You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Cosmic Encounterbg-39463-en-1e
There are two different sets of setup instructions provided in the sources: **Option 1:** 1. Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color [1][2]. 2. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of them, stacking four of their ships on each of their planets [1][2]. Then, players place the warp in the center of the play area [1][2]. Finally, players place their colony markers at '0' on the colony track [1][2]. 3. Prepare Destiny Deck: Take the three destiny cards that correspond to the color that each player has chosen and shuffle them with the wild and special destiny cards to create the destiny deck [1][2]. Any cards that correspond to a color that was not chosen are returned to the game box; they are not used during the game [1][2]. **Option 2:** 1. Choose Aliens: Shuffle the cosmic combo cards and reveal the top card of the deck [3][4]. Then, gather the alien sheets indicated for the appropriate number of players and deal one randomly to each player [3][4]. 2. Prepare Cosmic Deck and Deal Hands: Shuffle the encounter, reinforcement, and artifact cards to create the cosmic deck [3][4]. (Experienced players may include flare cards) [3][4]. 3. Deal Starting Hands: Deal a starting hand of eight cosmic cards to each player [3][4]. Players may look at their cards but cannot show them to other players [3][4]. 4. Choose First Player: If this is the players' first game, the youngest player is the first player and takes the first turn when the game begins [3][4]. Otherwise, reveal cards from the destiny deck until a card matching the color of one of the players is revealed; that player is the first player [3][4]. Then, shuffle the destiny deck [3][4].
🔧 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 262 ms · ask 13713 ms · total 1491791 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 1477806 ms · generation 13985 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To set up a game of Cosmic Encounter , players perform the following steps: Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of them, stacking", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "4 Setup T o set up a game of Cosmic Encounter, players perform the following steps: 1. Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color. 2. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "Choose Aliens: Shuffle the cosmic combo cards and reveal the top card of the deck. Then, gather the alien sheets indicated for the appropriate number of players and deal one randomly to each player. Experienced players can use the alien selection rules described in 'Advanced Game' on page 16. Prepar", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "To play a game of Cosmic Encounter , players take turns in clockwise order starting with the first player, who is determined during setup. During a player's turn, they have an encounter . An encounter is an interaction between two or more players who are trying to either establish or defend a colony", "headingPath": "Playing The Game · Start Turn Phase · Regroup Phase · Destiny Phase · Launch Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "Once players are comfortable with the core rules of the game, they should add flare cards to their future games. Flare cards provide players with powerful abilities that can be used repeatedly. Each flare has a blue bar indicating the prerequisities for it to be played. When a player plays a flare c", "headingPath": "Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "7 Playing The Game T o play a game of Cosmic Encounter, players take turns in clockwise order starting with the first player, who is determined during setup. During a player’s turn, they have an encounter. An encounter is an interaction between two or more players who are trying to either establish ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "This section contains the basic concepts for Cosmic Encounter that players need to understand before learning how to play the game. During the game, each player controls an alien that can alter the rules of the game. To understand how alien powers work, the players must first understand the basic me", "headingPath": "Basic Concepts · Aliens · Planets and Systems · Ships and Colonies · Moving Ships · The Warp", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Players win the game by establishing foreign colonies. The foreign colony track along the edge of the warp is used to indicate the number of foreign colonies each player has. Both the yellow and red player have two foreign colonies, and the blue player has four foreign colonies. When a player establ", "headingPath": "Winning The Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 231 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 231 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 6, 2026 14:34
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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Setup | p.4 | 0.048916 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | p.4 | 0.048131 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Setup | p.5 | 0.046239 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Playing The Game · Start Turn Phase · Regroup Phase · Destiny Phase · Launch Phase | p.7 | 0.046175 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns | p.16 | 0.045805 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | p.7 | 0.044557 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Basic Concepts · Aliens · Planets and Systems · Ships and Colonies · Moving Ships · The Warp | p.6 | 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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Winning The Game | p.6 | 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)) | 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Setup | p.4 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | p.4 | no quote on the wire | |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | Setup | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231) | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 262 ms · first delta 10746 ms · total 1491791 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 1477806 ms · retrieval 262 ms · ask 13713 ms · gateway work 13985 ms · total 1491791 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3849
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 437
- tok/sec
- 137.2 tok/sec — 437 output tokens in 3.185 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 44s 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)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 157), 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.