Ruling — Inventors of the South Tigris

← Inventors of the South Tigris

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Inventors of the South Tigrisbg-378387-en-1e

To set up the game, follow these steps:

Main Board Setup

1. Place the Main Board in the middle of the play area.[1]

2. Shuffle all Device Boards, placing them in a facedown Draw Pile near the Main Board.[1]

3. From the Device Board Draw Pile, reveal and place 4 faceup in a column below the left end of the Main Board, then reveal 2 more in a separate column to the/right of the first column.[1]

4. For each Device Board in the second column, place 1 Black Influence on the Builder slot.[1]

5. Shuffle all Device Cards to form a facedown Draw Pile near the Main Board, leaving space for a Discard Pile.[1]

6. From the Device Card Draw Pile, reveal and place 1 Device Card faceup onto the highest Device Board in the first column, and reveal and place 1 Device Card on each of the Device Boards in the second column, placing them over the right half of the boards so artwork lines up.[1]

7. Shuffle the 3 Neutral Invention Tiles and place 1 faceup (showing 2 Influence icons) over the bottom-left corner of the highest Device Board in the first column, and place the other Neutral Invention Tiles facedown in the top-right corner of the Device Boards in the second column.[1]

8. Place all Silver and Dice into a Main Supply near the Main Board.[1]

9. Shuffle all Pass Tiles and place 1 faceup onto each rectangular space in the top-right area of the Main Board, returning unused tiles to the box.[1]

10. Separate the Research Tiles by their backs, shuffle each set separately, and place them in facedown Draw Piles on their matching spaces of the Main Board.[2]

11. Set aside the 6 Starting Workshop Tiles (grey backs).[2]

12. Shuffle all other Workshop Tiles together, placing 9 of these in a facedown Draw Pile at the far-right end of the Main Board.[2]

13. From the remaining Workshop Tiles, place a number of them facedown onto each of the 14 spaces along the River, noting the icons on each space for the required amount.[2]

14. Turn over all 5 Workshop Tile Draw Piles in the left section of the Main Board and return any unused Workshop Tiles to the box.[2]

2-Player Setup Changes

1. Place only 1 Device Board in the second column and return unused Black Influence and Neutral Invention Tiles to the box.[2]

2. Shuffle the 6 Dummy Cards into a facedown Draw Pile near the Main Board and place the 3 Dummy Tokens nearby.[2]

3. Select an unused player colour and place its Ship on the left-most space of the River.[2]

4. Place 1 of the Tents and 12 Influence of that colour in a nearby Supply, and return all other player components of that colour to the box.[2]

5. Place the Envoy (Black Worker) in the indicated space to the right of the 4th Pass Tile.[2]

6. Set up the opponent (Dummy Player) by separating the 15 Scheme Cards by type and shuffling each type into its own facedown Reserve Pile.[3]

7. Place the opponent's 3 Workers next to their Worker Scheme Reserve Pile.[3]

8. Place 1 of the opponent's Influence into each Guild and the rest in a nearby Supply.[3]

9. Place the opponent's 4 Tents nearby and their Ship on the left-most River space of the Main Board.[3]

10. Shuffle the opponent's Invention Tiles and place them in a facedown Draw Pile.[3]

11. Only reveal 3 Device Boards in the first column for the solo/opponent setup.[3]

12. Give yourself the First Player Marker.[3]

13. Carry out the 'Start of Round' phase for your opponent (skipping this in the first Round).[3]

Player Board Setup

1. Each player selects a player colour.[4]

2. Give each player 1 Player Board and 1 of each Tower Tile.[4]

3. Place Tower Tiles over the tower illustration of the Player Board, with Tile 1 in the lowest space, Tile 2 above it, and so on.[4]

4. If playing with fewer than 4 players, place a Tent Tile over the matching section of the Player Board, with the side faceup showing the correct player count.[4]

5. Each player takes 1 of each Camel Tile, placing them near the top-right corner of their Player Board (the 'plus' icon tile on the left and the 'flip' icon tile on the right).[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.4 · setup: Main Board

[2] RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.5 · SETUP CHANGES FOR 2 PLAYERS

[3] RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.26 · Setup · Gameplay Overview

[4] RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook · p.6 · setup: PLAYER Boards

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 148 ms · ask 6156 ms · total 6307 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6307 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Each player takes the indicated coloured Die from the Main Supply and places it on the matching colour space at the bottom of the Study on their Player Board. Its value does not matter. 13 This player places a Charcoal Die in their Study. Each player places the indicated coloured Die and 5 White Dic", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047493, "snippet": "Have each player select a player colour, then follow these steps to set up each Player Board area: Give each player 1 Player Board and 1 of each Tower Tile. Note the small numbers in the top-right corner of each Tower Tile. The fronts show numbers 1-5, while the backs show numbers 6-10. Have each pl", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "When playing the 3 Round game, players each start with 1 of their Tents on the top space of their Setup Card. These provide goals that players can achieve throughout the game. Goals must be achieved in order, from top to bottom. As soon as players achieve the next step, they move their Tent down 1 s", "headingPath": "Setup card - goals", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.046394, "snippet": "Set up Inventors as you would for a 4-Round 2-player game (including the Dummy Player), with a few changes. Do not follow the player setup on pages 6-7 for your opponent. Instead, assign them a player colour, giving them only the following items: Separate the 15 Scheme Cards by their type. Shuffle a", "headingPath": "Setup · Gameplay Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.044136, "snippet": "If playing with 2 players, a few quick steps need to be resolved for the Dummy Player at the start of each Round: Turn over the top Dummy Card from the top of the Draw Pile, placing it on top of any previously drawn Dummy Cards. 1 Place Influence of the Dummy Player's colour in the indicated Guilds.", "headingPath": "start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Follow these steps to set up the Main Board area: Place the Main Board in the middle of the play area. 1 Shuffle all Device Boards, placing them in a facedown Draw Pile near the Main Board. 2 From the Device Board Draw Pile, reveal and place 4 faceup in a column below the left end of the Main Board.", "headingPath": "setup: Main Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "4 Each player places their 25 Influence nearby their Player Board. 5 Each player places their 4 Tents on the spaces near the top of their Player Board (or on their Tent Tile with fewer than 4 players). 6 Each player shuffles their 6 Invention Tiles, placing them faceup randomly across the 6 spaces i", "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When choosing to Build, players must follow these steps in order: Place 1-2 of their available Dice onto a Camel space. 1 Select which previously Invented Device in the left column they will Build. The total value of the Dice they just placed must be equal to or higher than the value required by tha", "headingPath": "player turns: build", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "setup: Main Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP CHANGES FOR 2 PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · Gameplay Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "setup: PLAYER Boards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1221}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1221 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1221 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 0.90787 of 3289 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 23:04 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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.7	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
#2	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	0.047493 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup card - goals	p.30	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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup · Gameplay Overview	p.26	0.046394 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income	p.13	0.044136 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: Main Board	p.4	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
#7	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	player turns: build	p.16	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))	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 45 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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup · Gameplay Overview	p.26	#4	0.046394 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup card - goals	p.30	#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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: Main Board	p.4	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	SETUP CHANGES FOR 2 PLAYERS	p.5	#16	0.014286 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	start of round: 2 player round setup · start of round: royalties and income	p.13	#5	0.044136 (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 Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.7	#1	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
#7	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	#2	0.047493 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: Main Board	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	SETUP CHANGES FOR 2 PLAYERS	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	Setup · Gameplay Overview	p.26	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Inventors of the South Tigris — Rulebook (corpus doc 1221)	setup: PLAYER Boards	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 148 ms · first delta 1120 ms · total 6307 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 148 ms · ask 6156 ms · gateway work 6307 ms · total 6307 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3688
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.101 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 52s 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 5s 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 1151), 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.