You asked
What does each player take, and what goes in the middle, before we begin?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Tichubg-215-en-1e
Before the game begins, the player who shuffles the deck places it face down in the middle of the table [1]. Players take cards as follows: 1. The dealer starts by taking the top-most card [1]. 2. All players then take turns, in counter-clockwise order, taking one card at a time until the deck is exhausted and each player holds 14 cards [1].
🔧 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 326 ms · ask 4481 ms · total 4817 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 4817 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 1, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The player holding the Mah Jong begins by leading (playing face up on the table) any of the following combinations of cards from his hand: a single card, for example: 4 a pair of cards of equal rank, for example: 8,8 a sequence of pairs of adjacent value, for example: J,J,Q,Q,K,K (the example is a s", "headingPath": "TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The game is played by pairs of two partners with the players of each team sitting opposite one another. During the game, the partners try to help each other score points and gain the lead. The game is played over several hands with the goal to be the first team to score a total of 1000 points. Befor", "headingPath": "TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Shuffle and take cards as you would for a four player game. The shuffler plays with a dummy partner. The shuffler may not declare Grand Tichu for either himself or the dummy. Before any cards are pushed, the dealer may look at both his hand and the dummy's. Pushing cards is the same as in a four pla", "headingPath": "THREECHU (TICHU NANKING FOR 3 PLAYERS) · TICHU TIENTSIN (6 PLAYERS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The first hand is a simple round of tichu, without any pushing of cards or any point values, in which everyone tries to get rid of his cards as quickly as possible - to be elected as the first Great Lord of the day. Whoever gets rid of his cards second becomes the first Lord and so on. The players t", "headingPath": "GRAND SEIGNEUR (5-12 PLAYERS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The trick is ended immediatly, but is still given away if won by the Dragon. This happens very rarely and the solution of the problem is usually obvious. However (if you need a rule): Tichu should not be a game of reaction, fast play should not give any advantage: bombs can be played before ordinary", "headingPath": "What happens to the last trick of the hand (when the 3rd player plays his last card(s))? · What happens if two players want to play a bomb at the same time? · What if two players of the same team call a Tichu at the same time? · Is 3,3,3,3,Phoenix a valid full house? · Can we play in clockwise order instead?", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "For hints on tactics, it is best to ask a Chinese bus driver. Since such a person may not be available to all reading these rules, we offer the following from our small experience. Naturally, when placed beside the wisdom of our Chinese tutor these will taste like a dusty dog biscuit beside the high", "headingPath": "TACTICAL TIPS", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Players turn over their tricks and score: 10 for each king and each ten 5 for each five 25 for the Dragon, and 25 for the Phoenix There are, thus, 100 points for the whole hand, which are divided between the two teams. If, however, the two players on one team achieve a double victory (being both fir", "headingPath": "SCORING A ROUND · THE TICHUS! · Small Tichu · Grand Tichu · END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The Mah Jong is an interesting card of mixed reputation, with the following properties: its owner starts the hand (but need not lead the Mah Jong). the Mah Jong ranks as a 1 and is, therefore, the lowest card in the deck. As a one, it may be included in a suitable sequence (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5). when a p", "headingPath": "THE SPECIAL CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 338}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 338 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 338 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 18:16
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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS) | p.1 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS) | p.1 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | THREECHU (TICHU NANKING FOR 3 PLAYERS) · TICHU TIENTSIN (6 PLAYERS) | p.4 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | GRAND SEIGNEUR (5-12 PLAYERS) | p.4 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | What happens to the last trick of the hand (when the 3rd player plays his last card(s))? · What happens if two players want to play a bomb at the same time? · What if two players of the same team call a Tichu at the same time? · Is 3,3,3,3,Phoenix a valid full house? · Can we play in clockwise order instead? | p.3 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | TACTICAL TIPS | p.2 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | SCORING A ROUND · THE TICHUS! · Small Tichu · Grand Tichu · END OF THE GAME | p.2 | 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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | THE SPECIAL CARDS | p.1 | 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
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 Tichu — Rulebook (corpus doc 338) | TICHU NANKING (4 PLAYERS) | p.1 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 326 ms · first delta 4130 ms · total 4817 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 326 ms · ask 4481 ms · gateway work 4817 ms · total 4817 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4119
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 85
- tok/sec
- 135.6 tok/sec — 85 output tokens in 0.627 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s 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
- BEGIN — "begin" / "beginning"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
begin
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 266), 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.