Ruling — burncycle

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: burncyclebg-322656-en-1e

A game of burncycle is broken into rounds.[1]

Setup

1. Place the floor mat in the middle of the play area with the network mat to the left and the command module mat to the right.[2]

2. Each player chooses a color (green, purple, yellow, or orange) and takes the corresponding agent mat.[2]

3. Each player takes the set of pegs in their player color.[2]

4. Place blue command module pegs near the command module mat.[2]

5. Place green door pegs beside the command module pegs.[2]

6. Place four red ping pegs in the peg holes at the top of the network mat.[2]

7. Place the red CEO network level die, set to 1, in the die slot at the top of the network.[3]

8. Place the network level die and a peg of the first player's color in the top right of the network, set to 1.[3]

9. Continue clockwise around the mat with the next player's die and peg.[3]

10. Place the card tray below the command module mat.[2]

11. Shuffle all card decks separately and place them in their designated slots with card backs towards you.[2]

12. Place four Reference Cards in the large slot in the back of the card tray.[2]

13. Give each player a player aid card.[2]

14. Randomly determine a first player.[4]

15. Give the corporation marker to the player to the right of the first player.[4]

The Flow of the Game

1. In a round, each player takes a full turn, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise.[1]

2. After all players have taken their turns, the corporation takes a turn.[1]

3. After the corporation's turn, a new round begins.[1]

A Player's Turn

A player's turn consists of the following steps, taken in order:

1. Route power (this step is optional and allows you to spend power to activate upgrades on your agent or command module).[1]

2. Build your dice pool.[1]

3. Take actions.[1]

4. Navigate the network.[1]

5. Route power.[1]

6. Degrade the burncycle.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook · p.19 · FLOW OF THE GAME · Player Turns · What is power? · 1. Route Power · Agent Upgrades

[2] RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook · p.9 · Mats · Pegs · Cards

[3] RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook · p.12 · Network · Captain

[4] RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook · p.10 · Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player

So says the rulebook. So plays the table.

🔧 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 180 ms · ask 6570 ms · total 6754 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6754 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "This is not a traditional rulebook. Rather, it is a 'Learn to Play' that presents the flow of the game and teaches the basics of how to play burncycle. The first time you play, we recommend that you read this book from start to finish, working through the accompanying tutorial as you do so. This wil", "headingPath": "USING THIS BOOK", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "The image below shows how we recommend you lay out the game. It depicts what the play area should look like when set up for the tutorial scenario. Since the tutorial is a 2-player game, we also wanted to show what the board looks like with a full 4 players. Feel free to move things around and arrang", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.046486, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "We recommend organizing your chips as shown below. Bot chips paired with their awareness chips. The 'Joan' chip is also stored here with Memory. The destroyed wall chips, and the remaining bot chips (if you have an expansion pack that provides more bots). Action chips (physical, utility, tech, gener", "headingPath": "Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "Place the red CEO network level die, set to 1, in the die slot at the top of the network, where the ping pegs should already be. Place the network level die of the first player's color, set to 1, in the die cut out at the top right of the network, and a peg of the same color in the peg hole beside i", "headingPath": "Network · Captain", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044246, "snippet": "Place the floor mat in the middle of the play area with the network mat to the left of it and the command module mat to the right. Each player chooses one of the four player colors - green, purple, yellow, or orange. Each should take the agent mat of that color and place it in front of them. Return ", "headingPath": "Mats · Pegs · Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.043905, "snippet": "The agent side of the bot card has action icons in the bottom right corner. See pages 11 and 12 of the Rules Reference for a detailed breakdown of both sides of the bot cards. The agent side of the bot card has action icons in the bottom All players may go through the bot cards (looking at their age", "headingPath": "Agents", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "images and adjust if you are looking at the board from a different perspective. You will find these orange tutorial boxes throughout this book. They will walk you through the setup and early gameplay of a 2-player game of burncycle. We recommend that you follow this tutorial for your first game. You", "headingPath": "WELCOME TO BURNCYCLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FLOW OF THE GAME · Player Turns · What is power? · 1. Route Power · Agent Upgrades", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Mats · Pegs · Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Network · Captain", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player", "sharpsignalDocId": 1284}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1284 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1284 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 0.87679 of 1534 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:41 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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	USING THIS BOOK	p.4	0.048387 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	GAME SETUP	p.8	0.046635 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)		p.1	0.046486 (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))	13
#4	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player	p.10	0.045921 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Network · Captain	p.12	0.044557 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Mats · Pegs · Cards	p.9	0.044246 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Agents	p.14	0.043905 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	WELCOME TO BURNCYCLE	p.4	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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	GAME SETUP	p.8	#2	0.046635 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)		p.1	#3	0.046486 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	FLOW OF THE GAME · Player Turns · What is power? · 1. Route Power · Agent Upgrades	p.19	#23	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
#4	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Network · Captain	p.12	#5	0.044557 (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
#5	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player	p.10	#4	0.045921 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Additional Notes	p.17	#14	0.024315 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Mats · Pegs · Cards	p.9	#6	0.044246 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	USING THIS BOOK	p.4	#1	0.048387 (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 burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	FLOW OF THE GAME · Player Turns · What is power? · 1. Route Power · Agent Upgrades	p.19	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Mats · Pegs · Cards	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Network · Captain	p.12	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK burncycle — Rulebook (corpus doc 1284)	Chips · Dice and Beads · First Player	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 180 ms · first delta 4159 ms · total 6754 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 180 ms · ask 6570 ms · gateway work 6754 ms · total 6754 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3028
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 506
tok/sec: 199.8 tok/sec — 506 output tokens in 2.533 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 23h, checked 2s 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 1214), 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.