The table judge that shows its work.
Every board game has that one rule nobody agrees on. RuleSage settles it — not with a guess, but by naming the book, the section and the page, and then opening that page so you can read the rule with your own eyes.
Free, in your browser — no account, nothing to install. Still early: expect the odd rough edge.
What one answer looks like
You asked
Can the robber go back to the desert?
answeredYes, the robber can be moved to the desert hex.
That's the whole citation — book, section, page. For an answered ruling, RuleSage doesn't retype the rulebook at you: the wording belongs to the people who wrote it and stays where they put it.
▸ Follow the citation — open the page it came from
The page, as scanned
Where this page comes from
- Source
- OFFICIAL PUBLISHER the publisher's own PDF
- Document
- Catan — Rulebook
- Page
- printed p.5 → PDF page 5 (offset 0)
- Archived file fingerprint (SHA-256)
- 3fed941b…6f4ac024
- Corpus reference
- doc 43 · bg-13-en-1e
The page number above is a real link — it opens the very scan the app serves,
not a retelling of it. The
source tells you the PDF came straight from the publisher, and the
fingerprint is a checksum of that exact file, so if a single word of
it ever changed, the number wouldn't match. The page you read is the page we cited.
Where we don't hold the publisher's PDF, the page number
is still printed — as plain text rather than a link. The citation never quietly loses
its page.
Every answer carries its citation. No citation, no answer — RuleSage would rather say "the rulebook doesn't cover this" than make something up. This exact ruling is live: see it in the app →
01How to use it
The five-minute tour — every one of these is live right now
⌕Find a game
Search hundreds of games, or filter by player count, play time and weight — how heavy a game feels to learn. Every option shows how many boxes match, and a filtered shelf is a link you can send to your group.
?Ask a rules question
Open your game, ask in plain words, and watch the answer compose live — then get the ruling with its citation: book, section, page. Every draft is checked word-for-word against the rulebook before it's shown as a ruling.
▸"How do I play?"
One tap on any game. The first person to ask does the waiting; everyone after gets the same checked answer instantly. Ask once, keep forever.
∅The honest "it doesn't say"
When the rulebook truly doesn't cover it, RuleSage says so — and shows you the passages it checked first, so you can see it looked before it declined to guess.
☰The public ledger
The questions asked are on the record — answered, honestly declined, or refused — most of them a page anyone can open. The app keeps score on itself, in public.
✦The shelf assistant
Describe the evening instead of the game — "something for five, under an hour" — or just ask it what to play, and get pointed at real boxes on the shelf that fit.
☺︎A joke at the door
The app's front door asks: joke, or wisdom? Pick one and it streams in while both buttons dissolve into a little fairy dust. There's no going back — choose wisely.
✎The suggestion box
A feedback line on every ruling, and a request form for any game the shelf is missing. It grows because people ask.
For the nerds: every ruling carries a small wrench. Open it and RuleSage shows you the receipts — which passages were retrieved, how they scored, how long each step took and which model answered. Where a layer keeps something to itself, the wrench prints "not disclosed" instead of pretending the question wasn't asked. Game and rulebook pages carry their own smaller wrenches too.
02Rulings, not opinions
Why strategy is kept on the other side of a wall
Table Rulings the rulebook only
"What does the rule actually say?" Answered only from the official rulebook and designer errata — the sources that can settle an argument.
- Cited to book, section and page — open the scan
- Won't answer if it can't cite a source
- Flags official errata that corrects the card
Strategy Guides community tips
"What's the best move?" Community advice and guides — genuinely useful, but it's opinion, not law.
- Kept on a separate shelf, clearly labelled
- Great for learning to play well
- Never used to answer a rules question
This wall is deliberate. When you ask "is this legal?", you get the rulebook and nothing else — a stranger's clever tactic can't sneak in and pose as a rule. Setup gets the same rigor: the first baked setup checklists are live, every step verified against the page it cites, every unverifiable step left as an honest, visible gap. A checklist has to earn its way out.
The whole idea: an answer is only as good as the rulebook line behind it. So RuleSage never asks you to take that line on faith — it hands you the page.
03How it works, briefly
And where to read the whole story
Underneath sits a patient librarian: a corpus called SharpSignal that holds the rulebooks and never loses the book and page a passage came from. When you ask, three searches read the shelves three different ways, a careful reader ranks what they found, and the drafted answer is then checked word-for-word against the lines it cites before you see it. Everything runs on machines we operate — your question goes to our server and no one else's.
That's the short version. The long versions are worth a coffee break — we write up how this thing works the way other people write travelogues:
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Three librarians and a careful reader
How RuleSage finds the right page — the whole answering machine, told properly. If you read one thing, read this. -
Where your question goes
The path a question travels from your thumb to an answer, and what is (and isn't) kept along the way. -
The seat trials
How we measured the judge that would rather refuse than guess — the receipts behind the honest "it doesn't say". -
The move
Why answers got faster — and how to read the little timing strip the app prints on your own ruling. -
The new kid
The moderation seat that checks community content before it's let near the shelf.
Go on — ask it the rule your group still argues about.