Ruling — Fantasy Realms

← Fantasy Realms

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Fantasy Realmsbg-223040-en-1e

Basic Version

1. Deal every player seven cards.[1]

2. Choose a starting player randomly and play goes clockwise.[1]

3. The player who goes first must draw a card from the deck.[1]

4. During each player's turn, he or she has a choice of drawing the top card from the deck or taking any one face-up card from the discard area.[1]

5. At the end of each turn, a player must discard a card to the discard area.[1]

6. All cards in the discard area should be spread out so that they are visible to all.[1]

7. The game ends when there are ten cards in the discard area.[1]

8. The player holding the highest scoring hand wins; in case of a tie, the hand with the lowest total base strength wins.[1]

Two-player Realms

1. Neither player starts with any cards.[2]

2. On each turn, a player has the choice of taking one face-up card from the discard area, or taking two cards from the deck and discarding one.[2]

3. This continues until both players have seven cards.[2]

4. After a player has seven cards, he or she continues turns as in the Basic version.[2]

5. The game ends when both players have seven cards and there is at least twelve cards in the discard area.[2]

Chaos Realms (3-7 Players)

1. All players receive seven cards.[2]

2. Choose a time limit.[2]

3. During the trading period, anyone may trade cards with anyone else at a one-for-one rate.[2]

4. The game ends when the time limit has expired.[2]

5. All players add up their scores, and whoever has the highest score wins.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook · p.2 · OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS

[2] RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook · p.6 · 1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 79 ms · ask 6024 ms · total 18052 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 11947 ms · generation 6105 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Draw pile Setup: Deal every player seven cards. Choose a starting player randomly and play goes clockwise. Turns: During each player's turn, he or she has a choice of drawing the top card from the deck or taking any one face-up card from the discard area. The player who goes fi rst must draw a card ", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Setup: Neither player starts with any cards. On each turn, a player has the choice of taking one face-up card from the discard area, or taking two cards from the deck and discarding one. This continues until both players have seven cards. Turns: After a player has seven cards, he or she continues tu", "headingPath": "1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Card One Card Three Card Five Card Two Card Four Card Six * The scoring sheet includes Card 8 and Additional Points sections to accommodate the Necromancer and exciting new cards coming in future expansions. Note that you have to use the Book of Changes to change any of these cards into a Wizard ( a", "headingPath": "This is one of the highest scoring hands possible:", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You are the ultimate ruler of a far-away land. Your goal is to build up the mightiest realm in the world. You might build up a massive army to sweep all before you, but that is not the only path to victory. Perhaps your kingdom will take the form 53 Cards (ten suits and three wild cards) 1 Rulebook ", "headingPath": "Components · OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Card One When scoring, the player announces that the Mirage takes on the name and suit of the Rainstorm . Note that the actual Rainstorm would put out the Wildfi re - but the ersatz Rainstorm doesn't give this penalty. The penalty for the Great Flood would normally blank the Wildfi re . However, the", "headingPath": "SCORING EXAMPLES · Card Four", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If a card receives a bonus WITH a certain other card or type of card, then it may only receive that bonus once. EXAMPLE: You have the Magic Wand (Bonus: +25 with any one Wizard) and two Wizards. You only get the +25 bonus once. A card that receives a bonus or penalty FOR EACH of a particular kind of", "headingPath": "WITH · FOR EACH", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "| Suit | Card Name: | Suit | Card Name: | | Army | Dwarvish Infantry Elven Archers Knights Light Cavalry Rangers | Land | Bell Tower Cavern Earth Elemental Forest Mountain | | Artifact | Book of Changes Gem of Order Protection Rune Shield of Keth World Tree | Leader | Empress King Princess Queen War", "headingPath": "Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "EXAMPLE: You have a Blizzard (blanks Floods ), a Great Flood (blanks Flames and Lands ), a Wildfi re (blanks Lands ), and Cavern (clears penalties on Weather ). The Cavern clears the penalty from the Blizzard fi rst. Since the penalty is cleared, the Great Flood is unaffected by the Blizzard, so it ", "headingPath": "Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other? · Q: What happens if the Doppelgänger copies the Basilisk? · Q: How does the Book of Changes work? · Q: Do the Rangers protect my armies against Wildfi re? · Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?", "sharpsignalDocId": 335}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 335 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 335 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 0.88534 of 1221 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 17:00 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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS	p.2	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?	p.6	0.048387 (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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	This is one of the highest scoring hands possible:	p.5	0.047123 (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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Components · OVERVIEW	p.1	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
#5	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	SCORING EXAMPLES · Card Four	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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	WITH · FOR EACH	p.3	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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?	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
#8	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other? · Q: What happens if the Doppelgänger copies the Basilisk? · Q: How does the Book of Changes work? · Q: Do the Rangers protect my armies against Wildfi re? · Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?	p.7	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

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 8 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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS	p.2	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Components · OVERVIEW	p.1	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other? · Q: What happens if the Doppelgänger copies the Basilisk? · Q: How does the Book of Changes work? · Q: Do the Rangers protect my armies against Wildfi re? · Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?	p.7	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	This is one of the highest scoring hands possible:	p.5	#3	0.047123 (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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	Q: Can you explain the Shapeshifter and Mirage?	p.8	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	SCORING EXAMPLES · Card Four	p.4	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	WITH · FOR EACH	p.3	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?	p.6	#2	0.048387 (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 Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	OVERVIEW · GAME PLAY · SCORING HANDS	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Fantasy Realms — Rulebook (corpus doc 335)	1. Two-player Realms · 2. Chaos Realms for 3-7 Players · Q: What happens if two cards contradict each other?	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 79 ms · first delta 3076 ms · total 18052 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 11947 ms · retrieval 79 ms · ask 6024 ms · gateway work 6105 ms · total 18052 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2599
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 393
tok/sec: 131.8 tok/sec — 393 output tokens in 2.982 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 51s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 263), 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.