You asked
How do I setup the game?
Answered counted as answered 2 of 2 books answeredAsked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e · Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e
Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e Answered
1. Choose an Adversary and/or Scenario first, as they may change rules of Setup [1][2]. 2. Randomly pick one Island Board per player and arrange them to form the Island [3]. 3. For specific player counts, use these Thematic Board layouts: 1 Player uses Northeast; 2 Players use West and East (touching on the side opposite the Ocean); 3 Players use West, East, and Northeast above East; 4 Players use West, East, Northwest, and Northeast [4]. 4. Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as indicated by the icons in each land [3]. 5. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color [5]. 6. Each player chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards (their starting hand) [5]. 7. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card [5]. 8. Each player starts on a different Island Board and follows Setup instructions on the back of their Spirit Panel, which includes putting Presence into one or more lands on their starting board [5]. 9. Players flip their Spirit Panels and place all remaining Presence onto the dashed circles on their Presence Tracks, leaving the leftmost numbers with solid circles uncovered [5]. 10. Shuffle the Minor and Major Power Decks and put them near the board with room for discard piles [3]. 11. Put the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and the Dahan near the board [3]. 12. Create the Invader Deck by mixing 3 Stage I cards (on top), 4 Stage II cards, and 5 Stage III cards (on bottom) [2]. 13. To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action: reveal the top card of the Invader Deck, have the Invaders Explore in that land type, and place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space [6].
Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e Answered
If using the extension to the Invader Board: 1. Add the extension to the Invader Board [1]. 2. Put the Beasts, Wilds, Disease, and Strife tokens in the corresponding areas on the Invader Board extension [1]. 3. Shuffle the Event Deck and put it on the Events space on the Invader Board extension [1]. 4. During Setup, put one [token] and one [token] on each Island Board [1][2]. 5. Put the [token] in the lowest-numbered land with no printed Setup icons [1][2]. 6. Put the [token] in land #2 (with the City) [1][2]. If playing with the thematic side of the Island Boards: 1. Place tokens as indicated by the Setup icons in each land [1][3].
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)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search null ms · ask null ms · total 18841 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 18841 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 (Spirit Island); 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 20:56
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 18841 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 18841 ms · total 18841 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 33s 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
- SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
- 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 | Spirit Island (bg-162886-en-1e) | Answered | queued 0 ms · search 235 ms · ask 10906 ms · first delta 8210 ms · gateway work 11151 ms | 8 | 6 | STREAMED | base rulebook doc 58 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 | ruling 1622 |
| 2 | Spirit Island: Branch & Claw (bg-191831-en-1e) | Answered | queued 0 ms · search 306 ms · ask 7373 ms · first delta 6416 ms · gateway work 7690 ms | 8 | 3 | STREAMED | 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) · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 | ruling 1623 |
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.