You asked
How do I setup the game?
Answered counted as answered 2 of 2 books answeredAsked with: Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e · Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e
Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e Answered
1. Set out the board and pieces [1]. 2. Place outbreaks and cure markers [1]. 3. Give each player cards and a pawn [1]. 4. Give each player a reference card [1]. 5. Shuffle the Role cards and deal 1 face up in front of each player [1]. 6. Place the matching colored pawns for these roles in Atlanta [1]. 7. Remove any remaining Role cards and pawns from the game [1]. 8. Take the Epidemic cards out of the Player Deck and set them aside until Step 5 [1]. 9. Shuffle the other Player cards (City and Event cards) [1]. 10. Deal cards to the players to form their initial hands, according to the number of players: 4 cards for a 2-player game, 3 cards for a 3-player game, or 2 cards for a 4-player game [1]. 11. Place the outbreaks marker on the “0” space of the Outbreaks Track [1]. 12. Place the 4 cure markers, “vial” side up, near the Discovered Cure Indicators [1]. 13. Place the board within easy reach of all players [1]. 14. Put the 6 research stations and disease cubes nearby [1]. 15. Separate the cubes by color into 4 supply piles [1]. 16. Place 1 research station in Atlanta [1]. 17. Set the game's difficulty level by using either 4, 5, or 6 Epidemic cards (for Introductory, Standard, or Heroic games) and remove any unused Epidemic cards from the game [2]. 18. Divide the remaining player cards into face down piles, as equal in size as you can, so that the number of piles matches the number of Epidemic cards being used [2]. 19. Shuffle 1 Epidemic card into each pile, face down [2]. 20. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom [2]. 21. Place the infection rate marker on the left-most “2” space of the Infection Rate Track [2]. 22. Shuffle the Infection cards and flip over 3 of them, putting 3 disease cubes of the matching color on each of these cities [2]. 23. Flip over 3 more cards and put 2 disease cubes on each of these cities [2]. 24. Flip over 3 more cards and put 1 disease cube on each of these cities [2]. 25. Place these 9 cards face up on the Infection Discard Pile [3][2]. 26. The other Infection cards form the Infection Deck [3][2].
Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e Answered
### Standard Game Setup 1. Add the 6 new Role cards to the base game Role cards before shuffling and dealing 1 Role card to each player [1][2]. 2. Add the 8 new Event cards to the 5 base game Event cards and shuffle them face down [1][2]. 3. Add 2 Event cards per player to the Player cards, before shuffling and dealing Player cards to each player [1][2]. 4. For a 5-player game, deal a Role card to the 5th player and 2 Player cards to each player [3][1][2]. ### Virulent Strain Challenge Setup 1. Put the normal Epidemic cards in the box [4][5]. 2. Select the Virulent Strain Epidemic cards to use by shuffling them face down before taking the needed number (4-7, based on your difficulty level) [4][5]. 3. Put the unused cards away without looking at them [4][5]. 4. Divide the remaining player cards into face down piles, as equal in size as you can, so that the number of piles matches the number of Virulent Strain Epidemic cards you are using [4][6][5]. 5. Shuffle 1 Virulent Strain Epidemic card into each pile, face down [4][6][5]. 6. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom [4][6]. ### Mutation Challenge Setup 1. Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply [7][8]. 2. Put the purple Discovered Cure Indicator and cure marker on the board [7][8]. 3. Put the 2 Mutation cards in the Infection Discard Pile (do not shuffle them into the Infection Deck) [7][8]. 4. After dealing cards to players, but before preparing the Player Deck, shuffle the 3 Mutation Event cards with the remaining Player cards [7][8].
🔧 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 null ms · ask null ms · total 18450 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 18450 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- citations (raw)
- 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=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
- layering — route
- layered — the question is setup-shaped, so every book was read on its own (the setup-shape lens below shows the pattern that matched)
- layering — how this ask was counted
- counted as ANSWERED — carried by layer 1 (Pandemic); layer 2 ANSWERED; 0 not read; rung: ANSWERED ▸ ABSTAINED ▸ UNATTRIBUTABLE ▸ REFUSED
- layering — books not run
- layer valve: rulesage.table.max-layers = 8 (today's setting, not necessarily the one this ask ran under). A book the valve trims is not read and leaves NO row of its own, so it cannot be listed above or counted in the census — an empty list here means the corpus breaker marked nobody, not that nothing was left out.
- layering — queued between books
- queued between layers: 0 ms of the 0 ms total queue wait (every wait after the first is a mid-ask wait, because the generation permit is released and re-taken for each book)
- 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 20:40
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.
no payload was recorded for this ruling (the call never returned one)
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
no payload was recorded for this ruling (the call never returned one)
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval n/a · first delta n/a · total 18450 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 n/a ms · ask n/a ms · gateway work 18450 ms · total 18450 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s ago)
- stream path
- not requested — no progress token attached (stream-answers off, or a non-streaming caller)
- 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
layers — one row per book this ask read
| # | book | outcome | timings | refs | cited | stream | arms | row |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pandemic (bg-30549-en-1e) | Answered | queued 0 ms · search 259 ms · ask 8152 ms · first delta 4353 ms · gateway work 8421 ms | 8 | 3 | STREAMED | base rulebook doc 174 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 43 | ruling 1503 |
| 2 | Pandemic: On the Brink (bg-40849-en-1e) | Answered | queued 0 ms · search 224 ms · ask 9794 ms · first delta 6844 ms · gateway work 10029 ms | 8 | 8 | STREAMED | no base-rulebook boost — this edition registers no ingested rulebook to anchor retrieval to · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 121 | ruling 1504 |
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 43), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: each book this ask READ got its own errata gate, keyed on that book's own edition — so an expansion's registered cards were matched against that expansion's own layer rather than left outside the match. The per-layer table above shows what each one sent, and any book that was not read ran no gate at all.