Ruling — Everdell

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered 2 of 2 books answered

Asked with: Everdellbg-199792-en-1e · Everdell: Pearlbrookbg-259996-en-1e

Everdellbg-199792-en-1e Answered

Standard Setup: 1. Place the board on the table [1]. 2. Place the Ever Tree on the stump at the top of the board [1]. 3. Place the twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries in piles along the bank of the river [1]. 4. Place the point tokens and 'occupied' tokens beside the board [1]. 5. Shuffle the Forest cards and place them on the forest clearings; use 3 cards for two players, or 4 cards for three or four players, then put the remaining cards back in the box [1]. 6. Place the 4 basic Event tiles along the river [1]. 7. Shuffle the special Event cards and place 4 special Events on the lower branches of the Ever Tree, then put the remaining special Events back in the box [1]. 8. Shuffle the main deck and randomly place 8 cards faceup in the Meadow [1]. 9. Place the deck inside the Ever Tree [1]. 10. Each player chooses a color and starts with 2 workers of that color [1]. 11. The first player draws 5 cards from the deck, the second player 6 cards, the third player 7 cards, and the fourth player 8 cards [1]. 12. Each player places their 4 other workers on the upper branches of the Ever Tree: 1 worker on spring, 1 on summer, and 2 on autumn [1]. 13. The most humble player goes first [1]. Rugwort the Rascal Setup (Two-player setup): 1. Select a player color for Rugwort (he prefers black) [2]. 2. You have a starting hand of 5 cards, and Rugwort does not have a hand of cards [2]. 3. Take one of Rugwort's workers and place it on the top-left Forest card, blocking it [2]. 4. Place his other worker on the 2-twig Basic location, blocking it [2].

[1] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.6 · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.16 · YEAR k 'RUGWORT THE RASCAL

Everdell: Pearlbrookbg-259996-en-1e Answered

To set up the normal game with these additions, follow these steps: 1. Place the River board to the side of the main board [1]. 2. Place the pearl tokens on the Shoal spot on the board [1]. 3. Place the Wonder boards beneath the Ever Tree, covering the costs for the basic Events (the basic Events will not be used with this expansion) [1]. 4. Place the Wonders on their spots on the boards [1]. 5. Shuffle the River Destination Citizen cards and set aside 2 of them, unseen [1]. 6. Do the same with the River Destination Location cards [1]. 7. Shuffle those 4 cards together, unseen, and place 1 facedown on each of the 4 spots on the River board [1]. 8. Place 1 pearl on top of each of these facedown River Destination cards [1]. 9. Place the remaining River cards back in the box unseen [1]. 10. Shuffle the new Critter and Construction cards with the #@ symbol into the deck before dealing out cards [1]. 11. When setting up the special Events, shuffle the Adornment cards and deal 2 facedown to each player; return the rest to the box, unseen [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Everdell: Pearlbrook — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP

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 13301 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13301 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 (Everdell); 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 21:07

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

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 13301 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 13301 ms · total 13301 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 20s 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	Everdell (bg-199792-en-1e)	Answered	queued 0 ms · search 238 ms · ask 8067 ms · first delta 5391 ms · gateway work 8316 ms	8	2	STREAMED	base rulebook doc 113 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 10	ruling 1695
2	Everdell: Pearlbrook (bg-259996-en-1e)	Answered	queued 0 ms · search 254 ms · ask 4720 ms · first delta 3120 ms · gateway work 4985 ms	8	1	STREAMED	no base-rulebook boost — this edition registers no ingested rulebook to anchor retrieval to · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 123	ruling 1696

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: 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.