Ruling — Star Realms: Frontiers

You asked

Take me through getting the game ready to play, from opening the box to the first turn.

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Star Realms: Frontiersbg-230253-en-1e

The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.8 · Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards

Players alternate taking turns. Each turn has three phases: Main Phase Discard Phase Draw Phase At any time during your Main Phase you may perform any of the following actions, as many times as you like, in any order you wish: Play cards from your hand. Use the Primary Abilities of in-play Bases. Us

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.31 · Challenge Setup · Difficulty Levels · Boss Order of Play

Players take individual turns. Randomly determine which player goes first. Play proceeds clockwise around the table from that player. After each player's turn, the Boss takes a turn. The Boss' special abilities and attacks only affect the player whose turn just ended. Beginner: The Boss doesn't take

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.37 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play

The Boss starts the game with 25 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck (8 Scouts and 2 Vipers). Players start with 50 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players have individual Authority and can b

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.23 · Challenge Cards · Challenge Difficulty Levels

The eight oversized Challenge Cards included in this set allow you to play by yourself, or on a team with your friends, against the game. In each challenge you will be fighting against a different bad guy (known as 'the Boss'). Typically, you'll use normal Star Realms rules for hand size, acquiring

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.16 · Draw Phase · Outpost · Ready to Play!

Trade When this icon appears in the upper-right corner of a card, it indicates the card's cost. When this icon appears in a card's text box, it indicates an amount of Trade that you gain. Scrap When this icon appears in a card's text box, it indicates a Scrap Ability. A Base with this icon is an Out

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 236 ms · ask 4887 ms · total 48141 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 43009 ms · generation 5132 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Players alternate taking turns. Each turn has three phases: Main Phase Discard Phase Draw Phase At any time during your Main Phase you may perform any of the following actions, as many times as you like, in any order you wish: Play cards from your hand. Use the Primary Abilities of in-play Bases. Us", "headingPath": "Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Players take individual turns. Randomly determine which player goes first. Play proceeds clockwise around the table from that player. After each player's turn, the Boss takes a turn. The Boss' special abilities and attacks only affect the player whose turn just ended. Beginner: The Boss doesn't take", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Difficulty Levels · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 37, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 25 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck (8 Scouts and 2 Vipers). Players start with 50 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players have individual Authority and can b", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The eight oversized Challenge Cards included in this set allow you to play by yourself, or on a team with your friends, against the game. In each challenge you will be fighting against a different bad guy (known as 'the Boss'). Typically, you'll use normal Star Realms rules for hand size, acquiring ", "headingPath": "Challenge Cards · Challenge Difficulty Levels", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Trade When this icon appears in the upper-right corner of a card, it indicates the card's cost. When this icon appears in a card's text box, it indicates an amount of Trade that you gain. Scrap When this icon appears in a card's text box, it indicates a Scrap Ability. A Base with this icon is an Out", "headingPath": "Draw Phase · Outpost · Ready to Play!", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "A player may, during their Main Phase on any turn, scrap every card in the Trade Row. The Trade Row may only be mulliganed once during a challenge, so this ability may only be used if no player has already mulliganed the Trade Row this game. For Bosses that have a hand, they get their normal hand si", "headingPath": "Mulliganing the Trade Row · Challenge Notes", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "faction icons in the upper left hand corner) and place it face-down on the table. Leave a space next to the Trade Deck for the Scrap Heap (a place to put any cards that are removed from the game during play). Lay out the top five cards from the Trade Deck face-up on the table. This is the Trade Row.", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 33, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 40 Authority per player. Each player starts with a Personal Deck consisting of 7 Scouts and 1 Viper. Players start with 60 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players are a Hydra team (See page 17). After the Boss draws its cards on its turn, follow ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}]
citations (raw): []
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 416 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 416 boosted
answered-before recall: no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 7, 2026 05:12

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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards	p.8	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Difficulty Levels · Boss Order of Play	p.31	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.37	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Cards · Challenge Difficulty Levels	p.23	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Draw Phase · Outpost · Ready to Play!	p.16	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Mulliganing the Trade Row · Challenge Notes	p.24	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Setup	p.6	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.33	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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 236 ms · first delta 5035 ms · total 48141 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 43009 ms · retrieval 236 ms · ask 4887 ms · gateway work 5132 ms · total 48141 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2259
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 138.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.065 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 345), 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.