Ruling — Heat: Pedal to the Metal

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Heat: Pedal to the Metalbg-366013-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps: 1. Place the game board in the middle of the table (for your first game use the USA track, and consider only racing 1 lap as a learning experience instead of the regular 2 laps as printed on the board) [1]. 2. Each player chooses a color and takes the car, player mat, Gear pawn, 12 Basic cards in their color, and the 3 Starting Upgrade cards in their color [1]. 3. Check the game board to discover how many Heat and Stress cards each player must add to their car (typically it will be 6 Heat and 3 Stress cards) [1]. 4. Place your player mat in front of you [1]. 5. Shuffle your 12 Basic cards, 3 Starting Upgrade cards, and 3 Stress cards together and place this draw deck facedown on your player mat’s left spot [1]. 6. Place the 6 Heat cards faceup on the Engine spot in the middle of the player mat and your Gear pawn in first gear [1]. 7. Place the remaining Stress cards faceup close to the board as a reserve [1]. 8. Randomly place all participating race cars on the starting grid to determine player order for the first round by placing them one at a time, filling the spots in ascending order [1]. 9. Draw 7 cards from your draw deck into your hand [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.3 ·

🔧 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 232 ms · ask 5126 ms · total 5366 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5366 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "In “Heat: Pedal to the Metal™” everyone races a car around the track for a given number of laps to determine the best driver. At the start of each round you can shift gears, which dictates how many cards you play that round. You control your car’s speed by adding the value of these cards to move tha", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "This booklet will teach you all the rules to play the core game. We suggest you play your first few races following these rules before trying the Advanced Play and Championship Rules found in the other booklet.", "headingPath": "Read this booklet First!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "H eat waves shimmer from the racetrack, obscuring the first corner. You adjust your goggles as the sun glints off the chrome of race cars slowly being pushed into position around you. The murmur of the crowd, the snap of flags in the wind, the gentle rumble of your engine. A blue summer sky, calm an", "headingPath": "Read this booklet First! · PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™' is played over several rounds. Each round all players ALWAYS complete 4 steps: ➊ - adjust their gear, ➋ - play cards, ➌ - move their car, ➒ - draw back up to seven cards. These mandatory steps are highlighted thanks to the following icon . The remaining steps (4-8) are al", "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "For each symbol played you will add an unknown value between 1 and 4 to your Speed. This is done by flipping the top card of your draw deck: If it is a Basic card ( ), add it to your Play Area. Otherwise, immediately put it in the discard pile and keep flipping until you find a Basic card ( ). The a", "headingPath": "Symbol", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Reveal the cards in your Play Area, then add all values together to determine your Speed. Values from Upgrade and Stress cards (see below) contribute to that total Speed. Move your car forward by exactly that many Spaces on the track. Always put your car on the Spot closest to the Race Line if avail", "headingPath": "3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In rare circumstances you can get stuck with so many Heat cards in your hand that you don't have enough playable cards for the gear you're in. If this happens, use as many playable cards as possible and cover the difference with Heat cards. In this case, your car does not move this turn. Instead, wh", "headingPath": "Cluttered Hand", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Register your board game We invite you to join our online community of players at Days of Wonder Online , where we host a number of online versions of our games. Head to our website and add your Days of Wonder Online number to your existing account or create a new one and follow the instructions. Yo", "headingPath": "Days of Wonder Online", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 175 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 175 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 05:47

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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First!	p.1	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))	210
#3	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First! · PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!	p.2	0.031746 (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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards	p.4	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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Symbol	p.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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React	p.5	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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Cluttered Hand	p.7	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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Days of Wonder Online	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 232 ms · first delta 3125 ms · total 5366 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 232 ms · ask 5126 ms · gateway work 5366 ms · total 5366 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3148
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 303
tok/sec: 137.4 tok/sec — 303 output tokens in 2.206 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): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 56), 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.