Ruling — Unsettled

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Unsettledbg-290484-en-1e

To play Unsettled, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Choose a planet and a survival task (Task A is recommended for the first game).[1][2]

2. Place the resource and breakthrough boards next to each other on one end of the play area, and the time and moment boards on the other.[2]

3. Place materials (green gems), data (blue cubes), and black markers (black cubes) in the top wells.[2]

4. Place all 6 power (orange discs) in the depleted (-) sphere of the dynamo.[2]

5. Shuffle and place environment and planet-specific cards in their spaces beneath the board.[2]

6. Place the research hut, laboratory, and workshop tiles in their spaces with the 'build' action space face-up.[2]

7. Place any planet-specific tokens from the planet box in the designated space, except for the 12 discovery tokens, which go on the moment board.[2]

8. Place the 12 comprehension tokens in the small easels in the tray.[2]

9. Place LUNA's primary function card.[2]

10. Shuffle and place the anomaly and breakthrough cards in their spaces beneath the board, separating breakthrough cards by type.[2]

11. Place the distress tokens (-3 per explorer) in their space beneath the board.[2]

12. Place the pink and blue moment markers in their spaces.[2]

13. Stack the 12 investigated tokens in the well between the moment markers.[2]

14. Place the 12 discovery tokens from the planet box into the quick-read display.[2]

15. Shuffle and place the opportunity cards in roughly equal piles in each of the two spaces below the board.[2]

16. Place the time marker on the leftmost space of the time track.[2]

17. Place the group trust marker on the rightmost space of the group trust track.[2]

18. Place trigger tokens near the timeline.[2]

19. Stack the chosen survival task cards in order so they progress like a book with page 1 on top.[2]

20. Place LUNA and each explorer's miniature on the Scarab tile.[3]

A Turn

1. You may move LUNA once on each of your turns; to do this, indicate the space you are exploring, reveal the top environment card from the stack beneath the resource board, place it in that space oriented the same direction as the Scarab, and place LUNA onto it.[4]

2. Once on each of your turns, you may have LUNA scan for a resource not currently available on her node by rolling the blue data discovery die.[4]

3. Use your turn's MOVE action to move onto a new node.[4]

4. Resolve node-edge effects, such as advancing the time marker if you move across a time symbol.[4]

5. Use focus actions on the resource board to gather resources (data or materials) that have been revealed in the environment.[4]

6. You must place at least 1 focus on the REST action space each turn.[5]

7. You may use your three focus cubes (representing awareness, wonder, and energy) to take actions, rotating them as you place them on action spaces.[5]

Winning the Game

1. Progress through the survival task by meeting conditions indicated in colored bars and advancing to the next card.[1]

2. The game ends when all explorers and LUNA are on the Scarab, at which point you win.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.24 · Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task

[2] RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.6 · Select a Planet · Place the 4 Main Board Trays · Resource Board · Breakthrough Board · Moment Board · Group Trust / Time Board

[3] RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.7

[4] RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.44 · Example Turn · Revealing a new node by moving LUNA · Revealing resources using LUNA · Moving and resolving node-edge effects · Using a focus action to gain resources

[5] RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.33 · Explorer · Focus (pg 14) · Forfeit · Framework

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 94 ms · ask 7984 ms · total 8080 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8080 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Don't try to sort and put away everything ahead of time. Most components will eventually be stored in the same trays they are displayed in during play. Setting up your first game will also be setting up storage of the components. It's best to keep each planet's components separate from one another (", "headingPath": "Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045591, "snippet": "→ Read aloud the narrative introduction from the front cover. → Perform the planet's unique setup. → Review the overview of the planet's unique mechanisms (most planet primers spill onto the back cover). Even after setup, some of the planet's tokens and cards may not have been specifically addressed", "headingPath": "Game Setup · Survival Task · After Setup is Complete · Adjust Difficulty (Optional) · Discomforting (less difficult) · Harrowing (standard)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.044092, "snippet": "If you encounter questions while playing, you may refer to the Advanced Directives section of this rulebook - which acts as an index as well as: glossary, advanced guide, FAQ, and preemptive forum discussion. We do not recommend you attempt to absorb that section as part of your initial learning exp", "headingPath": "Advanced Directives & Videos · Go Explore!", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.042232, "snippet": "Survival is the goal; survival tasks are what must be done for that to happen. If you successfully complete your task and get everyone (including LUNA) back to the ship - you have survived. Congratulations on your continued existence. Each time you play Unsettled you will select one of your chosen p", "headingPath": "Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.042005, "snippet": "For your first game, we recommend playing without a Scarab ability. Use those to modulate difficulty if you find yourself losing often. → Place LUNA (the robot) and each explorer’s miniature on the Scarab tile. Planet-Specific Setup (pg 8) Your chosen planet’s travelogue and survival task will have ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.039851, "snippet": "This section is intended to help you find answers while playing if you've applied the Universal Rules and they have failed to keep your game moving forward. Think of this as a mashup of an index, glossary, and FAQ. Each entry will direct you to the proper page of the rules and-in most cases-provide ", "headingPath": "Glossary / Extra Details", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Before diving into the details of exactly how everything works, let's build a broad foundation of what a turn entails with high-level summaries! On your turn, you take actions by placing your focus cubes on action spaces. Optionally, you may also move, activate LUNA, and/or take free actions. When y", "headingPath": "Basic Turn Overview · Set 2 Focus to Take Actions, REST 1 (required) (pg 14-16)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "You are represented in the environment by your explorer miniature. During your turn, you may (if you wish) move 1 node by picking up your miniature and placing it onto an adjacent node. If there are environment cards remaining in the draw-pile near the resource board, you may explore off the edge of", "headingPath": "Move Your Explorer (optional) (pg 21)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 24, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Select a Planet · Place the 4 Main Board Trays · Resource Board · Breakthrough Board · Moment Board · Group Trust / Time Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 44, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Example Turn · Revealing a new node by moving LUNA · Revealing resources using LUNA · Moving and resolving node-edge effects · Using a focus action to gain resources", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 33, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Explorer · Focus (pg 14) · Forfeit · Framework", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 520 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 520 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 0.89597 of 2528 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 28, 2026 10:58 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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout	p.3	0.04866 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Game Setup · Survival Task · After Setup is Complete · Adjust Difficulty (Optional) · Discomforting (less difficult) · Harrowing (standard)	p.8	0.045591 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Advanced Directives & Videos · Go Explore!	p.27	0.044092 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task	p.24	0.042232 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)		p.7	0.042005 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Glossary / Extra Details	p.28	0.039851 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Basic Turn Overview · Set 2 Focus to Take Actions, REST 1 (required) (pg 14-16)	p.12	0.03125 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Move Your Explorer (optional) (pg 21)	p.12	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

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 80 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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout	p.3	#1	0.04866 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)		p.8	#33	0.020471 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Example Turn · Revealing a new node by moving LUNA · Revealing resources using LUNA · Moving and resolving node-edge effects · Using a focus action to gain resources	p.44	#34	0.019813 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Explorer · Focus (pg 14) · Forfeit · Framework	p.33	#20	0.024541 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task	p.24	#4	0.042232 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Select a Planet · Place the 4 Main Board Trays · Resource Board · Breakthrough Board · Moment Board · Group Trust / Time Board	p.6	#15	0.026257 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Glossary / Extra Details	p.28	#6	0.039851 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)		p.7	#5	0.042005 (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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Surviving the Game · Progressing Through a Survival Task	p.24	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Select a Planet · Place the 4 Main Board Trays · Resource Board · Breakthrough Board · Moment Board · Group Trust / Time Board	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)		p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Example Turn · Revealing a new node by moving LUNA · Revealing resources using LUNA · Moving and resolving node-edge effects · Using a focus action to gain resources	p.44	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Explorer · Focus (pg 14) · Forfeit · Framework	p.33	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 94 ms · first delta 4190 ms · total 8080 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 94 ms · ask 7984 ms · gateway work 8080 ms · total 8080 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3288
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 771
tok/sec: 201.6 tok/sec — 771 output tokens in 3.824 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 57s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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: 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 451), 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.