You asked
How do I set up the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Rootbg-237182-en-1e
Answered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Root has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
Follow the modified setup rules on the first two pages of the Walking /Through Root booklet. Once you have set up the game, give the players an overview of Root's theme and the victory conditions for each faction. Now you're ready to play.
Before playing on the winter map, take out the 12 suit markers, flip them face down, and shuffle them. /Then, place one suit marker near each clearing on the map. A/fter a suit marker has been added to each clearing, flip them all over, and set up the game as normal. Note the different placement of
If any players are new to the game, use the Standard Setup (5.1) If everyone has played and you want more variety, use the Advanced Setup (Appendix A). If you want to play with five or more factions that would start in corner clearings, you must use the Advanced Setup.
If playing with three players, remove the Vagabond. If playing with two, also remove the Alliance. For more faction mixes, see page 22. Choose Factions. Each player chooses a faction board and takes all of their faction's pieces. 1 st /The back of each faction board lists all of its pieces and gives
As a group, you may choose and set up factions as described in the Standard Setup (5.1) or you may use the faction setup cards included in the Marauder and Homeland Expansions, as described below. A.8.1 Step 1: Create Dra/ft Pool. Agree whether you will omit any factions from the game. You can- not
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 230 ms · ask 9296 ms · total 424679 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 415143 ms · generation 9536 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Follow the modified setup rules on the first two pages of the Walking /Through Root booklet. Once you have set up the game, give the players an overview of Root's theme and the victory conditions for each faction. Now you're ready to play.", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.045831, "snippet": "Before playing on the winter map, take out the 12 suit markers, flip them face down, and shuffle them. /Then, place one suit marker near each clearing on the map. A/fter a suit marker has been added to each clearing, flip them all over, and set up the game as normal. Note the different placement of ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032266, "snippet": "If any players are new to the game, use the Standard Setup (5.1) If everyone has played and you want more variety, use the Advanced Setup (Appendix A). If you want to play with five or more factions that would start in corner clearings, you must use the Advanced Setup.", "headingPath": "5. Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 56}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031514, "snippet": "If playing with three players, remove the Vagabond. If playing with two, also remove the Alliance. For more faction mixes, see page 22. Choose Factions. Each player chooses a faction board and takes all of their faction's pieces. 1 st /The back of each faction board lists all of its pieces and gives", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.028814, "snippet": "As a group, you may choose and set up factions as described in the Standard Setup (5.1) or you may use the faction setup cards included in the Marauder and Homeland Expansions, as described below. A.8.1 Step 1: Create Dra/ft Pool. Agree whether you will omit any factions from the game. You can- not ", "headingPath": "A.8 Step 8: Set Up Factions", "sharpsignalDocId": 56}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.028372, "snippet": "16.3.1 Step 1: Gather Pieces. Form a supply of 20 warriors and 12 enclaves. 16.3.2 Step 2: Place Warriors and Enclave. In a clearing on the river, place 5 warriors and 1 enclave on its Peaceful side. /This is your starting clearing. 16.3.3 Step 3: Remove Dominance. In a two-player game, remove the F", "headingPath": "16.3 Faction Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 56}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.02753, "snippet": "Give the booklet to the Marquise player and ask them to read the text aloud as they take the actions described. When their turn is over, pass the booklet to the Eyrie player so they can do the same. Continue this until you reach the end. /The booklet also answers some common questions and gives stra", "headingPath": "Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.026879, "snippet": "During your Daylight, if you have at least 10 victory points, you may play a dominance card into your play area to activate it. Remove your score marker from the score track. For the rest of the game, you can only win by meeting the victory condition listed on your activated dominance card. Gently U", "headingPath": "Changing Your Victory Condition", "sharpsignalDocId": 75}]
- citations (raw)
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 75 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 75 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 652 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
- ruling 594 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
- ruling 409 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
- debug row retained until
- Nov 6, 2026 14:15
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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75) | Setup | p.3 | 0.048652 (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)) | 239 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75) | Setup | p.23 | 0.045831 (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 Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56) | 5. Setup | p.4 | 0.032266 (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)) | 269 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75) | Setup | p.4 | 0.031514 (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 Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56) | A.8 Step 8: Set Up Factions | p.23 | 0.028814 (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 Root — Law of Root (corpus doc 56) | 16.3 Faction Setup | p.19 | 0.028372 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75) | Play | p.3 | 0.02753 (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 Root — Learning to Play (corpus doc 75) | Changing Your Victory Condition | p.21 | 0.026879 (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
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 |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 230 ms · first delta 9406 ms · total 424679 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 415143 ms · retrieval 230 ms · ask 9296 ms · gateway work 9536 ms · total 424679 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 2102
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 142.9 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.063 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 52s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 6), 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.