Ruling — Scrabble

← Scrabble

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Scrabblebg-320-en-1e

Setup

1. Open the gameboard in the middle of the play area and put all letter tiles in the bag.[1]

2. Decide who will be the scorekeeper and have them grab a pen and paper.[1]

3. Place a tile rack in front of you.[1]

4. Everyone draws one tile; the player with the letter closest to A goes first (a blank tile beats any letter).[1]

5. Place all tiles back in the bag.[1]

6. In playing order, each player takes seven tiles from the bag and puts them on their rack without letting others see them.[1]

A Turn

1. Take turns placing tiles from your rack onto the gameboard.[1]

2. The first word placed must be at least two letters long and cover the center square.[1]

3. Every word played must form at least one new word.[1][2]

4. Words must be formed by placing tiles in a single line, either across or down, but never diagonally.[1]

5. Any new word must connect with at least one tile already on the gameboard.[2]

6. All touching letter tiles must form complete words.[2]

7. You may add at least one tile on a turn.[1]

8. You may choose to use a turn to exchange all or some of your letters by placing discarded letters facedown, drawing the same number of tiles from the bag, and returning the discarded letters to the bag.[3]

9. You may choose to miss a turn, which results in no points being scored.[3]

10. If you use all seven tiles from your rack in one turn, it is a "Bingo" and you score 50 additional points.[4]

11. After placing tiles, add up your word score (accounting for premium squares) and have the scorekeeper write it down.[1]

12. Refill your rack to seven tiles.[1]

13. Play moves clockwise.[1]

Scoring

1. Your score each turn is the sum of the letters in each word you form or modify.[2]

2. Different letters have different values.[1]

3. Blank tiles have no value, but when used, you must announce which letter they represent.[1]

4. Premium square bonus points are only counted on the turn the letters are first placed on them.[4]

5. If a letter is placed on a premium square and is part of two words, you count that letter and its premium value twice.[4]

6. If a word crosses a premium letter and a premium word square, total the letter score first and then double or triple the word score.[4]

7. Blanks on premium word squares can double or triple the word score, but blanks on double or triple letter squares are worth nothing.[4]

8. If a player empties their rack, their score is increased by the sum of the other players' unplayed tiles.[3]

9. When the game ends, each player's score is reduced by the sum of their unplayed letter tiles.[3]

Ending the Game

The game ends when:

1. All tiles have been drawn from the bag and one player empties their rack.[3]

2. All players pass twice in turn.[3]

3. A player reaches a decided score (in a specific variant).[5]

The player with the highest final score wins (the player with the highest score before adding or subtracting unplayed tiles is the winner).[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook · p.1 · SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn

[2] RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook · p.1 · Remember: · PLACING TILES

[3] RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook · p.2 · There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?

[4] RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook · p.2 · Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.

[5] RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook · p.2 · Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 261 ms · ask 7498 ms · total 7762 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7762 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 1, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "F42040000_SCRABBLE_CLASSIC_I.indd 1-4 Open the gameboard in the middle of the play area and put all letter tiles in the bag. Decide who will be the scorekeeper. Scorekeeper, grab a pen and paper. Place a tile rack in front of you. Now everyone draws one tile. The player with the letter closest to A ", "headingPath": "SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "The game is over when one player reaches a decided score, no matter how many tiles are left. This variant accommodates mixed level groups, as the score needed to win depends on the level of the player: | | 2 Players | 3 Players | 4 Players | | Beginner | 70 | 60 | 50 | | Intermediate | 120 | 100 | 9", "headingPath": "Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Any letter tile(s) played must form at least one new word. After the first word on the board is formed, a single tile may be played on any turn. Any new word must connect with at least one tile already on the gameboard. All touching letter tiles must form complete words. Your score each turn is the ", "headingPath": "Remember: · PLACING TILES", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Learn the two- and three-letter words. They are the building blocks of expert play and can really boost your score. Shuffle the tiles on your rack. Look for common ways that letters go together. Some of these are BR, CH, CL, DLE, ED, ENT, EST, FUL, GHT, ING, NK, KLE, MIS, ISM, IUM, MB, MP, ND, NT, P", "headingPath": "EXPERT TIPS · Exchange Blanks", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "· A covered premium square is no longer premium! Premium square bonus points are only counted on the turn letters are first placed on them. · When you form more than one word on a turn, count every letter (with any premium value) for each word you form. That means if you place a letter on a premium ", "headingPath": "Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "If all tiles have been drawn from the bag and one player empties their rack. If all players pass twice in turn. When the game ends, each player's score is reduced by the sum of their unplayed letter tiles. If a player has used all of their tiles, the sum of the other players' unplayed tiles is added", "headingPath": "There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Remember: · PLACING TILES", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN", "sharpsignalDocId": 144}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 144 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 144 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.89859 of 2406 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 10:27 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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn	p.1	0.048916 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN	p.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))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Remember: · PLACING TILES	p.1	0.047619 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	EXPERT TIPS · Exchange Blanks	p.2	0.046154 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.	p.2	0.045928 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?	p.2	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

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 6 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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn	p.1	#1	0.048916 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?	p.2	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.	p.2	#5	0.045928 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN	p.2	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	EXPERT TIPS · Exchange Blanks	p.2	#4	0.046154 (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 Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Remember: · PLACING TILES	p.1	#3	0.047619 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	SET IT UP · PLAY · On Your Turn	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Remember: · PLACING TILES	p.1	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	There are two ways the game can end: · Is there a tie? · You can't make a word? · No one can make a word? · You took too many tiles?	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Cover a premium square to boost your score! · Bingo for 50 points! · WORDS · Which words are NOT allowed? · Don't think that's a word? Any player may challenge another before the next player starts their turn.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Scrabble — Rulebook (corpus doc 144)	Finish Line SCRABBLE · ON-THE-GO FUN	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 261 ms · first delta 2088 ms · total 7762 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 261 ms · ask 7498 ms · gateway work 7762 ms · total 7762 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2709
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 758
tok/sec: 134.7 tok/sec — 758 output tokens in 5.628 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 3s 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: 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 66), 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.