Ruling — Pandemic

You asked

How does the mutation strain work?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e · Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e

The Mutation challenge adds a 5th (purple) disease that behaves differently from the original four [1][2]. If playing with the Bio-Terrorist challenge, the purple disease cannot be the Virulent Strain [3]. Additionally, when combining the Mutation and Virulent Strain challenges, if a card drawn to resolve a Mutation card is a Virulent Strain city, that card does not count towards Rate Effect [4].

[1] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.2 ·

[2] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.2 · OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …

[3] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.3 · VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …

[4] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.3 · Government Interference · Rate Effect

🔧 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 260 ms · ask 10880 ms · total 11151 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 11151 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 1, "score": 0.028893, "snippet": "3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.028034, "snippet": "The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe", "headingPath": "QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.028021, "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}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.027109, "snippet": "At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.026495, "snippet": "rSBurg lgierS tehran Play Example: On the first turn, Ben does 4 actions: (1) Drive to Chicago (from Atlanta), (2) Drive to San Francisco, (3) Treat Disease in San Francisco, removing a blue disease cube there, and (4) Treat Disease in San Francisco again, removing a second blue disease cube. Baghda", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.026137, "snippet": "1 by Matt Leacock Do you have what it takes to save humanity? As skilled members of a disease-fighting team, you must keep four deadly diseases at bay while discovering their cures. You and your teammates will travel across the globe, treating infections while finding resources for cures. You must w", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.02579, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.025342, "snippet": "Do you have what it takes to save humanity? As skilled members of a disease-fighting team, you must keep four deadly diseases at bay while discovering their cures. You and your teammates will travel across the globe, treating infections while finding resources for cures. You must work together, usin", "headingPath": "by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}]
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": 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": "Government Interference · Rate Effect", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 174 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 174 boosted
layering — route: not layered — one pooled read: the books were read together and that read answered, so re-reading them one at a time would spend the same GPU to re-derive an answer already given
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 21:09

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 THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. 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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.1	0.028893 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS	p.8	0.028034 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)	BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play	p.5	0.028021 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	Discover a Cure	p.4	0.027109 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	Discover a Cure	p.5	0.026495 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.1	0.026137 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …	p.4	0.02579 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW	p.1	0.025342 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	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)	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
[4]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)	Government Interference · Rate Effect	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 260 ms · first delta 10465 ms · total 11151 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 260 ms · ask 10880 ms · gateway work 11151 ms · total 11151 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4410
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 87
tok/sec: 135.1 tok/sec — 87 output tokens in 0.644 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

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.