RuleSage cited table rulings
← Blokus Duo

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Blokus Duobg-16395-en-1e

1. Players choose a color and place that set of 21 pieces in front of their side of the board.[1]
2. Decide who will start first.[1]
3. Player 1 places one of their pieces on one of the two starting points.[1]
4. Player 2 places one of their pieces on the second starting point.[1]
5. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn.[2]
6. Each new piece must touch at least one other piece of the same color, but only at the corners.[1][2]
7. No flat edges of same colored pieces can touch.[1][2]
8. There are no restrictions on how differently colored pieces can touch one another.[1][2]
9. Once a game piece has been placed on the board it cannot be moved during subsequent turns.[2]
10. When a player is unable to place one of their remaining pieces on the board, that player must pass.[2]
11. The game ends when both players are blocked from laying down any more pieces, which includes a player who may have placed all of their pieces on the board.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook · p.1
[2] RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook · p.4 · 3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn.

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 101 ms · ask 3114 ms · total 5422 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 2206 ms · generation 3216 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 1, "score": 0.047192, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046204, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045774, "snippet": "Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. Players choose a color and places that set of 21 pieces in front of their side of the board. Decide who will start first. Player 1 places one of their pieces on one of the two starting points. Player 2 places one of their pi", "headingPath": "OBJECT OF THE GAME · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045702, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045291, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044604, "snippet": "Each new piece must touch at least one other piece of the same color, but only at the corners. No flat edges of same colored pieces can touch. There are no restrictions on how differently colored pieces can touch one another. Once a game piece has been placed on the board it cannot be moved during s", "headingPath": "3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.044175, "snippet": "This version of Blokus is the perfect strategy game for two! The simple rules take less than a minute to learn, yet the game has the depth to challenge both beginners and experts alike. OBJECT OF THE GAME Each player has to fit as many of their 21 pieces on the board as possible. HOW TO PLAY 1. Playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1193}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1193 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1193 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 0.89381 of 791 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded
Sep 5, 2026 15:50 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.1 0.047192 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.2 0.046204 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.3 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
#4 RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) OBJECT OF THE GAME · HOW TO PLAY p.3 0.045774 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.4 0.045702 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.5 0.045291 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) 3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn. p.4 0.044604 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.6 0.044175 (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 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 24 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) OBJECT OF THE GAME · HOW TO PLAY p.3 #4 0.045774 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.1 #1 0.047192 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.3 #3 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
#4 RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.5 #6 0.045291 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.6 #8 0.044175 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.4 #5 0.045702 (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
#7 RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.2 #2 0.046204 (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 Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) 3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn. p.4 #7 0.044604 (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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) p.1 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Blokus Duo — Rulebook (corpus doc 1193) 3. Play continues as each player lays down one piece each turn. p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 101 ms · first delta 1902 ms · total 5422 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 2206 ms · retrieval 101 ms · ask 3114 ms · gateway work 3216 ms · total 5422 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4083
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
251
tok/sec
200.2 tok/sec — 251 output tokens in 1.254 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 20s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1123), 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.