Ruling — In the Year of the Dragon

← In the Year of the Dragon

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: In the Year of the Dragonbg-31594-en-1e

The game consists of exactly 12 rounds.[1] Each round consists of the following 4 phases, in order:

1. 1st Phase: Action [1][2]

2. 2nd Phase: Person [1][3]

3. 3rd Phase: Event [1][3]

4. 4th Phase: Scoring [1]

Before the game begins:

1. Each player must summon their first 2 subjects to court by taking 2 different person tiles of their choosing from the second row (the younger persons).[1]

2. The oldest player starts; in clockwise order, other players choose their first 2 persons, provided no player takes the exact same combination of 2 persons as any player before them.[1]

3. Every player must place each person tile they take below any 1 of their palaces.[1]

4. A palace with 1 story may only contain 1 person tile; a palace with 2 stories may hold up to 2 person tiles; and a palace with 3 stories may hold up to 3 person tiles; a palace may never have more than 3 stories.[1]

5. Every time a player takes a new person tile and places it below a palace, they must immediately move their person marker forward on the person track the full number of spaces shown on the newly assigned person tile (values 1 to 6).[1]

6. If a marker lands on the same space as another player's marker, the player places their marker on top of the other player's marker.[1]

1st Phase: Action

1. Shuffle the 7 action cards and place them face down in the large center space on the board in as many groups as there are players, divided as evenly as possible.[2]

2. Turn the cards face up.[2]

3. The player whose person marker is farthest ahead on the person track selects 1 group, places their dragon on it, and carries out exactly 1 of the actions in the chosen group.[2]

4. In order of the person track, the next player selects a group, places their dragon on it, and carries out an action (a player may select a group already chosen by a previous player that round).[4][2]

5. If a player chooses a group of cards already chosen by at least 1 other player that round, they must pay 3 yuan to the general supply, or they may not take an action from that group or place their dragon on it.[4]

6. Alternatively, a player may skip the first phase completely to bring their personal supply of money up to 3 yuan.[4]

7. Once all players have taken an action in order of the person track, players take back their dragons and place all action cards in a face down pile in the middle space on the board.[4]

2nd Phase: Person

1. After everyone has taken an action or replenished their supply of yuan to 3, each player, in the order shown on the person track, plays 1 person card from their hand onto the common discard pile.[3]

2. The player then takes the matching person tile from the board and places it below any 1 of their palaces.[3]

3. If all palaces are full, the player may replace 1 existing person tile; the displaced person is removed from the game.[3]

4. The player moves their person marker forward on the person track the number of spaces equal to the value on the new person tile.[3]

5. If a player plays a card with a question mark, they may choose any person tile from the display.[3]

6. If a player's palaces are full and they do not want to replace a person, they may release the new person by removing the tile from the game, but they do not move their marker on the person track.[3]

7. In the 12th round, players skip this phase because they will not have any person cards in hand.[3]

3rd Phase: Event

1. After each player plays a person card, a monthly event takes place.[3]

2. In the first 2 rounds, the event is always 'Peace'.[3]

3. In subsequent rounds, the event is dictated by the next event tile in the event row, moving from left to right.[3]

4. After a round's event, the corresponding event tile is turned face down.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook · p.3 · Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME

[2] RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook · p.3 · 1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME

[3] RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook · p.6 · 2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:

[4] RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes

Now you know — make it count.

🔧 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 77 ms · ask 6171 ms · total 12103 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 5852 ms · generation 6251 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Place the person tiles on the board (sorted by younger and older), along with the event tiles (2 peace tiles first, then randomly), and the action cards (in a face down pile) Note: Only in a 5-player game will you place all 10 person tiles of each type on the display. When playing with fewer, return", "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "Shuffle the 7 action cards at the start of this phase. Then place them, still face down, in the large center space on the board in as many groups as there are players (e.g., if there are 2 players, they are divided into 2 groups; if there are 3 players, 3 groups, etc.) . The cards should be divided ", "headingPath": "1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "each player must summon his first 2 subjects to court. The oldest player starts. He takes 2 different person tiles of his choosing from the second row (i.e., the younger persons). In clockwise order, the other players then choose their first 2 persons, following the same restrictions. Additionally, ", "headingPath": "Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "When all players have taken an action in order of the person track, they take back their dragons, and place all of the action cards in a face down pile again in the middle space on the board. Note: If a player chooses a group of cards already chosen by at least 1 other player that round (meaning, th", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "The front side shows an overview of the game's phases, and the back side displays the actions and events in brief. Additionally, each player takes 4 palace floors and builds 2 palaces with 2 stories each in his playing area, and takes 6 yuan (3 silver and 1 gold). (Each player should place his money", "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "After everyone has taken an action or replenished his supply of yuan to 3, each player, in the order shown on the person track (which may have changed through the action 'Military Parade') , plays 1 person card from his hand onto the common discard pile on the board. The player then takes the matchi", "headingPath": "2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Before your first game, carefully punch out all of the tiles from their frames, and place the dragons in their stands. Place the game board in the middle of the table. Set up the rest of the pieces as shown in the diagram to the right: The Person Tiles: First, sort these tiles by their color. Then s", "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When a player chooses this action, he takes 1 palace floor from the general supply for the hammer shown on the action card as well as 1 additional palace floor for each hammer shown on any craftsmen (beige) in his palaces. The player may build these new palace floors as he chooses: he can either add", "headingPath": "Build", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes", "sharpsignalDocId": 544}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 544 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 544 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 0.90606 of 3055 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 26, 2026 22:06 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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	p.2	0.048139 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	0.047938 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes	p.4	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
#5	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	p.2	0.045695 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:	p.6	0.045541 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	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
#8	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	Build	p.4	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 17 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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	#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
#2	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes	p.4	#4	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
#3	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	p.2	#5	0.045695 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:	p.6	#6	0.045541 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	Contagion:	p.7	#15	0.013514 (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
#6	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	p.2	#1	0.048139 (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
#7	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PREPARATION	p.2	#7	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
#8	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	#2	0.047938 (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 In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	Before the game begins , · PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	1st Phase: Action · PLAYING THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	2nd Phase: Person · Note: · 3rd Phase: Event · Peace:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK In the Year of the Dragon — Rulebook (corpus doc 544)	PLAYING THE GAME · Taxes	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 77 ms · first delta 1421 ms · total 12103 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 5852 ms · retrieval 77 ms · ask 6171 ms · gateway work 6251 ms · total 12103 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3355
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 954
tok/sec: 200.2 tok/sec — 954 output tokens in 4.766 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 9s 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 476), 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.