Ruling — Secret Hitler

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Secret Hitlerbg-188834-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps: 1. Select the Fascist track that corresponds to the number of players and place it next to any Liberal track [1]. 2. Shuffle the 11 Fascist Policy tiles and the 6 Liberal Policy tiles into a single Policy deck and place that deck face down on the Draw pile card [1]. 3. Prepare an envelope for each player, ensuring each contains a Secret Role card, a corresponding Party Membership card, one Ja! Ballot card, and one Nein Ballot card [1]. 4. Pack Liberal Secret Role cards with a Liberal Party Membership card, and pack Fascist and Hitler Secret Role cards with a Fascist Party Membership card [1]. 5. Ensure the correct number of ordinary Fascists are included in addition to Hitler [1]. 6. Shuffle the filled envelopes so each player's role remains a secret [1]. 7. Each player is randomly selected to receive one envelope [1]. 8. Once envelopes are dealt, all players examine their Secret Role cards in secret [2]. 9. Randomly select the first Presidential Candidate and pass that player both the President and Chancellor placards [2]. 10. For games of 5-6 players: tell everyone to close their eyes; Fascist and Hitler open their eyes and acknowledge each other; then everyone closes their eyes again, followed by everyone opening their eyes [2]. 11. For games of 7-10 players: tell everyone to close their eyes and extend a fist; all Fascists (excluding Hitler) open their eyes and acknowledge each other; Hitler keeps eyes closed but shows a thumbs-up; Fascists note who has the extended thumb [2]. After a pause, everyone closes their eyes and puts hands down, then everyone opens their eyes [2].

[1] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook · p.2 · SET UP

[2] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook · p.3 · WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:

🔧 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 1261 ms · ask 9162 ms · total 10494 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 10494 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Select the Fascist track that corresponds to the number of players and place it next to any Liberal track. Shuffle the 11 Fascist Policy tiles and the 6 Liberal Policy tiles into a single Policy deck and place that deck face down on the Draw pile card. You'll need an envelope for each player, and ea", "headingPath": "SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The President secretly looks at the top three tiles in the Policy deck and then returns them to the top of the deck without changing the order. The President executes one player at the table by saying 'I formally execute [player name].' If that player is Hitler, the game ends in a Liberal victory. I", "headingPath": "Policy Peek · Execution", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Secret Hitler features an investigation mechanic that allows some players to find out what team other players are on, and this mechanic only works if Hitler's special role is not revealed. To prevent that from happening, every player has both a Secret Role card and a Party Membership card. Hitler's ", "headingPath": "WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "ABOUT LYING: Often, some players learn things that the rest of the players don't know, like when the President and Chancellor get to see Policy tiles, or when a President uses the Investigate power to see someone's Party Membership card. You can always lie about hidden knowledge in Secret Hitler. Th", "headingPath": "LEGISLATIVE SESSION · EXECUTIVE ACTION · Investigate Loyalty · Call Special Election", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "During the Legislative Session, the President and Chancellor work together to enact a new Policy in secret. The President draws the top three tiles from the Policy deck, looks at them in secret, and discards one tile face down into the Discard pile. The remaining two tiles go to the Chancellor, who ", "headingPath": "LEGISLATIVE SESSION", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Secret Hitler was funded with Kickstarter. Secret Hitler was created by Mike Boxleiter, Tommy Maranges, and Mac Schubert. Secret Hitler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Share - copy and redistribute the game in any medium or format ", "headingPath": "THANK YOU · CREDITS & LICENSE · YOU ARE FREE TO: · UNDER THE FOLLOWING TERMS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Term limits only affect nominations to the Chancellorship; anyone can be President, even someone who was just Chancellor. If there are only five players left in the game, only the last elected Chancellor is ineligible to be Chancellor Candidate; the last President may be nominated. There are some ot", "headingPath": "ON ELIGIBILITY: · 3. Vote on the government · If the vote is a tie, or if a majority of players votes no: · If a majority of players votes yes:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Everyone should claim to be a Liberal. Since the Liberal team has a voting majority, it can easily shut out any player claiming to be a Fascist. As a Fascist, there is no advantage to outing yourself to the majority. Additionally, Liberals should usually tell the truth. Liberals are trying to figure", "headingPath": "STRATEGY NOTES · THANK YOU", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 126 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 126 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 14:39

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 Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	SET UP	p.2	0.032787 (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 Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	Policy Peek · Execution	p.5	0.032258 (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 Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:	p.3	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
#4	RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	LEGISLATIVE SESSION · EXECUTIVE ACTION · Investigate Loyalty · Call Special Election	p.5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	LEGISLATIVE SESSION	p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	THANK YOU · CREDITS & LICENSE · YOU ARE FREE TO: · UNDER THE FOLLOWING TERMS:	p.7	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
#7	RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	ON ELIGIBILITY: · 3. Vote on the government · If the vote is a tie, or if a majority of players votes no: · If a majority of players votes yes:	p.4	0.029851 (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 Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	STRATEGY NOTES · THANK YOU	p.6	0.029412 (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 Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	SET UP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126)	WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 1261 ms · first delta 7665 ms · total 10494 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 1261 ms · ask 9162 ms · gateway work 10494 ms · total 10494 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3352
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 374
tok/sec: 136.6 tok/sec — 374 output tokens in 2.737 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: 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 48), 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.