You asked
How do I setup the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e
### 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 246 ms · ask 10045 ms · total 10300 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 10300 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032018, "snippet": "During setup, deal a Role card to the 5th player and 2 Player cards (as with 4 players) to each player. Legendary Game Feeling invincible? Try the Legendary difficulty level. Use the Epidemic card in this expansion to play with 7 Epidemic cards. Play any time. Not an action. EVENT Take 2 exTRa acTIo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "Set up the game normally (separating the Player cards into 7 piles before shuffling an Epidemic card into each pile). When you draw the 7 th Epidemic, the infection rate remains at 4 (the track maximum). Warning: Not for the faint of heart... Each challenge adds some difficulty, so you may wish to t", "headingPath": "Shuffle · Adding Challenges", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031545, "snippet": "2-infect draw the bottom card from the infection deck and put 3 cubes on that city. discard that card. 3-intensify shuffle the cards in the infection discard pile and put them on top of the infection deck. Montreal Canada 1-incRease move the infection rate marker forward 1 space. 2-infect draw the b", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031498, "snippet": "OVERVIEW This expansion adds a 5th player, 6 roles, 8 events, and 3 challenges to Pandemic. To get started, play the base game with the new roles and events. You may also add a challenge to vary the game some more. We suggest you try the three challenges in order: • Virulent Strain challenge: makes ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.02967, "snippet": "The Mutation challenge adds a 5 th purple disease to the game that appears in unpredictable ways. Players must either cure all 5 diseases or cure the 4 other diseases and have no purple disease cubes on the board. Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply. Put the purple Disco", "headingPath": "MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029199, "snippet": "This expansion adds a 5 th player, 6 roles, 8 events, and 3 challenges to Pandemic. Virulent Strain challenge: makes one disease particularly nasty in unpredictable ways. To get started, play the base game with the new roles and events. You may also add a challenge to vary the game some more. We sug", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.027497, "snippet": "The Mutation challenge adds a 5th purple disease to the game that appears in unpredictable ways. Players must either cure all 5 diseases or cure the 4 other diseases and have no purple disease cubes on the board. Setup Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply. Put the purple ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.027106, "snippet": "This challenge pits one player, the Bio-Terrorist, against the others, seeking to create panic throughout the world with a 5 th disease. This challenge works with 3 or 4 players. 5 players (1 Bio-Terrorist and 4 other players) is not recommended. The Bio-Terrorist wins if the other players lose and ", "headingPath": "BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of)
- layering — route
- not layered — one pooled read, because one book was in scope and there is nothing to split
- 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 20:44
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 TWO-ARM fuse (full-text + vector), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.03279 — both arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). Measured healthy band on this fuse: 0.016–0.033. 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 Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.2 | 0.032018 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 | |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | Shuffle · Adding Challenges | p.2 | 0.032002 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.2 | 0.031545 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 | |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.2 | 0.031498 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 | |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections | p.4 | 0.02967 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · … | p.2 | 0.029199 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.4 | 0.027497 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 | |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play | p.5 | 0.027106 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) | 300 |
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.2 | no quote on the wire | |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · … | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.2 | no quote on the wire | |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · … | p.3 | no quote on the wire |
| [5] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.3 | no quote on the wire | |
| [6] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.3 | no quote on the wire | |
| [7] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections | p.4 | no quote on the wire |
| [8] | RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) | p.4 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 246 ms · first delta 7079 ms · total 10300 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 246 ms · ask 10045 ms · gateway work 10300 ms · total 10300 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 5014
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 434
- tok/sec
- 138.0 tok/sec — 434 output tokens in 3.146 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 33s 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
- 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
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: 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.