Ruling — Islebound

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Isleboundbg-185589-en-1e

Depending on the variant being played, the setup is as follows:

Standard Setup

1. Give each player one ship board, seven coins, one set of 20 cubes of one color, a ship matching that player's cube color (placed upright in a ship standee), and three starting crew members.[1]

2. Place one cube just below the “2” on the movement track as the ship’s starting movement.[1]

3. Ensure starting crew have two members with the “administrate” skill and one with the “work” skill, and place them “on deck”.[1]

4. Place any unused starting crew in the box.[1]

5. Give each player a player-aid card.[1]

6. Decide who will be the first player and give them the first-player card.[1]

7. Starting with the last player in turn order and proceeding in reverse-turn order, each player chooses a home port by placing one of their cubes just to the left of the red banner on one of the sea ports.[1]

8. Each player places their ship in their home port.[1]

9. Assemble the sea boards in the middle of the table to make the map by placing the four sea boards together.[1]

10. Place the four sea ports in the corners of the map so they fit correctly and there is one of each port name, ensuring all text on the board faces the same direction.[1]

Advanced Sea Boards Variant

1. Use the "advanced" side of all sea boards (not a mix of advanced and standard).[2]

Six Buildings Variant

1. Use the building track token with four books and one coin, placing it to the left of the token with three books so that it is above the first card.[3]

2. Ensure six buildings are available, with the fifth and sixth from the left requiring no books.[3]

Architect Variant

1. Place book tokens and building track tokens in the box.[4]

2. At the start of the game, deal seven building cards to each player.[4]

3. Players take turns drafting these cards by selecting one and passing the rest to the left until everyone has a hand of seven cards.[4]

Above and Below (Expansion) Setup

1. Put all Islebound villagers in a plastic cup or cloth bag (randomized).[5]

2. Set up everything in Above and Below as normal, but do not yet place any Islebound villagers in the "available villagers" row on the reputation board.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook · p.6

[2] RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook · p.22 · Advanced Sea Boards · Trading · Close Quarters

[3] RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook · p.22 · Action: Raid · Six Buildings

[4] RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook · p.22 · Architect Variant

[5] RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook · p.23 · Crew in Above and Below · To use Islebound Crew as Villagers in Above and Below: · Islebound Villager Abilities

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 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 154 ms · ask 3704 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": 6, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "6 Give each player the following: one ship board, seven coins, one set of cubes of one color (20 cubes), a ship matching the player’s cube color (each player should place their ship token in one of the ship standees so that it stands upright), and three starting crew members. Place one cube just bel", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The player first rests their crew-- they move all crew member tokens that are 'below deck' in the hammock area to the 'on deck' area of their ship. If a crew member is injured, the token is not moved to the 'on deck' area, but is instead flipped face up and remains in the 'below deck' area. The play", "headingPath": "Undervall · Zilliam", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The player first rests their crew-- they move all crew members that are 'below deck' in the hammock area to the 'on deck' area of their ship. If a crew member is injured, the token is not moved to the 'on deck' area, but is instead flipped face up and remains in the 'below deck' area. After this, th", "headingPath": "Fel's Garden · Grenille · Krazk (Home Port) · Marhaven (Home Port)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Starting with the first player, players take turns moving their ships and completing actions. Each turn, a player must move at least one space and complete one action. Players may also complete as many free actions as they want before ending their turn. Example: It is Tom's turn and his ship has a s", "headingPath": "The Game · MOVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A player may purchase a building card in the building card track by paying the coin cost of the card. The coin cost is listed in the top left corner, on the renown banner hanging under the coin. The player pays the cost to the supply, and takes the card. The player places the card next to their ship", "headingPath": "Free Action: Buy a Building", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The player may choose to attack the island town in the region where their ship is located in order to take control of it. Towns with a red banner (not blue-green) below the name can be attacked. The number on the banner is the attack strength that the player needs to meet or exceed in order to take ", "headingPath": "Action: Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "When playing with this variant, as your main action on your turn (after you move), you may raid one other player's ship that is on the same region as your ship. First, you declare which ship you are attempting to raid. You then roll one die per crew member with the 'combat' skill you own that is 'on", "headingPath": "Action: Raid · Six Buildings", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "First, the player may hire a new crew member. The player may choose from the three available crew members on the renown board. The two left-most crew members cost one coin each. The third costs no coins. The new crew member goes on the player's ship board in the 'on deck' area. The remaining crew me", "headingPath": "Morlim", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Advanced Sea Boards · Trading · Close Quarters", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Action: Raid · Six Buildings", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Architect Variant", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Crew in Above and Below · To use Islebound Crew as Villagers in Above and Below: · Islebound Villager Abilities", "sharpsignalDocId": 1170}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1170 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1170 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 0.90582 of 1805 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 23:14 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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)		p.6	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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Undervall · Zilliam	p.18	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
#3	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Fel's Garden · Grenille · Krazk (Home Port) · Marhaven (Home Port)	p.16	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
#4	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	The Game · MOVE	p.8	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
#5	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Free Action: Buy a Building	p.13	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
#6	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Action: Attack	p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Action: Raid · Six Buildings	p.22	0.030214 (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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Morlim	p.16	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 33 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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Advanced Sea Boards · Trading · Close Quarters	p.22	#11	0.028589 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Architect Variant	p.22	#14	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
#3	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Action: Raid · Six Buildings	p.22	#7	0.030214 (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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Game End	p.14	#16	0.013699 (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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Crew in Above and Below · To use Islebound Crew as Villagers in Above and Below: · Islebound Villager Abilities	p.23	#12	0.028219 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Welcome to the Archipelago · How do you win?	p.2	#10	0.028718 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	The Game · MOVE	p.8	#4	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 Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)		p.6	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Advanced Sea Boards · Trading · Close Quarters	p.22	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Action: Raid · Six Buildings	p.22	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Architect Variant	p.22	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Islebound — Rulebook (corpus doc 1170)	Crew in Above and Below · To use Islebound Crew as Villagers in Above and Below: · Islebound Villager Abilities	p.23	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 154 ms · first delta 1027 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 154 ms · ask 3704 ms · gateway work 3862 ms · total 3862 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3139
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 547
tok/sec: 199.6 tok/sec — 547 output tokens in 2.741 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 49s 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 2s 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 1100), 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.