Ruling — Night at the Zoo

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Night at the Zoobg-457412-en-1e

Standard Game Setup: 1. Place the 2 Game board in the center of the table [1]. 2. Each player takes a Player board and chooses a color [1]. 3. Place your Player board in front of you and put the Score tracker in your color on the '0' space of the score track on the Game board [1]. 4. Sort all Bonus tiles (which have no icons) by terrain type: Grass, Rocks, and Sand, and place each type in a separate face-up supply pile next to the game board [1]. 5. Shuffle the Animal tiles and draw 3 at random; their combined difficulty level (shown by moon icons) must be 6 or higher (if less than 6, reshuffle and draw 3 new tiles) [1]. 6. Place the 3 drawn Animal tiles face up in slots A, B, and C above the game board [1]. 7. Each player takes 3 Animal figures of each drawn animal type [1]. 8. Shuffle the Action tiles (showing a draft icon on the back) into a face-down pile and place it next to the Game board [1]. 9. Draw a number of Action tiles equal to the number of players plus one and place these tiles face-up on the light blue spaces (top row) of the Game board, called the Draft market [1]. 10. Each player randomly takes one Setup tile [1]. 11. Each player places their Animal figures on their player boards as shown by their Setup tile: Place each Animal marked with an icon on the corresponding Entrance space, and each Animal marked only by a letter on the corresponding Undiscovered Animal space [1]. 12. Flip the Setup tile to its back side [1]. 13. Choose a first player (the person who most recently saw or helped an animal, or chosen randomly) and that player takes the First Player token [1]. 14. Place all Pollen tokens in the supply [2]. Solo Game Setup: 1. Follow the standard rules with these exceptions: Prepare only one Player board (for yourself) [3]. 2. Take the 6 Solo game tiles, shuffle them, and place them face-down next to the game board to form a draw pile [3]. 3. When drawing Action tiles, draw 3 of them (as for the 2-player game) [3].

[1] RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook · p.4 · Goal of the Game · Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook · p.12 · Special Animal Rules

[3] RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook · p.9 · Food Symbols · Solo game · Setup

🔧 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 211 ms · ask 6390 ms · total 6611 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6611 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "1 Place the 2 Game board in the center of the table. Each player takes a Player board and chooses a color. Place your Player board in front of you and put the Score tracker in your color on the '0' space of the score track on the Game board. 3 Sort all Bonus tiles, which have no icons, by terrain ty", "headingPath": "Goal of the Game · Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "? For each movement, choose one option: Move the Snake 1 space in the direction it is facing (you cannot turn left or right during its movement); OR Change the Snake to face any orthogonal direction. The Snake starts the game facing the Neighborhood when discovered. At game end, score 10 VPs for eac", "headingPath": "Special Animal Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045235, "snippet": "Help the escaped animals to map out the darkened zoo and create a path back to their enclosures, so they can get home safely. Each animal has a unique way of moving and a different scoring condition, so choose wisely when to move, what actions to use - and keep track of all the runaways to get every", "headingPath": "Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Simultaneously, all players use the tile they drafted, and those in their Warehouse, in any order to: Place the tile in your Neighborhood; OR Place the tile in your Warehouse; OR Discard a tile to make a special move. You don't have to use all tiles in your Warehouse, but you must use the drafted ti", "headingPath": "2. Tile Placement Phase · Place the tile in your Neighborhood · Conditions · Action symbols", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The game starts with the First Player token assigned to Leo. The game then proceeds according to the standard rules. Leo acts as a regular player; however, he does not have a Player board. Between the tile drafts, the First Player token alternates between you and Leo. At the start of the Drafting Ph", "headingPath": "Gameplay · Drafting Phase: · Reshuffling Solo Game tiles: · Scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030886, "snippet": "Each tile may contain one unique food (out of 7). Score points based on the number of different food types you have in your Neighborhood on tiles (0-1 different food symbols score 0 VPs) . Tiles with a food symbol in your Warehouse do not count. You score only once for your best set of different sym", "headingPath": "Food Symbols · Solo game · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The game is played over 3 rounds. Each round has 5 drafts, each with the following three phases: Drafting Phase Tile Placement Phase Maintenance Phase Starting with the first player, in clockwise order, take an Action tile from the top row of the Game board. Once all players take a tile, move the re", "headingPath": "Gameplay · 1. Drafting Phase · About the Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The goal of the game is to guide your animals back to the Zoo most effectively. Draft tiles, then place them on your Player board to trigger actions and create a path for your animals. The game ends after 3 rounds (each round with 5 drafts), and the player with the most Victory points (VPs) wins.", "headingPath": "Goal of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Goal of the Game · Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Special Animal Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Food Symbols · Solo game · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 211}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 211 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 211 boosted
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 4, 2026 17:32

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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Goal of the Game · Game Setup	p.4	0.04866 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Special Animal Rules	p.12	0.048387 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Components	p.2	0.045235 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	2. Tile Placement Phase · Place the tile in your Neighborhood · Conditions · Action symbols	p.6	0.031746 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Gameplay · Drafting Phase: · Reshuffling Solo Game tiles: · Scoring	p.10	0.03125 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Food Symbols · Solo game · Setup	p.9	0.030886 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Gameplay · 1. Drafting Phase · About the Tiles	p.5	0.030769 (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 Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Goal of the Game	p.3	0.030303 (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))	297

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Goal of the Game · Game Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Special Animal Rules	p.12	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Night at the Zoo — Rulebook (corpus doc 211)	Food Symbols · Solo game · Setup	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 211 ms · first delta 3125 ms · total 6611 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 211 ms · ask 6390 ms · gateway work 6611 ms · total 6611 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2760
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 510
tok/sec: 148.0 tok/sec — 510 output tokens in 3.447 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 14s 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 136), 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.