RuleSage cited table rulings
← Near and Far

You asked

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

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Near and Farbg-195421-en-1e

Each player takes their 5 basic artifact cards (keeping the 2 advanced artifacts separate) [1]. From these 5, each player selects 1 card for their hand [1]. After selecting the card, players pass their 4 remaining basic artifact cards to the player on their left, who then selects 1 card and passes the stack again, repeating this process until all cards have been selected [1]. At this time, each player must discard 1 of their 2 advanced artifact cards (but may discard both) [1]. At the start of the game, the four chief cards are placed near the town board [2].

[1] RULEBOOK Near and Far — Rulebook · p.12 · Drafting Artifact Cards
[2] RULEBOOK Near and Far — Rulebook · p.27 · Chiefs
🔧 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 285 ms · ask 10648 ms · total 10944 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 10944 ms
retrieval refs (raw)
[{"page": 37, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You've played some game sessions with the same character and your friend comes and wants to play with a new character. What do you do? Do you have to start over? In most cases, no. In Campaign Mode , you can start a new character late in the campaign with extra experience. Give the new player a char", "headingPath": "Starting a character mid-campaign", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Use this variant if you want to have more quests on the map and more story reading. This increases the game length. During setup, place 4 quest tokens per player on the map. If playing Campaign Mode , characters will gain experience at a faster rate, so you will have to skip three maps of your choic", "headingPath": "Starting a character mid-campaign", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The two arrows in the adventure symbol (picture on the journal on the player boards) are meant as a reminder of this. Each pack bird a player owns gives +1 movement. Each active party member with an arrow symbol also gives +1 movement. A player's total movement represents the maximum number of space", "headingPath": "Each player starts out with a base movement of 2.", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "At the start of the game, the four chief cards are placed near the town board. There is one chief for each faction: Outlaws (green), Nomads (yellow), Mystics (blue), and Lizardfolk (red). Each chief is worth 5 journey points at the end of the game to the player that owns the card. The first player t", "headingPath": "Chiefs", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each player searches for the legendary Last Ruin, a ruined city said to contain the greatest desire of the heart. Players must journey through forgotten, dangerous lands, recruiting the help of four factions: Outlaws (green banner), Mystics (blue banner), Lizards (red banner), and Nomads (yellow ban", "headingPath": "Goal of the Game · Overview · Hearts", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Sometimes a regular quest will trigger a side quest. The side quest will be listed among the rewards (E.g.: Q2 ). The player should mark the side quest number in one of the circles on their character card labeled 'side quest.' The next time the player attempts a quest, the player to their left will ", "headingPath": "Side Quests · Character Quests", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "After completing a game and before starting the first turn in the next game, players may purchase talents (permanent abilities used over multiple games in a campaign) by spending experience points. (In Story Mode, players start at 1 experience and gain 1 experience for each completed character quest", "headingPath": "Character Talents", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If this is your first time through the campaign: If a space has a name (on the map, labelled just below the space), make sure that it is one of the spaces that is chosen to have a quest token (as long as it has an open book icon). Use the heart marker to keep track of hearts. Place 14 tent markers s", "headingPath": "Campaign Mode · Character Mode, Campaign Mode", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}]
citations (raw)
[{"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Drafting Artifact Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}, {"page": 27, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Chiefs", "sharpsignalDocId": 361}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 361 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 361 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

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Starting a character mid-campaign p.37 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Starting a character mid-campaign p.38 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Each player starts out with a base movement of 2. p.19 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Chiefs p.27 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Goal of the Game · Overview · Hearts p.14 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Side Quests · Character Quests p.23 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Character Talents p.13 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 Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Campaign Mode · Character Mode, Campaign Mode p.9 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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Drafting Artifact Cards p.12 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Near and Far — Rulebook (corpus doc 361) Chiefs p.27 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 285 ms · first delta 9926 ms · total 10944 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 285 ms · ask 10648 ms · gateway work 10944 ms · total 10944 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3334
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
131
tok/sec
136.3 tok/sec — 131 output tokens in 0.961 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 290), 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.