Ruling — Arborea

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Arboreabg-371077-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

Standard Setup

1. Place the main board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Randomly place the 8 Pilgrimage Track Tiles on the 4 tracks on the board, with 2 on the outermost spaces of each track; if a tile shows a Season icon, orient it so the square with no icon is closest to the center of the board.[1]

3. Place 1 random Bonus Tile on the top space of each column of the Borderlands (top-left corner of the main board) and return remaining Bonus tiles to the box.[1]

4. Place all Creatures above the Borderlands of the main board to form the Creature supply.[1]

5. Place both pieces of each Biome Tile on their matching '0' spots on the Biomeness Reserve.[1]

6. Place 1 Random Season Tile at the top of each Season Track and return remaining Season Tiles to the box.[1]

7. Place 1 Sun Tracker on the Sun Track in the corresponding spot according to player count; for a 2-player game, stack the remaining 2 Sun Trackers on the shown space at the end of the Sun Track.[1]

8. Place the 5 Starting Ecosystem Cards to the side.[1]

9. Sort the remaining Ecosystem cards into separate decks by color, shuffle each deck separately, and place them face up over the top right side of the board, ordered by color (red, then yellow, teal, and purple) and by increasing Biome requirements.[1]

10. Each player takes a Player Board, Player Aid, and all components of their color: 8 wooden cubes (placed on designated Sage Gift spaces), 2 Elder Villagers (placed in Supply), 1 Young Villager (placed in Supply), 2 Young Villagers (placed in their unique Reserve), and 3 Veteran Villagers (placed in their unique Reserve).[2] (Note: In a 2-player game, 1 Veteran is placed in your supply instead of a Young Villager).[2]

11. Each player takes a random Starting Ecosystem Card and places it near their player board, returning any remaining cards to the box.[2]

12. Randomly select the first player; turn order proceeds clockwise.[2]

13. Each player takes 1 Red "3-Biome" Ecosystem Card from the top of the leftmost Ecosystem Deck and places it above their player board.[2]

14. In turn order, players place Spirit Trackers on the Spirit Track (1st player on '0', 2nd player on '2', 3rd player on '4', etc.).[2]

15. Each player places 1 of their remaining wooden cubes at the start of each Season Track.[2]

16. Each player places 1 Regeneration Point Tracker on the '0' spot of the Regeneration Track and another on the '000' spot.[2]

17. Starting with the last player in turn order and proceeding in counter-clockwise order, each player takes 1 Villager from their Supply and places it on a Pilgrimage Track, then advances that track 1 space (players may choose the same track as another, advancing it again).[2] (Note: The first player in turn order should place their Villager last).[2]

Solo Mode Setup

1. Setup the game as normal for a 2-player game, but with the following changes: [3]

2. Choose a difficulty for Feronia between 2 (very easy) and 7 (very hard), or higher for more challenge.[3]

3. Give Feronia a Solo Player Board.[3]

4. Shuffle the Solo Deck and place it face down beside Feronia's board.[3]

5. Choose 3 unused component colors for Feronia and return all components of the 4th unused color to the box.[3]

6. Give Feronia 5 Elder Villagers (any combination of the 3 colors) on her supply and return the remaining Elder Villager to the box.[3]

7. Give Feronia 1 Young Villager (any of the 3 colors) at the start of her Ecosystem track on her board.[3]

8. Give Feronia 1 Veteran Villager and 2 RP Trackers (any of the 3 colors); place 1 of each on the "0" space of the RP track and the other RP Tracker on the "zero hundreds" tracking spot.[3]

9. Return all remaining components of Feronia's 3 colors to the box.[3]

10. Take a random starting Ecosystem and Biome card for yourself and return the remaining 4 to the box.[3]

11. Give Feronia the top Ecosystem card from each deck: place the card

[1] RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook · p.4 · SET U P

[2] RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook · p.5 · P LA Y ER SET U P

[3] RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook · p.19 · Solo Mode Components · Base Solo Mode Setup · Components for Feronia · Feronia's Ecosystem Cards

Rule found, game 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 151 ms · ask 6482 ms · total 9310 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 2674 ms · generation 6636 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Each player takes a Player Board, Player Aid, and all components of their colour: 8 Wooden cubes , placed on their designated Sage Gift spaces, 2 Elder Villagers , placed in your Supply. 1 Young Villager , placed in your Supply, In a 2-player game: 1 Veteran is placed in your supply instead. 2 Young", "headingPath": "P LA Y ER SET U P", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.046751, "snippet": "As Feronia is the 2nd player, she adds a Villager to a track before you do, as part of the setup process. Draw the first card from the Solo Deck, place a Villager from Feronia's supply to the track labeled '1' on this Solo card (as explained on the next page), then advance this track 1 step\". After ", "headingPath": "Placing Starting VIllagers", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Board : Place the main board in the middle of the table. Pilgrimage Track Tiles : Randomly place the 8 Pilgrimage Track Tiles on the 4 tracks on the board, 2 of them on the outermost spaces on each Pilgrimage Track. When placing tracks that show Season icons, orient each tile so the square showing n", "headingPath": "SET U P", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "The Midnight River Expansion is included in the Kickstarter Exclusive Edition of Arborea. It is also available to purchase separately from www.alleycatgames.com Expansion components can be easily identified and separated form base game components due to the inclusion of the Expansion Icon shown here", "headingPath": "MIDNIGHT RIVER EX P ANSION · Setup · Player Setup (Each Player)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Do this in counter-clockwise order: The first player in turn order should place their Villager last. You may choose which Villager to place, either 1 Elder or Young Villager. Players may choose the same track that another player has already placed a Villager on; when doing so, the Track will advance", "headingPath": "P LA Y ER SET U P", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Choose 1 Pilgrimage Track, and push both pieces of the track 1 space towards the centre of the board. Villagers on a Pilgrimage Track move along with it when it moves. The Pilgrimage Track consists of two separate pieces, but is considered a single track that moves as a single unit. After a Pilgrima", "headingPath": "Advance 1 Pilgrimage Track:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030159, "snippet": "Icons Biome Icon: You must advance the top half of the corresponding Biome tile 1 space on the Biome Reserve. Train Villager: Move the shown Villager from its Reserve into your Supply. Place 1 Villager on a Pilgrimage Track: When activating this icon, you can choose to ignore this effect. See page 6", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When the Sun Tracker is placed on the last spot of the Sun Track the game ends after each player takes 2 more complete turns (then proceed to end-game scoring.) To keep track that all players have taken 2 additional turns: When the Sun Tracker is placed on the last spot of the Sun Track, the current", "headingPath": "GAME END · ENDGAME SCORING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET U P", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "P LA Y ER SET U P", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Solo Mode Components · Base Solo Mode Setup · Components for Feronia · Feronia's Ecosystem Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1178}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1178 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1178 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 0.89710 of 3246 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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	P LA Y ER SET U P	p.5	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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	Placing Starting VIllagers	p.19	0.046751 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	SET U P	p.4	0.046032 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	MIDNIGHT RIVER EX P ANSION · Setup · Player Setup (Each Player)	p.14	0.045695 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	P LA Y ER SET U P	p.5	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
#6	RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	Advance 1 Pilgrimage Track:	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
#7	RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)		p.22	0.030159 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	GAME END · ENDGAME SCORING	p.12	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 53 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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	Solo Mode Components · Base Solo Mode Setup · Components for Feronia · Feronia's Ecosystem Cards	p.19	#11	0.02895 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	Placing Starting VIllagers	p.19	#2	0.046751 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	KICKSTART ER EX P ANSION MODULES : · WINDS OF CHANGE CARDS · Setup · Gameplay	p.17	#12	0.027693 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	SET U P	p.4	#3	0.046032 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	QUICK REFERENCE · Place 1 Villager on a Pilgrimage Track; or , Advance 1 Pilgrimage Track . · Activate Villagers . · Complete an Ecosystem card. · Page Reference: · Endgame Scoring · …	p.24	#24	0.012195 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	P LA Y ER SET U P	p.5	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	P LA Y ER SET U P	p.5	#5	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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	MIDNIGHT RIVER EX P ANSION · Setup · Player Setup (Each Player)	p.14	#4	0.045695 (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 Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	SET U P	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	P LA Y ER SET U P	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Arborea — Rulebook (corpus doc 1178)	Solo Mode Components · Base Solo Mode Setup · Components for Feronia · Feronia's Ecosystem Cards	p.19	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 151 ms · first delta 1434 ms · total 9310 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 2674 ms · retrieval 151 ms · ask 6482 ms · gateway work 6636 ms · total 9310 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3280
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 200.4 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.110 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 51s 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 4s 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 1108), 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.