Ruling — Mindbug: First Contact

You asked

Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Mindbug: First Contactbg-345584-en-1e

1. Deal each player 2 Mindbugs and place them face up in front of them [1]. 2. Set aside all double-sided cards [1]. 3. Shuffle the creature cards and deal each player 10 cards face down as their draw pile [1]. 4. Leave a bit of room next to your draw pile for a discard pile [1]. 5. Each player draws 5 cards from their personal draw pile as their starting hand [1]. 6. Each player starts the game with 3 life, using a life tracker set to 3 (dice, tokens, or 3 unused cards may also be used) [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook · p.5 · Step 1: Deal Mindbugs · Step 2: Set Aside All Evolution Cards · Step 3: Shuffle and Deal Decks · Step 4: Draw Hands · Step 5: Set Starting Life

🔧 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 429 ms · ask 6177 ms · total 6621 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6621 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Whenever you have less than 5 cards in hand, you immediately draw cards from your draw pile until you have 5 cards in hand. Do this before any other effects occur (e.g. before a card is mindbugged or its Play effect is triggered). If your draw pile runs out of cards, you don't draw additional cards.", "headingPath": "Drawing Cards · Taking Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Deal each player 2 Mindbugs and place them face up in front of them. Set aside all double-sided cards (cards with a creature on both front and back). These are not shuffled into the deck but may come into play through a special Evolve effect on certain cards. Shuffle the creature cards and deal each", "headingPath": "Step 1: Deal Mindbugs · Step 2: Set Aside All Evolution Cards · Step 3: Shuffle and Deal Decks · Step 4: Draw Hands · Step 5: Set Starting Life", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When a creature evolves from stage 2 to stage 3, simply flip the double-sided card over to show that the stage 3 is now in play. A creature that evolves is still considered the same creature. It remains in its current state (e.g. exhausted or boosted) even after evolving and doesn't trigger Play eff", "headingPath": "Game terms", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Action: While this creature is in play, its Action effect can be activated instead of attacking or playing a card this turn. In Discard Pile: While this card is in your discard pile, its effect is active. Boost X cards to this: You may take up to X cards from any discard pile(s) and place them face ", "headingPath": "RULES REFERENCE · GAME TERMS", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "While resolving an effect, always resolve as much of the effect as you can, and ignore any part of the ability that cannot be resolved. If an effect asks you to discard two cards, but you only have one card in hand, you discard that card and ignore Example: the second one. While resolving an effect,", "headingPath": "Resolving Effects: · Simultaneous Effects:", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Before playing a card from your hand, make sure that you will be able to protect yourself against it if your opponent decides to use a Mindbug on that card. · When you play a card from your hand, show it clearly to your opponent by turning it temporarily towards them so that they can read it and the", "headingPath": "ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR BEGINNERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Mindbugs You immediately win the game when the opponent's life is reduced to zero. You start the game with 3 life. Whenever you lose life, you reduce your life tracker by the corresponding number. Whenever you gain life, you increase your life tracker by the corresponding number. There is no limit t", "headingPath": "Step 5: Set Starting Life · Goal of the Game · Life · Play Area Player 1 · Playing the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "TOUGH: If this creature would be defeated and is not exhausted, exhaust it instead of defeating it. It doesn't matter whether it would be defeated through combat or by a card effect. Exhausting means rotating the card by 90 degrees to highlight that its TOUGH keyword has been triggered already. Bein", "headingPath": "Keywords", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Step 1: Deal Mindbugs · Step 2: Set Aside All Evolution Cards · Step 3: Shuffle and Deal Decks · Step 4: Draw Hands · Step 5: Set Starting Life", "sharpsignalDocId": 477}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 477 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 477 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 7, 2026 05:52

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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Drawing Cards · Taking Turns	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Step 1: Deal Mindbugs · Step 2: Set Aside All Evolution Cards · Step 3: Shuffle and Deal Decks · Step 4: Draw Hands · Step 5: Set Starting Life	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Game terms	p.22	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	RULES REFERENCE · GAME TERMS	p.28	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Resolving Effects: · Simultaneous Effects:	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR BEGINNERS	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Step 5: Set Starting Life · Goal of the Game · Life · Play Area Player 1 · Playing the Game	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Keywords	p.16	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 Mindbug: First Contact — Rulebook (corpus doc 477)	Step 1: Deal Mindbugs · Step 2: Set Aside All Evolution Cards · Step 3: Shuffle and Deal Decks · Step 4: Draw Hands · Step 5: Set Starting Life	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 429 ms · first delta 5512 ms · total 6621 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 429 ms · ask 6177 ms · gateway work 6621 ms · total 6621 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2057
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 139
tok/sec: 137.5 tok/sec — 139 output tokens in 1.011 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 11s 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: 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 408), 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.