Ruling — Dinosaur Island

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dinosaur Islandbg-221194-en-1e

Based on the provided sources, the setup involves the following steps:

Main Game Setup

1. Position the marketplace board, research center board, and track board centrally, within reach of all players, leaving room along the edges for individual player areas.[1]

2. Pile all 81 income tokens off to the side to create the bank.[1]

3. Place the 54 dinosaurs, 29 paddock tiles, and 12 modifier tokens next to the bank to create the supply.[1]

4. Put all 80 visitors in the cloth bag and place the bag in the supply.[1]

5. Draw 2 DNA dice per player, plus 1 more die, at random to create the dice pool, and return any remaining dice to the box.[1]

6. Shuffle the 22 specialist cards and place the stack face-down in its corresponding slot in the marketplace.[1]

7. Shuffle the 30 attraction tiles and the 25 regular lab upgrade tiles and stack them in their corresponding slots (removing tiles marked '4+' in a 3-player game, or '3+' and '4+' in a 2-player game).[1]

8. Stack the 4 'Dino Research II' lab upgrade tiles and 4 'DNA Refinement II' lab upgrade tiles face-up in their reserved slots.[1]

9. Draw the top 4 attraction tiles and place 1 in each market row (from the $5 row to the $2 row) arranged by cost.[1]

1<0xC2><0xA0>0. Draw the top 4 lab upgrade tiles and place 1 in each market row.[1]

11. Draw the top 4 specialist cards and place 1 in each market row.[1]

12. Separate the 17 dino recipe tiles into three stacks by category (large carnivores, small carnivores, and herbivores), shuffle each stack facedown, place them in their corresponding slots on the research center, and flip the top tile of each stack face-up.[1]

13. Separate the 39 objective cards into three stacks by type (short, medium, and long), choose a single stack based on desired game length, and reveal a number of objective cards equal to the number of players plus one, placing them face-up.[1]

14. (If playing with plot twists) Shuffle all 11 plot twist cards facedown, draw 2 at random and place them face-up, and return the others to the box.[2]

Individual Player Setup

1. Each player takes 1 lab board, 1 park board, 9 workers, 3 scientists, 5 corporation tokens, 10 marker cubes of their own color, and 6 limit cubes.[2]

2. Place your 2 player boards in front of you, with the lab board on the left and the park board on the right, leaving room to the right of the lab board for specialist cards.[3]

3. Put 4 workers near the top of your lab (on the corporate logo) to create your worker pool, and put 4 more workers in the supply.[3]

4. Put 3 scientists just above your lab to create your research pool.[4]

5. Place a limit cube at “4” on each basic DNA track (blue, pink, purple) and at “2” on each advanced DNA track (green, red, orange) in the cold storage chart on the left side of your lab.[4]

6. Place a marker at “1” on each basic DNA track and at “0” on each advanced DNA track.[4]

7. Place 1 dinosaur in the paddock in the upper-left corner of your park.[4]

8. Place 1 marker on the public excitement track on the track board at “1”.[4]

9. Place a marker at “10” on the score track on the track board.[4]

10. Put 1 marker on the threat indicator on the right side of your lab at “1”.[4]

11. Put 1 marker on the security indicator on the right side of your lab at “1”.[4]

12. Choose a first player (the player who most recently extracted DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber, or if no one has, the player who most recently visited a theme park) and give them the first player token.[3]

13. Arrange the turn order track so that turn order is clockwise from the first player.[3]

14. Give the first player $15 in income, with each successive player receiving $1 more than the previous player.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook · p.4 · MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives

[2] RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook · p.4 · 7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces

[3] RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook · p.5

[4] RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook · p.6

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 184 ms · ask 6291 ms · total 6478 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6478 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "1 Map Out the Game's Footprint Position the marketplace board , research center board , and track board centrally, within reach of all players. Be sure to leave plenty of room along the edges for each player's individual area. Off to the side, pile all 81 income tokens ; this is the bank . Next to t", "headingPath": "MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Gain any 2 basic DNA $2$2 Gain any 2 advanced DNA $5$5 Gain any 1 advanced DNA $4$4 Gain any 3 basic DNA $3$3 Phase 2Phase 2 then discard 1 item from $2 row then discard 1 item from $5 row then discard 1 item from $4 row then discard 1 item from $3 row Phase 5Phase 5 CLEANUP PHASECLEANUP PHASE 99 Ch", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "remaining worker on the turn order track. Lastly, put your 3 scientists just above your lab; this is your research pool. 33 Gain Starting DNA Place a limit cube at “4” on each of the basic DNA tracks (i.e., blue, pink, purple) and at “2” on each of the advanced DNA tracks (i.e., green, red, orange) ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "Shuffle all 11 plot twist cards facedown, then draw 2 at random and place them face-up. The rules on these cards are now in effect for the remainder of the game. (If the second plot twist card would contradict the first, discard the second and redraw.) Return the other plot twist cards to the box. E", "headingPath": "7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "RESEARCH PHASE To begin this phase, the first player rolls all dice in the DNA dice pool and places those rolled dice along the top of the research center, so that there is one die per slot. (It doesn’t matter which die is in which slot.) Then, in turn order, each player assigns one of their scienti", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "• Instead of the standard objective cards, use the solo objective cards. Shuffle all 16, then draw 10. Of those 10, choose 7 that will be in play this game, and place them face- up. Take the 3 cards that were not chosen and shuffle them together with the 6 that were not drawn, giving you a face-down", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If a given stack is empty, shuffle the corresponding discard pile to form a new stack. (Note: Do not rearrange the attractions in order of cost; that only occurs during initial setup.) Reveal New Dino Recipes Check each stack of dino recipe tiles on the research center board. Turn the top tile of ea", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.029469, "snippet": "Phase 4 Phase 4 Phase 4 Phase 4 Fun house Junior Coaster Dinosaur Fryland Jurassic Pork X1 Brachiosaurus X1Compsognathus X1Tyrannosaurus Rex X2 X3 X 1 1 1 6 6 4 4 4 9 9 11 11 16 16 14 14 19 19 21 2624 29 31 41 36 46 34 44 39 49 2 2 2 7 7 5 5 10 3 3 3 8 8 12 12 17 17 15 15 20 20 13 13 18 18 22 2725 3", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 391}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 391 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 391 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 0.88066 of 3025 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 21:01 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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives	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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.5	0.048652 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.6	0.047123 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces	p.4	0.045002 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.17	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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.15	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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.17	0.029469 (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 37 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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives	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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.6	#3	0.047123 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.5	#2	0.048652 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.6	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.8	#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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.17	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.15	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces	p.4	#4	0.045002 (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 Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	MAIN GAME SETUP<< · 2 Establish the Dice Pool · 3 Place the Market Stacks · 4 Seed the Market Rows · 5 Place the Research Stacks · 6 Reveal End-Game Objectives	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)	7 Prepare the Plot Twists · Distribute Player Pieces	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Dinosaur Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 391)		p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 184 ms · first delta 1462 ms · total 6478 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 184 ms · ask 6291 ms · gateway work 6478 ms · total 6478 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3521
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 993
tok/sec: 201.6 tok/sec — 993 output tokens in 4.925 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 320), 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.