Ruling — Harmonies

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Harmoniesbg-414317-en-1e

I looked through Harmonies's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME RULES

Place the Central board with the 2-4 Players side faceup. Put all the tokens in the Pouch, then place the Pouch next to the Central board. Fill each of the 5 spaces of the Central board with 3 tokens you draw randomly from the Pouch. J Shuffle the Animal cards and place 5 cards faceup next to the Ce

RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook · p.6 · Game turn

At the end of each turn: Return the remaining 6 tokens to the box (they are discarded and are not returned to the Pouch), then refill each of the 3 spaces with 3 tokens. If you did not take an Animal card on this turn, you may discard 1 Animal card from the center of the table and replace it with th

RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook · p.6 · NATURE'S SPIRIT CARDS

After you have played several games, you can use Nature's Spirit cards to enjoy a richer game experience!

RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook · p.3 · Take and place tokens

With this action you will place the various features that will form your Landscape. You must perform this action exactly once during your turn. Take 3 tokens from any one of the Central board spaces. You must place these 3 tokens on your Personal board however you see fit, following the rules below.

RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook · p.6 · Game turn

Shuffle the Nature's Spirit cards and deal 2 to each player, facedown. On your first turn, you look at these 2 cards, then choose 1 and place it faceup above your Personal board, returning the other to the box. Then place a Nature's Spirit cube on the chosen card. Nature's Spirit cubes follow the sa

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 184 ms · ask 1108 ms · total 1293 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 1293 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 2, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Place the Central board with the 2-4 Players side faceup. Put all the tokens in the Pouch, then place the Pouch next to the Central board. Fill each of the 5 spaces of the Central board with 3 tokens you draw randomly from the Pouch. J Shuffle the Animal cards and place 5 cards faceup next to the Ce", "headingPath": "GAME RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "At the end of each turn: Return the remaining 6 tokens to the box (they are discarded and are not returned to the Pouch), then refill each of the 3 spaces with 3 tokens. If you did not take an Animal card on this turn, you may discard 1 Animal card from the center of the table and replace it with th", "headingPath": "Game turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "After you have played several games, you can use Nature's Spirit cards to enjoy a richer game experience!", "headingPath": "NATURE'S SPIRIT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "With this action you will place the various features that will form your Landscape. You must perform this action exactly once during your turn. Take 3 tokens from any one of the Central board spaces. You must place these 3 tokens on your Personal board however you see fit, following the rules below.", "headingPath": "Take and place tokens", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Shuffle the Nature's Spirit cards and deal 2 to each player, facedown. On your first turn, you look at these 2 cards, then choose 1 and place it faceup above your Personal board, returning the other to the box. Then place a Nature's Spirit cube on the chosen card. Nature's Spirit cubes follow the sa", "headingPath": "Game turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Take 1 Animal card Place 1 Animal cube Actions are performed in any order. Optional actions may be performed between the placement of 2 tokens.", "headingPath": "PLAYER AID", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "The number of Landscapes on your Personal board. The groups of connected Landscapes on your Personal board. An isolated Landscape is considered a group of size 1. For example, with this Nature's Spirit, you score 4 points for each Mountain of height 2 and 4 points for each Mountain of height 3 on yo", "headingPath": "Some Nature's Spirit cards earn you points based on:", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Refill the Central board. Refill the row of Animal cards so there are 5 cards faceup, if needed.", "headingPath": "End of game turn:", "sharpsignalDocId": 91}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)

no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 91 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 91 boosted

answered-before recall

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

debug row recorded

Sep 1, 2026 22:08 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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	GAME RULES	p.2	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Game turn	p.6	0.047883 (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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	NATURE'S SPIRIT CARDS	p.6	0.046642 (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))	105
#4	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Take and place tokens	p.3	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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Game turn	p.6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	PLAYER AID	p.7	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))	143
#7	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Some Nature's Spirit cards earn you points based on:	p.6	0.030018 (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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	End of game turn:	p.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))	96

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 31 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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	GAME RULES	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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Game turn	p.6	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Unlimited.	p.7	#10	0.028372 (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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Setup	p.6	#19	0.012658 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Take 1 Animal card	p.3	#11	0.014493 (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 Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Take and place tokens	p.3	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Once per turn.	p.7	#9	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
#8	RULEBOOK Harmonies — Rulebook (corpus doc 91)	Game turn	p.6	#2	0.047883 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 184 ms · first delta 1201 ms · total 1293 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 184 ms · ask 1108 ms · gateway work 1293 ms · total 1293 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1395
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 180.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.050 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 4s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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 22), 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.