You asked
how do i setup the game?
Answered counted as answeredTo set up the game, follow these steps: * **Board and Components:** Place the board on the table and place the Éver Tree on the stump at the top of the board [1]. Place twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries in piles along the bank of the river. Place point tokens and occupied tokens beside the board [1]. * **Cards:** Shuffle the Forest cards and place them on the forest clearings [1]. Use 3 cards for two players, or 4 cards for three or four players; put remaining cards back in the box [1]. Place the 4 basic Event tiles along the river, then shuffle the special Event cards and place 4 special Events on the lower branches of the Ever Tree (remaining special Events go back in the box) [1]. Shuffle the main deck and randomly place 8 cards faceup in the Meadow; place the deck inside the Ever Tree [1]. * **Players:** Each player chooses a color and starts with 2 workers of that color [1]. The first player draws 5 cards, the second player 6 cards, the third player 7 cards, and the fourth player 8 cards [1]. Each player places their other 4 workers on the upper branches of the Ever Tree (1 on spring, 1 on summer, and 2 on autumn) [1]. The most humble player goes first [1]. * **Rugwort Specific Setup:** If playing with Rugwort, select a color for him (he prefers black) and use the two-player setup [2]. Rugwort does not have a hand of cards [2]. Place one of Rugwort's workers on the top-left Forest card (blocking it) and his other worker on the 3 twig Basic location (blocking it) [2].
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)
- gemma4:12b think:false 4eb23ef187e2
- timings
- search 254 ms · ask 9320 ms · total 9586 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 9586 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 16, "score": 0.032266, "snippet": "Select a player color for Rugwort (he prefers black) and set up the game according to the two-player setup. You have a starting hand of 5 cards, and Rugwort does not have a hand of cards. Take one of Rugwort's workers and place it on the top-left Forest card, blocking it. Place his other worker on t", "headingPath": "YEAR E \"RUGWORT THE RASCAl\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "In Everdell, you will be deploying workers to various locations on the board in order to gather resources, which you will use to play cards faceup in front of you, forming your own woodland city. Each turn you will perform only one of three possible actions: Place a Worker Play a Card Prepare for Se", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Place the board on the table. Place the Éver Tree on the stump at the top of the board. Place the twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries in piles along the bank of the river. Place the point tokens and occupied tokens beside the board. Shuffle the Forest cards and place them on the forest clearings. Use", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "These are varied and generally more powerful locations that you can visit. In a two or three-player game, there is room for only 1 worker on each Forest location. The location spots with the symbol are only available in a four-player game. However, you may not place 2 of your own workers on a single", "headingPath": "FOREST LOCATIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "If you have placed all of your workers and you cannot play a card or do not wish to, then you must prepare for the next season. On your turn, bring back all of your deployed workers, then gain the listed bonuses for the next season, as shown atop the Ever Tree. After doing so, your turn is finished,", "headingPath": "PREPARE FOR SEASON", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "When a card is played, follow this sequence of actions, when applicable: Use \"card playing ability\" (Dungeon, Judge, Innkeeper, etc). If the card comes from the Meadow, replenish the Meadow. Pay resources or use occupied token. Place the newly played card in your city. (If the played card effect rem", "headingPath": "TIMING", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "You may pay the required cost in berries to play the Critter card, or if the Construction listed in the top left of the Critter card is already in your city, you may play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. Important: When playing a Critter for free by using the related Construction", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "You may play one card. To play a card, you must pay the listed requirements into the general supply. Cards may be played from either the Meadow cards or from your hand. You will be playing these cards in front of you to form your city. There are two types of cards in the game: Critters and Construct", "headingPath": "PLAY A CARO", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YEAR E \"RUGWORT THE RASCAl\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
- 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 20:03
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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | YEAR E "RUGWORT THE RASCAl" | p.16 | 0.032266 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | OVERVIEW | p.3 | 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | SETUP | p.6 | 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | FOREST LOCATIONS | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | PREPARE FOR SEASON | p.12 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | TIMING | 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) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.10 | 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 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | PLAY A CARO | p.10 | 0.014706 (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
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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | SETUP | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | YEAR E "RUGWORT THE RASCAl" | p.16 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 254 ms · first delta n/a · total 9586 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 254 ms · ask 9320 ms · gateway work 9586 ms · total 9586 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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
- 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 10), 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.