Ruling — Scythe

You asked

How do we decide who starts?

Answered counted as answered

The player with the lowest number in the label on their Player Mat goes first, and play proceeds clockwise from that point [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.8 · STARTING PLAYER:

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:12b think:false 4eb23ef187e2
timings: search 113 ms · ask 5464 ms · total 5587 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5587 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 31, "score": 0.028589, "snippet": "RESOURCES: All units-characters, mechs, & workers-can carry around resources (any number). TURNS AND PLAYER MATS: On your turn, you must choose a different section of your Player Mat than you did the previous turn. Take either the top-row action, the bottom-row action, or both (starting with the top", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "The bottom-row actions are in the same order on all Player Mats, but the costs and benefits vary. The Player Mat visuals and the default costs and benefits explained in this section are based on the starting position of each Player Mat. OVERLAPPING TURNS: Usually when a player starts to take the bot", "headingPath": "BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "The first time you play Scythe, we recommend that you run a sample scoring round during the game so players have a feel for the actual end-game scoring in advance. After any player places their first star, pause the game to let players calculate their current score. This is just for the sake of exam", "headingPath": "SAMPLE SCORING ROUND", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "We recommend that you don't try to teach every little rule to new players. Instead, give each player a quickstart card. This card contains key information about units on one side, and the other side covers broad concepts and gives players something specific to do for their first five turns. Your fir", "headingPath": "QUICK-START CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The player with the lowest number in the label on their Player Mat will go first. Play proceeds clockwise from there. DESIGNER'S NOTE: The higher-numbered Player Mats offer slightly more lucrative starting track positions than the others, as those players are more likely to have 1 fewer turn by the ", "headingPath": "STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Combat may happen at the end of a player's Move action (after all units have moved but before the player takes a bottom-row action). If that player's character and/or mechs share a territory with an opponent's character and/or mechs, combat occurs. It's possible for this to happen on multiple territ", "headingPath": "COMBAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "The top-row actions appear in a different order on each Player Mat, though each action is identical. The Player Mat visuals and the default costs and benefits explained in this section are based on the starting position of each Player Mat.", "headingPath": "TOP-ROW ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Announce your coin total, and the player with the most coins wins! If multiple players have the same total, use the following as tiebreakers (in order): Number of workers, mechs, and structures Power Popularity Number of resource tokens controlled Number of territories controlled Number of star toke", "headingPath": "DECLARING THE WINNER", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
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 14, 2026 11:29

retrieval — what the search arm returned

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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	0.028589 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS	p.14	0.016393 (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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	SAMPLE SCORING ROUND	p.28	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
#4	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	QUICK-START CARD	p.9	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
#5	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	STARTING PLAYER:	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)	300
#6	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	COMBAT	p.22	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	TOP-ROW ACTIONS	p.11	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)	239
#8	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	DECLARING THE WINNER	p.29	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44)	STARTING PLAYER:	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 113 ms · first delta n/a · total 5587 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 113 ms · ask 5464 ms · gateway work 5587 ms · total 5587 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s 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.

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 2), 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.