RuleSage cited table rulings
← Villagers

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Villagersbg-241724-en-1e

1. Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table.[1] This is the Road.[1]
2. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks.[1]
3. Give each player a Founders card and place it with the 2 Gold side facing up.[1] The Founders card forms the start of each Village.[1]
4. Give each player a Village Square and place it next to their Village.[1]
5. Give each player 8 Gold, this is their starting Supply.[1]
6. Place the rest of the Gold in an area next to the Road to form the Bank.[1]
7. Give the First Player Card to the player who has lived in the same place the longest.[1]
8. If it’s a 2 or 3 player game, remove the cards marked with *, those are the Wool and Leather suits.[1]
9. Shuffle the rest of the cards and form 6 face-down stacks each with twice as many cards as there are players in the game.[1]
10. Line these stacks up above the Starting Road Villagers.[1]
11. Add the First Market Card beneath the second stack, and the Second Market Card beneath the sixth stack.[1] The Road is now complete.[1]
12. From the remaining cards deal 5 cards face-down to each player.[1] These are the Player Hands.[1]
13. Place the rest of the cards in a stack next to the Road, this is called the Reserve.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook · p.4

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 179 ms · ask 2928 ms · total 3114 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 3114 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 5, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Shuffle the rest of the cards and form 6 face-down stacks each with twice as many cards as there are players in the game. In a 5 player game for example you would make 6 stacks with 10 cards in each. Line these stacks up above the Starting Road Villagers . 8 Add the First Market Card beneath the sec", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played .", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "GAME SETUP RESERVE BASIC VILLAGERS DISCARD BANK ROAD Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks. Give each player a Founders", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "4 Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road . Find the 10 Hayers , 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks. Give each player a Founders card and place it with the 2 Gold side facing up", "headingPath": "FOR SOLO MODE ONLY · GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "GIVE ALL PLAYERS THIS: VILLAGEFOUNDERSVILLAGE SQUARE PLAYER HANDSUPPLYPLAYER AID Find the 6 Starting Road Villagers marked with * and place them face-up in a line in the centre of the table. This is the Road. Find the 10 Hayers, 10 Lumberjacks and 10 Miners and place them face-up in separate stacks.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "After both players are done drafting do the following: Each player in reverse turn order may choose to place 1 Gold from the Bank on a villager on the Road . You are allowed to place Gold on the same villager, or not place any Gold if you wish. 1 Discard all face-up villagers on the Road with no coi", "headingPath": "UPDATING THE ROAD IN 2 PLAYER GAMES", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After all players are done drafting do the following*: After all players are done drafting do the following*: Discard any villagers on the Road with coins on them. 1 1. Discard any villagers on the Road with coins on them. Deal new cards to replace the discarded villagers as you would when drafting,", "headingPath": "UPDATING THE ROAD", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The player wants to play their Cartwright. As the Production Chain Text shows, it must be placed on top of a Lumberjack and a Wheeler. 1. The player has a Wheeler in their hand, and a Lumberjack already placed in the Village, so getting the Cartwright out will not be a problem. They decide to play t", "headingPath": "BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The game is played over several rounds until all the face-down stacks of villager cards on the Road * have been emptied. Each round is divided into 2 phases carried out in order: A 1. The Draft Phase: players draft villagers from the Road . 2. The Build Phase: players play villagers from their hand ", "headingPath": "GAME RULES · THE DRAFT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 845}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 845 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 845 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 0.88357 of 1065 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded
Oct 26, 2026 20:17 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played . p.5 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) p.4 0.048131 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) FOR SOLO MODE ONLY · GAME SETUP p.4 0.047875 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) 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
#5 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) UPDATING THE ROAD IN 2 PLAYER GAMES p.11 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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) UPDATING THE ROAD 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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) BUILD PHASE EXAMPLE p.13 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
#8 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) GAME RULES · THE DRAFT PHASE p.8 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 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) GAME SETUP · That's it, the game is now ready to be played . p.5 #1 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#2 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) p.4 #2 0.048131 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) UPDATING THE ROAD IN 2 PLAYER GAMES p.11 #5 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
#4 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) UPDATING THE ROAD p.10 #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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#5 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) DRAFT PHASE EXAMPLE p.9 #17 0.013158 (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 Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) EVENT PHASE p.23 #15 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
#7 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) SOLO MODE · SETUP p.22 #9 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
#8 RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) FOR SOLO MODE ONLY · GAME SETUP p.4 #3 0.047875 (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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Villagers — Rulebook (corpus doc 845) p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 179 ms · first delta 1264 ms · total 3114 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 179 ms · ask 2928 ms · gateway work 3114 ms · total 3114 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2407
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
362
tok/sec
201.8 tok/sec — 362 output tokens in 1.794 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 9s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 780), 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.