RuleSage cited table rulings

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 quoting the rulebook back to you, word for word, with the page number.

Ask a question about a game on your shelf. Get an answer you can trust, because you can see exactly where it came from.

You asked

In Catan, can I move the robber onto the desert?

answered

Yes. The robber may be moved to the desert hex. While it sits there it blocks nothing, since the desert produces no resources — a common way to "park" it away from your own tiles.

RULEBOOK Catan — Base Game Rulebook · p.10 ↗ · The Robber
"You may also move the robber to the desert, where it has no effect."
▸ Follow the citation — open the page it came from

Where this page comes from

Source
OFFICIAL PUBLISHER KOSMOS / Catan GmbH
Document
Catan — Base Game Rulebook
Page
printed p.10 → PDF page 10 (offset 0)
Archived file fingerprint (SHA-256)
9f2a1c…d4e8bb
Corpus reference
doc 43 · bg-13-en-1e

The page number is a live link: click it and RuleSage shows you the actual rulebook page the quote sits on. 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 quote can't drift from its source.

Every answer carries its citation. No citation, no answer — RuleSage would rather say "the rulebook doesn't cover this" than make something up.

The whole idea: an answer is only as good as the rulebook line behind it. So RuleSage never hides that line — it leads with it.

01Rulings, not opinions

And why strategy is kept on the other side of a wall

There are two very different questions you can ask about a game, and mixing them up is how arguments start. RuleSage keeps them strictly apart.

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.

  • Quoted verbatim, with page numbers
  • 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.

02Setup checklists, baked from the book

The kiln — how a trustworthy checklist is made

Setting up a game is its own small chore: how many of each token, which cards go where, what changes with player count. RuleSage can hand you a step-by-step setup checklist — but it holds that checklist to the same standard as a ruling. Every step has to be earned.

We call the process the bake, and the machine that runs it the kiln. A raw draft goes in; a checklist where every line is backed by the rulebook comes out. Anything that couldn't be verified is left as an honest gap, not quietly guessed.

1 · read
Draft
Pull the setup steps out of the rulebook text.
2 · quote-gate
Check the words
Each step must match a real line on a real page — or it's rejected.
3 · judge
Check the meaning
A second pass confirms the step actually follows from that line.
4 · serve
Or leave a hole
Passes get served. Failures become a visible gap pointing at the page.

What the finished checklist looks like

Component inventory

1. DERIVED

Sort the number tokens and place one on each numbered hex. (18 number tokens)

baked from p.2 · gate-verified · judged · open p.2

2. UNVERIFIED

A step here couldn't be verified against the rulebook — check the book.

see p.3

The blue DERIVED stamp means "this line was checked against the book and holds." The dashed UNVERIFIED gap is RuleSage refusing to bluff — it would rather point you at the page than invent a step. You can always expand any line to read the exact rulebook text it rests on.

03Where the rulebooks live

RuleSage sits on top of the SharpSignal corpus

None of this works without a good memory of the rulebooks themselves. That memory is a separate engine called SharpSignal — the corpus. Think of it as a very careful librarian: it stores every rulebook page and, when RuleSage asks a question, hands back the exact passages that matter, each still tagged with its book and page.

RuleSage The game-night face: asks the questions, writes the plain-English answer, bakes the checklist, keeps rulings and strategy apart.
SharpSignal The corpus underneath: holds the rulebooks, finds the right passages, and guarantees every quote traces back to a real page.

Keeping them separate is the point. SharpSignal is a general-purpose document engine — the same corpus that answers board-game rules could just as well hold field manuals or policy binders. RuleSage is simply the friendliest thing you can build on top of it: a judge for your kitchen table. Because the librarian never loses the page number, RuleSage can always show you its work — and that's the one promise the whole thing is built around.

Ask freely, trust what you read, and if the rulebook truly doesn't say — RuleSage will tell you that too.