Ruling — Spirit Island

You asked

What does a badlands token do?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

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

The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.18 · DAMAGE TOKENS?

There are no tokens in Spirit Island for tracking Damage. Instead models are built to be rotated to help track Damage done to them. (For more details, see sidebars on page 15 and 16.)

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.17 · SINGLE-TURN EFFECTS

A few Powers have temporary effects on a land (such as 'Invaders skip all Actions'). There are Reminder Tokens you can use to mark those lands for the turn if you want; just remember to remove them at the end of the turn! REMINDER TOKENS

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.32 · ICONOGRAPHY

Explorer: A type of Invader. Does 1 Damage, has 1 Health. Town: A type of Invader. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. 1 Fear when destroyed. City: A type of Invader. Does 3 Damage, has 3 Health. 2 Fear when destroyed. Dahan: A clan/village of local Islanders. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. Fear: Fright done

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.18 · DEFEND

Some Powers let you Defend a target land, which reduces Damage done by Invaders to the land and/or Dahan. 'Defend 2' means 'Whenever Invaders deal Damage in target land this turn, reduce by 2 the Damage done to the land and to Dahan.' If multiple Defend effects are used in one land, they add togethe

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.22 · ADVERSARIES

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

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 267 ms · ask 8431 ms · total 8707 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8707 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 18, "score": 0.031778, "snippet": "There are no tokens in Spirit Island for tracking Damage. Instead models are built to be rotated to help track Damage done to them. (For more details, see sidebars on page 15 and 16.)", "headingPath": "DAMAGE TOKENS?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030622, "snippet": "A few Powers have temporary effects on a land (such as 'Invaders skip all Actions'). There are Reminder Tokens you can use to mark those lands for the turn if you want; just remember to remove them at the end of the turn! REMINDER TOKENS", "headingPath": "SINGLE-TURN EFFECTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "Explorer: A type of Invader. Does 1 Damage, has 1 Health. Town: A type of Invader. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. 1 Fear when destroyed. City: A type of Invader. Does 3 Damage, has 3 Health. 2 Fear when destroyed. Dahan: A clan/village of local Islanders. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. Fear: Fright done", "headingPath": "ICONOGRAPHY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029139, "snippet": "Some Powers let you Defend a target land, which reduces Damage done by Invaders to the land and/or Dahan. 'Defend 2' means 'Whenever Invaders deal Damage in target land this turn, reduce by 2 the Damage done to the land and to Dahan.' If multiple Defend effects are used in one land, they add togethe", "headingPath": "DEFEND", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.028718, "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}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.028139, "snippet": "Unless a Power explicitly says otherwise: It only affects one single target land. 'Destroy up to 3 Explorers' will let you destroy up to 3 Explorers in the same land - not in multiple different lands. If a Power has multiple effects, they ALL apply to the same land. It only affects the current turn.", "headingPath": "GENERAL PRINCIPLE: ONE LAND! ONE TURN! ONE USE!", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.027746, "snippet": "Growth Gain Energy Play and pay for Power Cards Fast Power Phase (Cards and Innate) Invader Phase Blighted Island Effect Fear Effects Ravage: Invaders Damage the land and Dahan. Add Blight if the land takes 2 or more Damage. Surviving Dahan fight back. Build: If Invaders are present, add a Town or C", "headingPath": "Spirit Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.027364, "snippet": "The Invaders have begun to colonize your Island! While not specifically aiming to exterminate you, their colonization and 'taming' of the land has upset the natural balance. The goal of the game is to drive off the Invaders by meeting the victory conditions of the current Terror Level. As more Invad", "headingPath": "INVADERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
citations (raw): []
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: no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 20:32

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)	DAMAGE TOKENS?	p.18	0.031778 (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))	183
#2	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	SINGLE-TURN EFFECTS	p.17	0.030622 (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))	237
#3	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	ICONOGRAPHY	p.32	0.029762 (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)	DEFEND	p.18	0.029139 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	ADVERSARIES	p.22	0.028718 (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)	GENERAL PRINCIPLE: ONE LAND! ONE TURN! ONE USE!	p.17	0.028139 (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)	Spirit Phase	p.32	0.027746 (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)	INVADERS	p.15	0.027364 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 267 ms · first delta 8561 ms · total 8707 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 267 ms · ask 8431 ms · gateway work 8707 ms · total 8707 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2889
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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.