RuleSage cited table rulings
← Everdell

You asked

When can I play a critter for free?

Answered counted as answered

When you can play a critter for free is when you have a Construction in your city that is related to the Critter, and you place an "Occupied" token on that Construction. This allows you to play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. You may only do this once per Construction. [1] Additionally, the Postal Pigeon allows you to play a card worth up to 3 points for free when activated, and the Queen allows you to play any card from your hand or the Meadow cards worth up to 3 points for free when you place a worker there. [2] However, the specific condition for playing a Critter for free is only explicitly stated in [1], which describes using a related Construction with an "Occupied" token. Final answer: When the Construction listed in the top left of the Critter card is already in your city, you may play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. [1]

[1] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.10 · CRITTERS
[2] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.19 · CRITTERS

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
qwen3:4b-instruct-2507-q4_K_M@0edcdef34593
timings
search 150 ms · ask 9817 ms · total 9968 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued n/a ms · generation 9968 ms
retrieval refs (raw)
[{"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You may pay the required cost in berries to play the Critter card, or if the Construction listed in the top left of the Critter card is already in your city, you may play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. Important: When playing a Critter for free by using the related Construction", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Dungeon can only have up to 2 prisoners, but the second cell must be unlocked by having a Ranger in your city. Ever Tree: At game end, worth 1 point for each purple Prosperity card in your city, including this Ever Tree. Ever Tree can grant 1 of any Critter for free. Fair Grounds: When played and du", "headingPath": "CONSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Peddler: W hen played and during Production, you may trade up to 2 of your resources for 2 of any other resource. Trade with the general supply, not other players. Postal Pigeon: When played, reveal 2 cards from the deck. You may immediately play 1 of these worth up to 3 points, for free. Discard th", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "Castle: At game end, worth 1 point for each Common Construction in your city. Cemetery: When you place a worker here, reveal 4 cards from the draw pile or discard pile and play 1 of them for free. Discard the others. Your worker must stay here permanently. Cemetery may only have up to 2workers on it", "headingPath": "CONSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "If you have placed all of your workers and you cannot play a card or do not wish to, then you must prepare for the next season. On your turn, bring back all of your deployed workers, then gain the listed bonuses for the next season, as shown atop the Ever Tree. After doing so, your turn is finished,", "headingPath": "PREPARE FOR SEASON", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "In Everdell, you will be deploying workers to various locations on the board in order to gather resources, which you will use to play cards faceup in front of you, forming your own woodland city. Each turn you will perform only one of three possible actions: Place a Worker Play a Card Prepare for Se", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "When playing Everdell solo, you will be competing against a cantankerous old rodent known as Rugwort and his pack of rowdy, rambunctious, rat ruffians. He will be returning to Everdell for three years in a row, each time bearing a new title of nastiness. You must find a way to overcome his dastardly", "headingPath": "SOLO RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "You do not gain the 3 berrie s. This card cannot be combined with any other cardplay ing abilities including the Inn, any Forest locations that allow you to play a card, or cards like the Dungeon. Judge: When playing a Critter or Construction, you o ro e nhn listed cost with 1 of any other resource ", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
citations (raw)
[{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
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
Oct 7, 2026 01:28

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.10 0.032787 (at the 2-arm ceiling (0.03279) — the top of a 2-arm fuse; whether more arms ran here was never recorded) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CONSTRUCTIONS p.20 0.031746 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.19 0.03125 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CONSTRUCTIONS p.20 0.030214 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) PREPARE FOR SEASON p.12 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) OVERVIEW p.3 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) SOLO RULES p.16 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.18 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.10 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.19 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 150 ms · first delta n/a · total 9968 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued n/a ms · retrieval 150 ms · ask 9817 ms · gateway work 9968 ms · total 9968 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 10), 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.