You asked
How do I set up a balanced game?
Answered counted as answeredTo set up a balanced game of Dominion, follow these steps: 1. Each player takes 3 Estates and 7 Coppers and shuffles them face down to create a starting deck [1]. 2. Place 17 face-up piles on the table: 7 Base card piles (which are always used) and 10 Kingdom card piles (which vary by game) [1]. 3. Use the following quantities for Base cards: Copper, Silver, Gold, and Curse (amounts vary by player count); use 8 copies each of Estate, Duchy, and Province for a 2-player game, or 12 copies each for 3-4 players [1]. 4. Specifically for Curses, use 10 with 2 players, 20 with 3 players, and all 30 with 4 players [1]. 5. Choose 10 Kingdom cards to use and prepare 10 copies of each chosen card [1]. 6. If using a Victory Kingdom card (such as Gardens), use 8 copies for 2 players or 12 copies for 3-4 players [1]. 7. Place the Trash mat near the piles [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 345 ms · ask 8342 ms · total 8699 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 8699 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 13, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Laboratory: You draw 2 cards and get +1 Action. Library: You look at cards one at a time, putting each one into your hand or setting it aside, until you have 7 cards in hand; then you discard the set aside cards. If you shuffle in the middle of doing this, you do not shuffle in the set aside cards. ", "headingPath": "1st turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "You can count the number of cards in your deck at any time (without looking at the card fronts), but cannot look through or count your discard pile or another player's deck or discard pile. The number of cards in each player's hand is public, as is the top card of each discard pile. All cards in pla", "headingPath": "\"Trash a card\" - Put a card into the Trash pile.", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Randomly choose a starting player. If you have just played a game of Dominion and it was not a tie, have the player who won the previous game go last (the player to their left goes first). Each player draws an initial hand of 5 cards. Dominion is a game of building a deck of cards. Each player has t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Updated kingdom randomizer 2nd.indd 1 Each player takes 3 Estates and 7 Coppers and shuffles them face down as a starting deck. Place 17 face-up piles of cards on the table: the 7 Base card piles, which are always used, and always the same, and 10 Kingdom card piles, which vary from game to game. Th", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Updated kingdom randomizer 2nd.indd 7 7/25/21 1:16 AM treasure_2nd02.indd 97 7/12/21 12:43 AM 7/12/21 12:43 AM Take all of the cards you have in play (both Actions and Treasures), and any remaining cards in your hand, and put them all into your discard pile. The order does not matter; you can hide t", "headingPath": "treasure_2nd02.indd 1", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "You draw the card immediately. If you have to draw more cards than are left in your deck, you shuffle your discard pile, put it under your deck, and then draw. If there still are not enough cards to draw, you just draw as many as you can.", "headingPath": "\"+1 Card\" - Draw a card.", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "The game ends at the end of a turn, if either the Province pile is empty, or any three or more Supply piles are empty (any piles at all, including Kingdom cards, Curses, Copper, etc.). Take all of your cards - from your hand, deck, discard pile, play area, and even set aside cards - and sort them fo", "headingPath": "treasure_2nd02.indd 1", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Whichever 10 cards you pick, get out those piles - 10 copies of each card (do not put the randomizer card in the pile). When a Victory Kingdom card is used (e.g. Gardens), it gets 8 copies for 2 players, 12 copies for 3-4 players, as with the other Victory cards. Put the Trash mat near the piles. Up", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 102}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
- 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
- Oct 26, 2026 19:20
retrieval — what the search arm returned
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | 1st turn | p.13 | 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | "Trash a card" - Put a card into the Trash pile. | p.9 | 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | p.4 | 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 | |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | p.3 | 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 | |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | treasure_2nd02.indd 1 | p.5 | 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | "+1 Card" - Draw a card. | p.7 | 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 238 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | treasure_2nd02.indd 1 | p.6 | 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | p.3 | 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 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 Dominion — Rulebook (corpus doc 102) | p.3 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 345 ms · first delta n/a · total 8699 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 345 ms · ask 8342 ms · gateway work 8699 ms · total 8699 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s ago)
- stream path
- not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
- 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
- SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
- pattern that matched
- SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 33), 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.