Ruling — Zombicide: Black Plague

You asked

What does each player take, and what goes in the middle, before we begin?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Zombicide: Black Plaguebg-176189-en-1e

Each player takes one Dashboard for each of their Survivors, a colored plastic base to attach to the Survivor's miniature, and 5 plastic trackers in the same color [1]. Before the game begins, the following are placed in the middle (as indicated by the Quest): 1. Doors [1] 2. Objectives [1] 3. All tokens [1]

[1] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.6 ·

🔧 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 264 ms · ask 14117 ms · total 14391 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 14391 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 56, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "All Zombies of specified type get an extra Activation! END PHASE • Remove all Noise tokens from the board . • The next player receives the “first player” token (play clockwise) . GAME ROUND SUMMARY GAME RULES OVERRIDE THIS ROUND SUMMARY RULES . TARGETING PRIORITY ORDER When several targets share the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "PLAYERS’ PHASE Starting with whoever holds the first player token, each player activates his Survivors one after another, in the order of his choice . Each Survivor can execute three Actions at the Blue Danger Level (not counting any free Action his Blue Level Skill may give him) . The possible Acti", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 56, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "1 FIRST STEP Choose the first player at the beginning of the game . He receives the “first player” token . 2– PLAYERS’ PHASE The first player activates all of his or her Survivors, one after the other, in any order . When he or she’s done, the next player’s Turn begins . Play clockwise . Each Surviv", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "SETUP 1 . Choose a Quest . 2 . Place the tiles . 3 . Place the doors, Objectives, and all tokens as indicated by the Quest . 4 . Each player gathers 1 to 6 Survivors for him to play . Play- ers sit around the table in any order they choose . As they cooperate against the game, all players form a sin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 34, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the End Phase of the Game Round, all such weapons are freely reloaded, so that they always start the Round ready to fire . • If such a weapon is fired and passed to another Survivor without reloading, it must still be reloaded before the new owner can use it in the same Game Round . • When equipp", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "8 . Shuffle the Zombie cards into one deck and the Equip - ment cards into another . Place both decks face down close to the board . 9 . Place the miniatures representing the chosen Survivors on the starting Zone(s) indicated by the Quest . 10 . Each player places his Survivors’ Dashboard(s) in fron", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "ZOMBIES’ PHASE For all their ferocity, zombies are dumb as dirt. You pretty much know what they’re gonna do. Unless there’s a necromancer around, of course. That’s when you’ve gotta be smarter. A determined group, even a small one, can hold the stupid hordes at bay. Just keep careful, keep quiet, an", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "It does not matter how many hits you obtain with a weapon that inflicts 1 Damage . A Fatty will absorb the hits without flinching . Dice symbol Dual symbol THREE HANDS? Putting the proper Equipment card in his Body space, a Survivor could effectively be considered as having three cards equipped in H", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 371 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 371 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 18:20

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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.56	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.19	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.56	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.6	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.34	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.23	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.32	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)		p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 264 ms · first delta 13718 ms · total 14391 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 264 ms · ask 14117 ms · gateway work 14391 ms · total 14391 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3614
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 79
tok/sec: 134.1 tok/sec — 79 output tokens in 0.589 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s 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 300), 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.