Ruling — Fallout Shelter: The Board Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Fallout Shelter: The Board Gamebg-293889-en-1e

The game is played over a number of rounds, each consisting of three steps:

1. Spawn Threats: Threat cards are spawned in the vault (this step is skipped the first round).[1]

2. Place Dwellers: Starting with the first player, each player takes turns placing one dweller on any available space in the vault.[1] Players continue taking turns in clockwise order until each player is out of dwellers or has passed.[1]

3. Recall Dwellers: All dwellers are recalled by removing them from the vault and placing them in front of the player again.[1]

On a player's turn, they take one of their available dwellers and place them on a space in the vault.[1] A dweller cannot be placed on a space that already contains a dweller, nor on a space from one of the rooms in the room track.[1] To place a dweller, the player must pay all costs shown in red above the space, and then, from left to right, they gain each reward listed in green above the space.[1] If a player does not want to (or cannot) place a dweller, they can pass; once a player has passed, they cannot take any more turns that round.[1]

During the game, players may also perform the following:

* Building Rooms: For each of a specific icon on a space, a player chooses a room from the room track to build in their level of the vault.[2][3] To build, the player takes the card from the room track and places it in their level of the vault, then draws a new room to replace it.[2][3] The room must be placed immediately next to the player's elevator or next to a room already built, and a player cannot have more than three rooms on each side of their elevator.[2][3] Building a room requires paying the cost shown in the lower-right corner of the selected room.[3]

* Gaining Dwellers: For each of a specific icon on a space, a player gains one new dweller for the remainder of the game by taking a dweller of their color from the game box and placing it directly on the icon, up to a maximum of seven dwellers.[4]

* Gaining Items: For each of a specific icon on a space, a player gains an item of their choice from the item track, which they place in front of them, then draws a new item to replace it.[4]

* Income: If another player places a dweller on a space in a room in a player's level of the vault, that player may gain one resource of their choice from the supply, provided the dweller does not go to a space on a threat in that level.[3]

At the start of each round after the first, threats are spawned in random locations around the vault.[5] For each level of the vault (starting with the top), players roll both dice and add the results to determine where a threat spawns on that level.[5] A threat is spawned by drawing the top card of the threat deck and placing it over the space in the column corresponding to the dice results, provided there is a room in that column and no threat card is already in that space; no threat is spawned if a '7' is rolled.[5] A threat card on a space replaces that space, its cost, and its reward until the threat card is removed.[5]

The game ends at the end of the round in which either a player builds the sixth room on their level of the vault, or the threat deck runs out of cards.[6] At the end of that round, each player must discard one happiness for each threat on their level of the vault.[6] The player with the most happiness wins.[6] In the case of a tie, ties are broken by:

1. Most total resource cubes [6]

2. Most dwellers [6]

3. Most items [6]

If a tie still persists, both players win.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING

[2] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.7 · FIRST PLAYER

[3] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.7

[4] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.6 · NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER

[5] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.9 · Linked Spaces

[6] RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.11 · ENDING THE GAME · Tie-breakers · FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES · BETHESDA SOFTWORKS

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 144 ms · ask 5373 ms · total 5519 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5519 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Separately shuffle the items, threats, and remaining rooms and place each deck of cards above the vault as indicated. Place the resource cubes, happiness, and dice within reach. Draw three items and place them face up to the left of the item deck. This is the item track. Draw three rooms and place t", "headingPath": "STEP 3: CREATE SUPPLY · STEP 4: CREATE TRACKS · STEP 5: FIRST PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "In Fallout Shelter , each of you plays as an officer in your vault. Whoever generates the most happiness by the end of the game, wins ! The game is played over a number of rounds, each consisting of three steps: Spawn Threats: Threat cards are spawned in the vault. This step is skipped the first rou", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "For each of this icon on the space, you gain one new dweller for the remainder of the game. Take a dweller of your color from the game box, and place it directly on this icon. When you recall your dwellers, this dweller will be recalled as well, and will be available to place on future turns. Note: ", "headingPath": "NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "– 2 – STEP 1: BUILD THE VAULT Locate the elevator and six rooms with red backs and arrange them as indicated. STEP 2: CHOOSE COLORS Each player chooses a color and adds the elevator of the matching color to the vault in a column in any order. Then, each player takes the resource tracker and two dwel", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "For each of these icons on the space, you gain one resource of the corresponding type. Take a resource cube from the supply and place it in the matching resource track. If there is no more room in the track (six max per track), you cannot gain any more of that resource and that cube is lost. When yo", "headingPath": "RESOURCES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "At the start of each round after the first, threats are spawned in random locations around the vault. For each level of the vault (starting with the top), roll both dice and add together their results to determine where a threat spawns on that level. Each column of spaces is labeled with a number (l", "headingPath": "Linked Spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Threats with this icon require your dweller to fight! When you place your dweller in that space, roll both dice and add together their results. If the result is equal to, or greater than, the number shown on this icon, your dweller wins! You gain the reward shown on the threat. If the result is less", "headingPath": "7 6 5 3 9 10 2 11 12 4 8 · INJURED DWELLERS · HEALING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "For each of this icon on the space, you choose a room from the room track to build in your level of the vault. A 'level' of the vault is a horizontal row of rooms stretching out to either side of an elevator. The elevator card matching your color indicates which level of the vault you own. Only you ", "headingPath": "FIRST PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FIRST PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Linked Spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ENDING THE GAME · Tie-breakers · FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES · BETHESDA SOFTWORKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1112}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1112 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1112 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 0.93605 of 2846 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:13 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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	STEP 3: CREATE SUPPLY · STEP 4: CREATE TRACKS · STEP 5: FIRST PLAYER	p.3	0.048916 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING	p.4	0.048652 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER	p.6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)		p.2	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
#5	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	RESOURCES	p.5	0.030769 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	Linked Spaces	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
#7	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	7 6 5 3 9 10 2 11 12 4 8 · INJURED DWELLERS · HEALING	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
#8	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	FIRST PLAYER	p.7	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))	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 14 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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	STEP 3: CREATE SUPPLY · STEP 4: CREATE TRACKS · STEP 5: FIRST PLAYER	p.3	#1	0.048916 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)		p.2	#4	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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	FIRST PLAYER	p.7	#8	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
#4	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	ENDING THE GAME · Tie-breakers · FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES · BETHESDA SOFTWORKS	p.11	#11	0.014085 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)		p.7	#9	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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	Linked Spaces	p.9	#6	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
#7	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER	p.6	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING	p.4	#2	0.048652 (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 Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	PLAYING THE GAME · PLACING A DWELLER · PASSING	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	FIRST PLAYER	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)		p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	NEW DWELLERS · FIRST PLAYER	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	Linked Spaces	p.9	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Fallout Shelter: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1112)	ENDING THE GAME · Tie-breakers · FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES · BETHESDA SOFTWORKS	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 144 ms · first delta 1313 ms · total 5519 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 144 ms · ask 5373 ms · gateway work 5519 ms · total 5519 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2023
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 841
tok/sec: 202.7 tok/sec — 841 output tokens in 4.148 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 21s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 1042), 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.