You asked
How do I play?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Dungeon Petzbg-97207-en-1e
I looked through Dungeon Petz's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
2 The game is for 2 to 4 players. In this rulebook, we will describe it as a 4-player game. Rules for a 2- or 3-player game will be written in boxes like this one. If you are playing with four, you can ignore them. Most of this rulebook explains the basic rules - the ones you should use for your fir
Start this step by finding the player with the biggest group. This player's biggest group is the first one sent shopping. If multiple players are tied for the biggest group, those players will take turns in clockwise order, starting at the Starting Player Token. If you have multiple groups of the bi
A potion makes your pet sleep happily. If animal rights activists complain about you drugging your pets, point them to this section of the rules so they can see how nasty the other cards can be. When it is time to evaluate this card, don't do anything to your pet. Instead, you must do something with
Once you are experienced, you can make your game more strategic by revealing two exhibition tiles and two customer tiles at the beginning of the game. (For an extreme variant, you can reveal all information at the start, but it is not always fun to plan so far ahead.) As you know, pets in the upper
12 Now it is time to care for your pets and show them off at the exhibition. will have to be met with food tokens. If your pet is carnivorous or if no hunger need is assigned to it, this symbol has no effect. Each player gets one turn, starting with the starting player and continuing clockwise. Each
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 90 ms · ask 3422 ms · total 3515 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3515 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "2 The game is for 2 to 4 players. In this rulebook, we will describe it as a 4-player game. Rules for a 2- or 3-player game will be written in boxes like this one. If you are playing with four, you can ignore them. Most of this rulebook explains the basic rules - the ones you should use for your fir", "headingPath": "A Few Words from Vlaada · About This Rulebook · Progress Board · Central Board · Player Boards · Starting Player Token", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Start this step by finding the player with the biggest group. This player's biggest group is the first one sent shopping. If multiple players are tied for the biggest group, those players will take turns in clockwise order, starting at the Starting Player Token. If you have multiple groups of the bi", "headingPath": "Biggest Groups Go First", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "A potion makes your pet sleep happily. If animal rights activists complain about you drugging your pets, point them to this section of the rules so they can see how nasty the other cards can be. When it is time to evaluate this card, don't do anything to your pet. Instead, you must do something with", "headingPath": "Potions · Speeding Play · Scoring an Exhibition · Exhibition Tile", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.044589, "snippet": "Once you are experienced, you can make your game more strategic by revealing two exhibition tiles and two customer tiles at the beginning of the game. (For an extreme variant, you can reveal all information at the start, but it is not always fun to plan so far ahead.) As you know, pets in the upper ", "headingPath": "More Foresight · Advanced Meat Stand Rule · Final Round Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.044237, "snippet": "12 Now it is time to care for your pets and show them off at the exhibition. will have to be met with food tokens. If your pet is carnivorous or if no hunger need is assigned to it, this symbol has no effect. Each player gets one turn, starting with the starting player and continuing clockwise. Each", "headingPath": "Speed of Play · Phase 4 - Showing Off · Evaluating Needs", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.04257, "snippet": "You acquire potions by visiting the hospital in phase 2. When assigning Need Cards to pets, a Potion Card may replace a Need Card of any color. Example: You must assign this pet 1 green and 1 yellow card. If you have a Potion Card, you may instead assign this pet 1 potion and 1 yellow card, or 1 gre", "headingPath": "Potions · Speed of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The imps in your shop no longer dig gold, but you have relatives who do. Each round, they send you some … just not so much that their dungeon lord would notice. Each round (including the first one), all players get income. The starting player and the player on his or her left get 1 gold. The other t", "headingPath": "Getting Income · Revealing New Information", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When it is your turn to send a group, you have two options: Send the group to buy something: Choose an unoccupied action space on the Central Board and put all the group's imps on that space . The group's gold (if any) goes to the bank in the center of the Central Board. It has been spent. Perform y", "headingPath": "A Group Does Not Have To Go", "sharpsignalDocId": 441}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 441 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 441 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 recorded
- Aug 23, 2026 16:58 UTC
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.
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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | A Few Words from Vlaada · About This Rulebook · Progress Board · Central Board · Player Boards · Starting Player Token | p.2 | 0.048412 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Biggest Groups Go First | p.8 | 0.047643 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Potions · Speeding Play · Scoring an Exhibition · Exhibition Tile | p.13 | 0.046898 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | More Foresight · Advanced Meat Stand Rule · Final Round Order | p.17 | 0.044589 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Speed of Play · Phase 4 - Showing Off · Evaluating Needs | p.12 | 0.044237 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Potions · Speed of Play | p.11 | 0.04257 (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 Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Getting Income · Revealing New Information | p.7 | 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 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | A Group Does Not Have To Go | p.8 | 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 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
candidate pool: the answering read scored 56 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.
floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.
arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.
| read at | document | heading | page | fused rank | fused RRF score | carried by | how it got its slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Biggest Groups Go First | p.8 | #2 | 0.047643 (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)) | vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | A Few Words from Vlaada · About This Rulebook · Progress Board · Central Board · Player Boards · Starting Player Token | p.2 | #1 | 0.048412 (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)) | vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Initial Manure | p.6 | #32 | 0.012195 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Play Needs | p.12 | #9 | 0.029551 (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)) | vector + full-text | the re-ranker chose it |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Potions · Speed of Play | p.11 | #6 | 0.04257 (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)) | vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Assigning Need Cards to Pets | p.11 | #12 | 0.026471 (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)) | vector + full-text | the re-ranker chose it |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Double-Symboled Cards · The way you lay your cards down is important. When · The Winner · Visual Record of the Game | p.17 | #11 | 0.026655 (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)) | vector + full-text | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Dungeon Petz — Rulebook (corpus doc 441) | Phase 3 - NEED CARDS · Arranging Cages and Pets · New Cages and Addons · Pets | p.10 | #10 | 0.028006 (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)) | vector + full-text | the re-ranker chose it |
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 |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 90 ms · first delta 3364 ms · total 3515 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 90 ms · ask 3422 ms · gateway work 3515 ms · total 3515 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3985
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 132.4 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.068 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 35s ago)
- answerer host (measured by rulesage)
- reachable (for 23h, checked 6s ago)
- answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask)
- node1
- 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.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. 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 372), 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.