RuleSage cited table rulings
← Finspan

You asked

how do i play this game?

Answered counted as answered

To play this game, choose a fish card from your hand, pay its cost, and place it on your ocean mat. To pay the cost, discard one or more cards from your hand, pay eggs or young from your ocean, or consume a shorter fish in your ocean. Place the fish on an empty or occupied slot in your ocean, following the zones (Sunlight, Twilight, Midnight) and dive site (blue, purple, or green) rules. If the fish is placed on top of an egg, young, or school, transfer those tokens to the newly played fish. You may only play this fish below the dive site that matches the color band of its ability (blue, purple, or green). [1]

[1] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAY A FISH CARD

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 113 ms · ask 8138 ms · total 8251 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued n/a ms · generation 8251 ms
retrieval refs (raw)
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each turn, you will either play a fish or dive into your ocean. You will take 6 turns during each of the 4 weeks (a total of 24 turns per player during the entire game). You will typically spend the beginning of the game playing low-cost fish cards and laying eggs, the middle of the game playing hig", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031054, "snippet": "The game ends after the completion of week 4. After activating in any order 'GAME END' abilities on fish in oceans that don't award end-game points (including fish that enter play during this step), players simultaneously perform each step in order: GAME END (YEOW): Gain any 'GAME END' points on fi", "headingPath": "END OF GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029514, "snippet": "CONSUMING FISH: You may place the fish on top of a shorter fish (card or forage) already in your ocean either by choice or to satisfy a cost. The played fish must have a longer length (shown at the bottom left) than the fish it consumes. Any tokens (egg, young, or school) on the consumed fish transf", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.028718, "snippet": "The vertical area on the right side of fish cards shows the fish's ability. Benefits from fish abilities are optional for each affected player. Gaining all or part of a benefit is allowed. WHEN PLAYED: Gain this benefit when you play a fish (after all other 'play a fish' steps). IF ACTIVATED: Gain t", "headingPath": "FISH ABILITIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.027638, "snippet": "In addition to all the gameplay variety of Finspan, players can now nurture colorful coral reefs in each of their ocean's three dive sites. Healthy reefs enable you to play powerful reef fish, unlock fish abilities, and score bonuses at the end of the game. Meanwhile, sharks scatter schools of young", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW & GOAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "1 Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply. 2 Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply. These 10 cards have dark gray corners and a different back than other fish cards. 3 Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards", "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Playing a fish involves choosing a fish card from your hand, paying its cost, and placing it on your ocean mat. Thematically, this represents you discovering this fish in an area of your ocean. Follow these steps to play a fish card: PLACE A DIVER. Place an available diver in the gray box at the upp", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Post it on the Finspan Tabletop Game Facebook group, on BoardGameGeek, or in the Finspan channel of the Stonemaier Games Discord server: stonemaiergames.com/discord", "headingPath": "HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE?", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}]
citations (raw)
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
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 01:42

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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW p.4 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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) END OF GAME p.8 0.031054 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAY A FISH CARD p.5 0.029514 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) FISH ABILITIES p.9 0.028718 (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 Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) OVERVIEW & GOAL p.1 0.027638 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS p.2 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
#7 RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAY A FISH CARD p.4 0.015873 (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 Finspan — Sharks & Reefs Expansion (corpus doc 55) HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? p.8 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 164

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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) PLAY A FISH CARD p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 113 ms · first delta n/a · total 8251 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 113 ms · ask 8138 ms · gateway work 8251 ms · total 8251 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s 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 5), 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.