Ruling — Spirit Island

You asked

When does the game end?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e · Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e

The game will end in defeat if: * The Island is overrun by Blight [1] * Any Spirit is destroyed completely [1] * You act too slowly and fail to drive the Invaders off before they become entrenched [1]

[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.3 · TABLE OF CONTENTS

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): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 240 ms · ask 8445 ms · total 8695 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8695 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 21, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "If you're getting crushed and it's no fun: For a slightly easier game, give all Spirits a bonus Growth at the end of Setup. For a moderately easier game, omit the Invaders' initial Explore at the end of Setup. For a much easier game, do both. Note: Two Blight rules can make the game extremely punish", "headingPath": "GAME TOO HARD?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "This is the wrap-up phase at the end of each turn. Discard: Players discard all Power Cards played this turn into their personal discard piles. Damage and Elements Clear: All Elements go away. All Damage done during the turn goes away; if you turned any pieces on their sides to note partial Damage, ", "headingPath": "TIME PASSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Some Spirits are inclined to take a long time choosing Power Cards: perhaps several centuries in the case of slow-moving earth Spirits. But the threat of the Invaders forbids the luxury of infinite time. Any player may place a limit on the time available to complete the Spirit Phase. This can be don", "headingPath": "THE URGENCY OF WAR", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "For decisions about/within a land: Each Spirit makes choices regarding the lands on their starting board. For other cases: The game owner/organizer makes the call.", "headingPath": "But in the rare event that agreement is not possible:", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "You suddenly realize that for the past 4 turns you've been using a Power Card on lands it can't actually target. What to do? The answer is: don't sweat it. Especially on your first play or two, you'll likely make minor mistakes here and there. They're unlikely to break anything: the game will just b", "headingPath": "WHOOPS!", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Spirit Presence marks the lands a Spirit occupies. Lands with your Presence are sometimes referred to as 'your lands'. If your Presence is ever destroyed (for example, by Invaders Blighting the land), it is removed and put next to the Island. If any Spirit ever has no Presence left on the Island, th", "headingPath": "PRESENCE AND SACRED SITES", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The game is played with one Island Board per player, laid out to make an Island (see Setup, page 6). Each Island Board is divided into eight numbered lands, with exactly two of each terrain (Jungle, Mountain, Sands, and Wetland). Most pieces only affect other pieces in the same land, unless explicit", "headingPath": "BOARDS AND LANDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Adversaries are specific colonizing Powers from the world of Spirit Island. Including an Adversary in a game is optional, but doing so adds an additional layer of depth and strategy to the game. Be sure to choose your foe before Setup begins, as some may change the rules of Setup. The Adversary Pane", "headingPath": "ADVERSARIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 58 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 20:24

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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	GAME TOO HARD?	p.21	0.046898 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TIME PASSES	p.10	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
#3	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE URGENCY OF WAR	p.8	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
#4	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	But in the rare event that agreement is not possible:	p.8	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))	163
#5	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	WHOOPS!	p.20	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PRESENCE AND SACRED SITES	p.13	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	BOARDS AND LANDS	p.13	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	ADVERSARIES	p.22	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 240 ms · first delta 8243 ms · total 8695 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 240 ms · ask 8445 ms · gateway work 8695 ms · total 8695 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2150
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 52
tok/sec: 134.7 tok/sec — 52 output tokens in 0.386 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 7), 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.