random, to the A hex stack and mix them face down.[1]

4. Deal out hexes face up in a random order to build the city.[1]

5. Place the four harbor hexes at the four corners so they fit the shape of Messina.[1]

6. Mix up the stack of C hexes face down, place the remaining B hex face down on top of that stack, and place the stack where it is easy to reach.[1]

Tiles and Tokens

1. Separate Docking Tiles into a facedown stack and shuffle them.[2]

2. Sort Boat Tiles into stacks by number, shuffle each stack, and stack them in order with 1 on top.[2]

3. Separate Quarantine Cabin Improvement Tiles randomly into three equal stacks, place them on the scoreboard face down, and turn up the top tile in each stack.[2]

4. Separate Wagon Tiles into five pairs, randomize each pair face down, and make two stacks using wagons 1 to 5 in order (with wagon 1 on top, face up).[2]

5. Sort Workshop Tiles by era (I or II) and citizen type, shuffle all six stacks, place the three era I stacks on the scoreboard face down (turning up the top tile in each), and set the three era II stacks aside face down.[2]

6. Keep fire tokens, major fire tokens, rat tokens, lumber tokens, and citizen tokens close at hand.[1]

7. Use the appropriate number of plague cubes based on player count: 16 for two players, 18 for three players, or 24 for four players.[1]

Player Setup

1. Each player chooses a color.[3]

2. Take the player board, figures, cubes, counters, and overseer tokens in your color, as well as a scroll board that fits beside your player board.[3]

3. Keep 3 of your figures near your board and put 2 figures in the token supply.[3]

4. Place 3 cubes at the bottom of the three tracks on your scroll board.[3]

5. Take one counter from each player and place them in a random order on the player order indicator on the scoreboard.[3]

6. Place your color's overseer tokens on the corresponding starting spaces near the center of your player board.[3]

Round I Setup

1. Draw the top docking tile from its stack to determine which dock gets the boat.[4]

2. Place the top boat tile in one of the dock's spaces, face up, and give it 1 plague cube.[4]

3. Turn the window of the population wheel 1 space clockwise.[4]

4. Add 1 plague cube to every hex with a rat matching the icon shown in the window.[4]

5. Add 1 citizen of each of the three classes to each hex that matches the color shown on the wheel (orange hexes get a nun, white hexes get a craftsman, and blue hexes get an aristocrat).[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.4 · Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.5 · Other Tiles

[3] RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.6 · Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP

[4] RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook · p.7 · Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn

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 190 ms · ask 4740 ms · total 4936 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4936 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Each player chooses a color. Take the player board, the figures, the cubes, the counters, and the overseer tokens in your color. You also take a scroll board, which fits beside your player board as shown below. Keep 3 of your figures near your board for now. You will send them to Messina on your fir", "headingPath": "Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "The City of Messina: Messina is built of hexagonal neighborhood tiles. Separate the neighborhood hexes into three classes A , B , and C . Some of the A hexes are not intended to be used in all player counts. Sort through the A hexes and remove those that do not match the current number of players. R", "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Gain 1 coin token. Gain 1 lumber token. Gain 1 fire token. Gain 1 major fire token. Advance on one track of your scroll board. Advance on the city register (for free). Advance on the church regis- ter (for free). Immediately score the indi- cated number of points. Advance one overseer of your choice", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.047183, "snippet": "Advance the round counter to the next round. Lay all lieutenant figures in Messina flat on their hexes to show that they have not been used yet in the new round. Remove citizen tokens from hexes that have plague cubes. Check the round info table to see which register has priority this round. Rearran", "headingPath": "Setup for Next Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Choose an available workshop from the scoreboard and turn up the tile below it. Pay the cost and place the workshop in one of the slots alongside your board. (If you somehow manage to get more than 6 workshops, just keep them all in roughly the same place.) You may move a citizen of the appropriate ", "headingPath": "WORKSHOPS · WAGONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "The other tiles need to be separated into stacks and shuffled. Docking Tiles are shuffled into a facedown stack. Whenever this stack is empty, reshuffle all the tiles to make a new stack. Boat Tiles are sorted into stacks by number. Shuffle each stack then stack them in order with 1 on top. Place th", "headingPath": "Other Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.044343, "snippet": "You are now ready to add boats, plague cubes, and citizens to Messina. In round I, 1 boat arrives: Draw the top docking tile from its stack to determine which dock gets the boat. Place the top boat tile in one of the dock's spaces, face up. Give that boat tile 1 plague cube. Now the plague spreads t", "headingPath": "Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After taking penalties for your rat tokens, evaluate your final position on each register. If there are points shown on your current space, score those points at this time. On the popularity register, players also get points for being farther ahead. In a two-player game, the first player gets 5 poin", "headingPath": "POINTS ON REGISTERS · REPOPULATED NEIGHBORHOODS · SCROLL BOARD · REMAINING TOKENS · The Winner", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Other Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 764}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 764 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 764 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 0.90063 of 2224 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 18:41 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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP	p.6	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Game Setup	p.4	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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)		p.20	0.047379 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Setup for Next Round	p.16	0.047183 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	WORKSHOPS · WAGONS	p.12	0.046154 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Other Tiles	p.5	0.045037 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn	p.7	0.044343 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	POINTS ON REGISTERS · REPOPULATED NEIGHBORHOODS · SCROLL BOARD · REMAINING TOKENS · The Winner	p.17	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

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 35 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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP	p.6	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Setup for Next Round · End of Game · Final Scoring	p.17	#10	0.02879 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Setup for Next Round	p.16	#4	0.047183 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)		p.20	#3	0.047379 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Other Tiles	p.5	#6	0.045037 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn	p.7	#7	0.044343 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Register Priority Tile · Solo Variant · Setup · Lieutenants · Opponent's Turns	p.19	#9	0.029437 (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 Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Game Setup	p.4	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Game Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Other Tiles	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Player Setup · Play Order · ADVANCED GAME SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Messina 1347 — Rulebook (corpus doc 764)	Round I Setup · A Boat Docks · Population Wheel · Gameplay · Your turn	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 190 ms · first delta 1298 ms · total 4936 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 190 ms · ask 4740 ms · gateway work 4936 ms · total 4936 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4052
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 717
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 717 output tokens in 3.572 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 5h, 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 698), 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.