Ruling — Gùgōng

← Gùgōng

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Gùgōngbg-250458-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Place the Game Board in the middle of your playing table, on the side corresponding to the number of players.[1]

2. Place all players' Travellers next to the board.[1]

3. Place all players' Envoys on the starting location of the Palace of Heavenly Purity Track.[1]

4. Place all players' Ships next to their Player Board.[1]

5. Place the Next Start Player Medal on the appropriate space next to the card location of the Intrigue Track.[1]

6. Place all players' Intrigue Markers on the starting location of the Intrigue Track, with the starting player's marker at the bottom and continuing in turn order clockwise.[1]

7. Shuffle all the Travel Tokens and randomly place 1 faceup on each city on the Travel location, then stack the remaining tokens on 2 facedown draw piles of equal size on the indicated locations.[1]

8. Place the 1 VP Marker on the '0' spot of the Victory Points (VP) Track.[1]

9. Roll the 3 Destiny Dice and place them on the indicated spaces on the top edge of the Game Board.[2][3]

10. Place the Day Tracker on the first space of the Day Track.[2]

11. Randomly determine a start player through a preferred method and use the Start Player Marker to indicate this player.[2]

12. For a solo game:

* Set up the board for a normal 2-player game, with these exceptions:

* Shuffle the 7 Gift Cards marked with the symbol and randomly pick 1.[4]

* Remember the number you picked, place the 7 Gift Cards randomly on the Game Board, and place Meng's Double Servant next to the Card with the number you picked.[4]

* Only use the basic Travel Tokens, not the Bonus Travel Tokens.[4]

* Choose the 2 sets of cards you'll be playing with (options include Player 4, Player 2, or Player 1 cards).[4]

* Shuffle Meng's cards and place them facedown next to his Player Board.[5]

* Shuffle the Automa deck and place it facedown next to Meng's Player Board.[5]

* Use Servants of a third (neutral) player colour to track Meng's Harbour rewards.[5]

* If Meng starts with 5 Gift Cards, indicate this by placing a neutral Servant in the appropriate Harbour Reward space of his Player Board.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook · p.2 · R U L E B O O K

[2] RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME MATERI

[3] RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice

[4] RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook · p.16 · SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase

[5] RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook · p.16 · Meng

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 145 ms · ask 3711 ms · total 3862 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3862 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The board should be set up for a normal 2-player game, with these exceptions: Shuffle the 7 Gift Cards marked with the symbol and randomly pick 1. Remember the number you picked, place the 7 Gift Cards randomly on the Game Board and place Meng's Double Servant next to the Card with the number you pi", "headingPath": "SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "'Gùgōng' is played in 4 rounds, representing 4 Days. Each Day consists of 3 Phases: The Morning Phase , where players prepare the game for the coming Day. The Day Phase , where players perform multiple actions. The Night Phase , where players check if they have successfully matched cards in their di", "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "Player 5 cards Player 3 cards Player 2 cards Shuffle Meng's cards and place them facedown next to his Player Board. Shuffle the Automa deck and place it facedown next to Meng' s Player Board. These cards will determine where Meng exchanges gifts each turn. For an easy game, use only 1 Special Automa", "headingPath": "Meng", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "3 Destiny Dice Roll the 3 dice and place them on the indicated spaces. These determine which Gift Cards will grant you extra Servants and maybe even Victory Points at the end of each round. 1 Day Tracker Place it on the first space of the Day Track. It will indicate the current round. 1 Start Player", "headingPath": "GAME MATERI", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When all players have run out of Gift Cards in the Day Phase, the Night Phase starts. This is a 2-step process: All players take their Gift Cards from their discard pile cards into their hands and simultaneously check whether their values match the values of the Destiny Dice. For each match, you may", "headingPath": "PHASE 3: THE NIGHT PHASE · Step 1: Check Destiny Dice values · Step 2: Move all Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "1 Game Board Place the Game Board in the middle of your playing table. Place it on the side cor- responding to the number of players, as depicted on the lower left corner of the board. The Game Board depicts the Forbidden City and its surroundings. It shows the 7 available actions of the game, where", "headingPath": "R U L E B O O K", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029877, "snippet": "Randomly place the 7 Gift Cards marked with the symbol faceup on the 7 Gift Card locations. Shuffle the cards marked with the symbol, and place them facedown near the Game Board as a draw pile. Each player receives a set of 4 Gift Cards, as determined by the number of segments of the fan icon that a", "headingPath": "38 Gift Cards · 20 Jades · 15 Decree Tiles · 1 Player Board* · 12 Servants*", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "7 Officials oversee the main functions of the Chinese State, represented by 7 Gift Card locations on the Game Board. When you exchange a Gift Card with 1 of these 7 Officials, you may perform the action on this location. Return the indicated number of Servants from the Servant Pool on your Player Bo", "headingPath": "LOCATION ACTIONS · Iconography", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "R U L E B O O K", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME MATERI", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Meng", "sharpsignalDocId": 480}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 480 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 480 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 0.90753 of 1752 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 22:39 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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase	p.16	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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice	p.4	0.046898 (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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	Meng	p.16	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
#4	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME MATERI	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	PHASE 3: THE NIGHT PHASE · Step 1: Check Destiny Dice values · Step 2: Move all Ships	p.14	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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	R U L E B O O K	p.2	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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	38 Gift Cards · 20 Jades · 15 Decree Tiles · 1 Player Board* · 12 Servants*	p.3	0.029877 (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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	LOCATION ACTIONS · Iconography	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

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 38 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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase	p.16	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME MATERI	p.2	#4	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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	Meng	p.16	#3	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
#4	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice	p.4	#2	0.046898 (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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GENERAL ICONOGRAPHY · LIST OF TRAVEL TOKENS	p.20	#15	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 Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	LOCATION ACTIONS · Iconography	p.6	#8	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
#7	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	R U L E B O O K	p.2	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	SPECIAL AUTOMA CARDS	p.18	#11	0.02938 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	R U L E B O O K	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME MATERI	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	GAME OVERVIEW · PHASE 1: THE MORNING PHASE · Step 1: Determine start player · Step 2: Refill the map · Step 3: Roll the Destiny Dice	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	SETUP (SOLO) · Human · Morning Phase · Day Phase	p.16	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Gùgōng — Rulebook (corpus doc 480)	Meng	p.16	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 145 ms · first delta 1047 ms · total 3862 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 145 ms · ask 3711 ms · gateway work 3862 ms · total 3862 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2851
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 550
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 550 output tokens in 2.740 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 7s 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 411), 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.