Ruling — Kitchen Rush

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Kitchen Rushbg-223953-en-1e

Kitchen Rush is a cooperative game where all players work together as a team to win or lose.[1] The game is played in a series of 4 rounds.[1]

Setup

1. Place the game board in the middle of the table.[2]

2. Place piles of all Ingredients, Spices, and money near the game board, within reach of all players.[2]

3. Fill the cloth bag with Spices based on the number of players.[2]

4. Place the bag next to the game board, near the Spices area.[2]

5. Shuffle the Upgrades and place them in a face-down pile next to the game board, near the Office area, and reveal the first 2 cards.[2]

6. Place one plate of each size next to the revealed Upgrade cards.[2]

7. Give each player a Player Mat and 2 Hourglasses of the same color.[2]

8. Choose one remaining Hourglass to be the players' Helper and place it next to the game board.[2]

9. Place the second Hourglass of the Helper's color next to the Upgrades, laid down.[2]

10. Place the Prestige Track Mat on the side of the playing area and put a marker on the starting space (0) and one on the first space of the Round track (round 1).[3]

11. Shuffle the Prestige Bonuses and place them in a face-down pile on the first card slot.[3]

12. Decide on a difficulty level (Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard), get a corresponding Objective, and inform everyone of the requirements.[3]

13. Shuffle the Orders and place them in a face-down deck next to the game board, near the Maitre d' space.[3]

14. Set a digital timer or cell phone countdown to 4 minutes.[3]

15. Add items to the game board.[3]

Gameplay

Each round consists of the following phases:

1. Preparation Phase: Move the marker on the Round track to the next space (skip this during the first round).[1] If playing with Events, draw the first one from the Events pile and apply its effect.[1] Any other effects that need to take place before players' actions also happen during this phase.[1] Players may freely discuss and form a plan for the upcoming Action phase.[1]

2. Action Phase: This phase is played in real-time with a timer.[4] Players perform actions with their workers by taking an Hourglass, turning it over, and placing it on an available action space.[4] You may perform an action immediately without waiting for the sand to run out, but you cannot move the Hourglass while sand is running.[4] You may only use your own Hourgiasses or the Helper.[4] You cannot use an action space that is already occupied by an Hourglass or contains a token (such as Locked, Unavailable Action, or Malfunction).[4] Moving an Hourglass to a new action space completes the previous action.[4]

3. Cleanup Phase: All Orders prepared by players are served during this phase.[5]

Actions

* Waiter: Choose one of two options:

* Take Order: Take an Order from the game board and place it face-up in front of you.[6] Take the required plate(s) from the Clean Plates area and place them on the first row of your Player Mat.[6] If the required plate is unavailable, you may use one size higher without penalty.[6] If no plate is available, you may take the Order and add the plate to your Player Mat later when it becomes available.[6]

* Serve Promptly: During the Action phase, you may turn an Order card sideways to immediately get 1 coin as a tip.[5] Once served promptly, you can no longer add Ingredients, Spices, or cook it more times.[5]

* Spices: Take the cloth bag and remove any number of Spices to place on your plates.[7] You may spread the cubes across multiple plates.[7] You can add Spices to a plate even while or after it is cooked.[7] You may continue taking cubes as long as you are in the Spices action, even if the sand runs out, but performing any other action ends this.[7]

Ending the Game

At the end of the 4th round, check to see if the team managed to accomplish the chosen goal.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.7 · 4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase

[2] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.4 · Game Board

[3] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.5 · Game Board

[4] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.7 · Action Phase

[5] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.9 · Waiter

[6] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.8 · Waiter

[7] RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook · p.11 · Spices

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 104 ms · ask 6611 ms · total 11067 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 4350 ms · generation 6717 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Place the Prestige Track Mat on the side of the playing area. Put a marker on the starting space of the track (numbered 0, it is indicated with a different color) and one on the first space of the Round track (round 1). Shuffle the Prestige Bonuses and place them in a face down pile on the first car", "headingPath": "Game Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Kitchen Rush is a cooperative game. This means that all players work together against the game and you win or lose as a team. The game is played in a series of 4 rounds. Each round new Orders come in, you prepare the dishes and you serve them to the customers. At the end of the 4th round you check t", "headingPath": "4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046394, "snippet": "This phase is played in real-time. When the Action phase starts, start the timer. During this phase you perform actions with your workers. Take one of your Hourglasses, turn it over and place it on the action space you want to use. You can immediately then perform the action - you don't have to wait", "headingPath": "Action Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Note: For 1 player see also 6.Solo Game on page 14 for the necessary adjustments. Place the game board in the middle of the table. Place piles of all the Ingredients, Spices and money near the game board, within reach of all the players. We recommend you place them in the order they are shown in the", "headingPath": "Game Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You go to the customer's table to take their order or you make sure to serve their dishes as quickly as possible. When performing this action, choose one of the following options: Take Order: Take one of the Orders on the game board and place it face-up in front of you. Take the plate(s) that it req", "headingPath": "Waiter", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030886, "snippet": "If you lost Prestige this round and by doing so you ended up behind a space with a card icon, return the latest Prestige Bonus to the top of the pile. If, when losing Prestige you passed more than one spaces with such card icons, return that many Prestige Bonuses to the top of the pile. If at any ti", "headingPath": "Prestige Bonuses · 5. GAME END · 6. SOLO GAME · 7. EVENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Serve Promptly: All the Orders that have been prepared by the players will be served in the Cleanup phase. If you wish however, you may serve it promptly during the Action phase. Turn the card sideways and immediately get 1 coin as a tip. Keep in mind that after an Order has been Served Promptly, yo", "headingPath": "Waiter", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "You gather the required ingredients from the Storages to prepare the customers' orders. When performing this action, you may take any Ingredients from that Storage area and place them on plates on your Player Mat that are still in the first row ( ). You may add Ingredients to any number of plates on", "headingPath": "Storage", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Action Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Waiter", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Waiter", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Spices", "sharpsignalDocId": 1055}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1055 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1055 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 0.90114 of 3156 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:11 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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.5	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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase	p.7	0.047379 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Action Phase	p.7	0.046394 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.4	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
#5	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.8	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
#6	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Prestige Bonuses · 5. GAME END · 6. SOLO GAME · 7. EVENTS	p.14	0.030886 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.9	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
#8	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Storage	p.10	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 27 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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase	p.7	#2	0.047379 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Action Phase	p.7	#3	0.046394 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.4	#4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.9	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	1-2 Players · 3 Players · 4 Players	p.6	#18	0.012821 (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 Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Spices	p.11	#12	0.013889 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.8	#5	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
#8	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.5	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	4. HOW TO PLAY · Round Overview · Preparation Phase	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Game Board	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Action Phase	p.7	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.9	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Waiter	p.8	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Kitchen Rush — Rulebook (corpus doc 1055)	Spices	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 104 ms · first delta 1892 ms · total 11067 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 4350 ms · retrieval 104 ms · ask 6611 ms · gateway work 6717 ms · total 11067 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2592
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 960
tok/sec: 202.7 tok/sec — 960 output tokens in 4.735 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 56s 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 985), 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.