Ruling — Hearts

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Heartsbg-6887-en-1e

Setup

1. If there are more than seven candidates for play, two tables must be formed.[1]

2. Players draw from an outspread pack to choose seats and cards; the lowest cut has the first choice, and others follow in order.[1]

3. The player cutting the lowest card takes the first deal, which then passes in regular rotation to the left.[1]

4. Any player may shuffle the pack, with the dealer being last.[1]

5. The cards are presented to the player cutting, who must leave at least four cards in each packet.[1]

6. The cards are dealt from left to right, one at a time to each player in rotation until the pack is exhausted.[1]

7. In Two-handed Hearts, the dealer stops when each player has received thirteen cards.[1]

A Turn

1. The eldest hand leads any card they please.[2]

2. Other players must follow suit if they are able to do so.[2]

3. If a player is unable to follow suit, they are not allowed to discard, but must immediately gather the cards already played and take them into their own hand.[2]

4. If a player fails to follow suit on a subsequent trick, they must also gather the cards already played, take them into their hand, and lead for the next trick.[2]

5. If all players follow suit, the highest card played wins the trick.[2]

6. The winning cards are turned face down and are considered dead.[2]

7. The winner of the previous trick leads for the next trick.[2]

8. The play continues until a player gets rid of all their cards and wins the game.[2]

Rules and Irregularities

* Leading out of turn: A player leading out of turn may be called upon by the player on their right to lead or not lead a heart when it is their turn to lead.[3] If all players play to a false lead, the error cannot be fixed; if not all have played, cards must be taken back and are not liable to be called.[3] If a player plays out of turn during a trick, the player on their left may demand the card be taken back; after the proper player plays, the player in error may be called upon to play their highest or lowest card of the suit led, or not to discard a heart.[3]

* Exposed Cards: If a player plays two cards to one trick, they may indicate the intended card, but the other must be left face upward.[3] Any player may call an exposed card, and that decision is binding.[3] A player with an exposed card must play it if called upon, provided they can do so without revoking.[3]

* Revoking: A player who fails to follow suit when able may amend the error if they discover it before the trick is turned and quitted.[3] The erroneous card becomes an exposed card, and subsequent players may withdraw and substitute their cards without penalty.[3]

* Errors and Penalties: A player who omits playing to a trick and plays to a following one cannot correct the error and must take the last trick with whatever hearts it contains.[3] If a player is found to be short of cards (provided all others have the right number and have played to the first trick), that player must take the last trick with whatever hearts it contains.[3]

* Misdealing: A misdeal occurs if the dealer omits the cut (if discovered before the last card is dealt), deals a card incorrectly without remedying it before the next, counts the cards on the table or in the pack, or if it is discovered before the first trick is played that any player has too many or too few cards.[1] A misdeal loses the deal unless another player has touched the cards or interrupted the dealer.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook · p.2 · HEARTS.

[2] RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook · p.17 · ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.

[3] RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook · p.3 · HEARTS.

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 118 ms · ask 6837 ms · total 6956 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6956 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 17, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "The cards are dealt 3-2-3 at a time. The eldest hand leads any card he pleases, and the others must follow suit if they can. If all follow suit, the highest card played wins the trick, which is turned face down, and the cards in it are dead. The winner leads for the next trick, and so on. But if any", "headingPath": "ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.046343, "snippet": "But 2 to 1 in his favour is a much better chance than the certainty, almost, that he will be loaded if a particular player is allowed the opportunity to lead a certain suit again. See B's play in Illustrative Hand No 2, and Y's in No 4. A player may have no desire to prevent any particular adversary", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "Should he succeed in either object, he has another chance for his money. It is usually bad policy to return the suit opened by the original leader. He has picked that out as his safest suit, and although he may be the only one safe in it, by continuing it you are reducing your chances to two players", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045688, "snippet": "If any card is exposed by the dealer, the player to whom it is dealt may demand a new deal, provided he has not touched any of his cards. Any one dealing out of turn, or with the wrong cards, may be stopped before the last card is dealt. After that the deal stands good, and the packs, if changed, mu", "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045607, "snippet": "A good player, after sorting his hand, carefully estimates its possibilities. The hand may be such that it is evidently impossible to avoid taking some hearts. The player must then decide whether he will play to give each of the others hearts, or will take them all himself. If he succeeds in either ", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "Hearts is supposed by some persons to be an entirely new game; but its leading principle, losing instead of winning tricks, is to be found in many other card games, some of which are quite old. Slobberhannes, Enflé, Schwellen, Polignac, and The Four Jacks, all belong to the same family, but most of ", "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045079, "snippet": "Where you have a certain safe card, and others of another suit not absolutely safe, it is better to keep the safe card, in order to be sure of getting rid of the lead if you are put in on your dangerous suit. In following suit, the most annoying hand that one can hold is one containing at least thre", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.040489, "snippet": "If there are more than seven candidates for play, two tables must be formed. Players draw from an outspread pack for the choice of seats and cards, the lowest cut having the first choice, and the others following in their order. The player cutting the lowest card takes the first deal, which afterwar", "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 222 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 222 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 0.92514 of 2832 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 28, 2026 08:14 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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.	p.17	0.046402 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.11	0.046343 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.10	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
#4	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.3	0.045688 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.8	0.045607 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.11	0.045079 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	0.040489 (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 58 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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.8	#5	0.045607 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.3	#36	0.022074 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.3	#9	0.030478 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.10	#13	0.026847 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.	p.17	#1	0.046402 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.9	#31	0.022858 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.10	#18	0.025141 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	#8	0.040489 (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 Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.	p.17	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 118 ms · first delta 2772 ms · total 6956 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 118 ms · ask 6837 ms · gateway work 6956 ms · total 6956 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3526
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 813
tok/sec: 198.0 tok/sec — 813 output tokens in 4.107 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 8s 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 148), 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.