You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e
1. Set out the board and pieces [1]. 2. Place outbreaks and cure markers [1]. 3. Give each player cards and a pawn [1]. 4. Give each player a reference card [1]. 5. Shuffle the Role cards and deal 1 face up in front of each player [1]. 6. Place the matching colored pawns for these roles in Atlanta [1]. 7. Remove the remaining Role cards and pawns from the game [1]. 8. Take the Epidemic cards out the Player Deck and set them aside until Step 5 [1]. 9. Shuffle the other Player cards (City and Event cards) [1]. 10. Deal cards to the players to form their initial hands based on the number of players: 4 cards for a 2-player game, 3 cards for a 3-player game, and 2 cards for a 4-player game [1]. 11. Place the outbreaks marker on the “0” space of the Outbreaks Track [1]. 12. Place the 4 cure markers, “vial” side up, near the Discovered Cure Indicators [1]. 13. Place the board within easy reach of all players [1]. 14. Put the 6 research stations and disease cubes nearby [1]. 15. Separate the cubes by color into 4 supply piles [1]. 16. Place 1 research station in Atlanta [1]. 17. Set the game’s difficulty level by using either 4, 5, or 6 Epidemic cards for an Introductory, Standard, or Heroic game [2]. 18. Remove any unused Epidemic cards from the game [2]. 19. Divide the remaining player cards into face down piles, as equal in size as you can, so that the number of piles matches the number of Epidemic cards being used [2]. 20. Shuffle 1 Epidemic card into each pile, face down [2]. 21. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom [2]. 22. Place the infection rate marker on the left-most “2” space of the Infection Rate Track [2]. 23. Shuffle the Infection cards and flip over 3 of them, putting 3 disease cubes of the matching color on each of these cities [2]. 24. Flip over 3 more cards and put 2 disease cubes on each of these cities [2]. 25. Flip over 3 more cards and put 1 disease cube on each of these cities [2]. 26. Place these 9 cards face up on the Infection Discard Pile [2]. 27. The remaining Infection cards form the Infection Deck [2].
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 265 ms · ask 7945 ms · total 8220 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 8220 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "2 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "3 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the ", "headingPath": "PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Each player has a role with special abilities to improve your team's chances. The Contingency Planner may, as an action, take an Event card from anywhere in the Player Discard Pile and place it on his Role card. Only 1 Event card can be on his role card at a time. It does not count against his hand ", "headingPath": "ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "PariS atlanta After doing 4 actions, draw the top 2 cards together from the Player Deck. If your draws include any Epidemic cards, immediately do the following steps in order: Increase: Move the infection rate marker forward 1 space on the Infection Rate Track. St. PeterSBurg london eSSen Milan liMa", "headingPath": "Manila DRAW CARDS · EPIDEMIC CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 174 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 174 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)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 3, 2026 05:21
retrieval — what the search arm returned
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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.2 | 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 | |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.3 | 0.047163 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · … | p.4 | 0.032787 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo | p.7 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.1 | 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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | Manila DRAW CARDS · EPIDEMIC CARDS | p.6 | 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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | Discover a Cure | p.4 | 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 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.2 | no quote on the wire | |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.3 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 265 ms · first delta 4188 ms · total 8220 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 265 ms · ask 7945 ms · gateway work 8220 ms · total 8220 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4603
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 591
- tok/sec
- 148.6 tok/sec — 591 output tokens in 3.977 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s ago)
- 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)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 43), 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.