Ruling — Thunder Alley

← Thunder Alley

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Thunder Alleybg-108906-en-1e

To play, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Select a Track.[1]

2. Each player selects a Team and takes the appropriate Team Sheet and matching cars.[1]

3. Each player selects a number of cars from their team based on the number of players involved: 2 players (6 cars), 3 players (5 cars), 4 players (4 cars), or 5-7 players (3 cars).[1]

4. Shuffle the Event Card and Race Card decks separately and place them beside the board.[1]

5. Place Cars on Track: Draw one card from the Race Deck and read the Team Bar from left to right to place the first car for each team on the Starting Grid (starting with the #1 Pole position).[1] Continue reading across the Team Bar to place subsequent cars.[1] To place the second car for each team, use the same card but read the Team Bar from right to left, alternating directions until all cars are placed.[1] All cars should start with their light background up.[1]

6. Place the Current Lap Marker on the #1 space on the Lap Track.[1]

7. Place enough Position markers for each car in play, lined up from 1st Place on the left to the last place tile on the right.[1]

8. Give the player with the car in the Pole Position the First Player marker, placed face up.[1]

9. Place all Wear Markers and Turn Leader Markers in the infield of the track.[1]

10. Deal Race Cards to each player equal to the number of cars they start with plus 1.[1]

Sequence of Play

A full Turn consists of each player activating all of their cars once.[2] A Turn begins with the following sequence:

1. Fill Hands: At the beginning of each Turn, each player draws enough cards from the Race Deck to fill their hand; the hand size is the number of cars each team started the race with plus 1.[2] The First Player fills their hand first, and others follow in clockwise order.[2]

2. Perform Action Segments: Players take turns performing Action Segments (individual player's card play that activates one of their cars).[2]

* To perform an Action Segment, play one Race Card for the activated car.[3]

* The car moves based on the card's speed, movement type, and text.[3]

* The car receives Movement Points (MPs) equal to the card's On-Track Speed value minus any Speed Penalty.[4]

* The activated car must spend all its available MPs.[4]

* Movement costs 1 MP to enter an empty space, 2 MPs to move laterally into an occupied space, and 3 MPs to move forward into an occupied space (note: 3 MPs for Forward Displacement only occurs in Solo and Lead Movement).[4]

* The car may move forward or laterally depending on the card's restrictions, but may not move diagonally unless Spotter Instructions allow it, and may not move backwards (unless forced by Lateral Displacement or play of Working the Pack).[4]

* The activated car may not enter the same space more to than once during an Action Segment.[4]

* After moving, place the appropriate Wear Marker indicated on the played Race Card in the activated car's holding box on its Team sheet (note: cards with a white background do not generate a Wear marker).[3]

* If the car starts the segment with three or more Wear Markers, its movement is penalized.[3]

* Turn the activated car over.[3]

* The Active Player's segment is complete, and play moves to the next player's segment.[3]

3. Perform End of Turn Sequence:

* Determine the Leader and award a Turn Leader marker to the lead car.[2]

* Draw and resolve one Event Card.[2]

* Perform Pit Stops.[2]

* Determine First Player.[2]

* Remove Lapped Cars.[2]

* Discard unwanted Race Cards.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook · p.3 · 2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:

[2] RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook · p.3 · 3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands

[3] RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook · p.4 · 3.4 Action Phase

[4] RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook · p.6 · 6.1 Basics of Movement

Rule found, game on.

🔧 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 107 ms · ask 7632 ms · total 7741 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7741 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 15, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "It is important to note that all of the cars need to have their fronts pointing toward the Start/Finish Line at the beginning of the game and that is the direction all cars will run for the entire race. Team Bar - Each Race Card has a series of 7 colors (with related symbols) printed on it to determ", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "When a player activates a car not on the Apron (i.e. not in the Pits) and plays a Race Card, the car receives a number of Movement Points (MPs) equal to the card's On-Track Speed value minus any Speed Penalty the car has (7.4). Cars may move forward or laterally (i.e. sideways) depending upon restri", "headingPath": "6.1 Basics of Movement", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046486, "snippet": "This phase consists of a number of action segments. The first Action Segment of a turn is performed by the player holding the First Player Marker. Once their Action Segment is complete, the player to their left performs an action segment. This continues until all cars have been activated for an acti", "headingPath": "3.4 Action Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046147, "snippet": "A full Turn consists of each player activating all of their cars once. After the last car's activation is over, the Turn is over. An Action Segment is an individual player's card play that activates one of their cars. Fill Hands (3.3) Perform Action Segments (3.4) Perform End of Turn Sequence (3.5) ", "headingPath": "3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "Car #22 is activated using a 'Working the Pack' card. For the first Movement Point car #22 swaps positions with car #15. For the second Movement Point car #22 moves ahead leaving #15 behind. For the last 2 MPs car #22 swaps positions with car #28 and then #43 to move to the front of the pack. The ga", "headingPath": "Working the Pack Example · A NOTE FROM THE DESIGNER · Unique Circumstances · Bumping", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.04526, "snippet": "Play one Race Card for the activated car, which moves based on the card's speed, movement type, and text. It is penalized some amount of its movement if it starts the segment with three or more Wear Markers (temporary or permanent) already in its holding box on the Team Sheet (7.4). After moving the", "headingPath": "3.4 Action Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044136, "snippet": "When the Perform Action Segment of a turn has been completed by all players and all of the cars have either been activated or crossed the start/finish line, award any car(s) that have not crossed the finish line a position marker based on running order. If any car has crossed the Finish line and bee", "headingPath": "10.1 Crossing the Finish Line · 10.2 Scoring · 11.0 SEASON RULES · 11.1 Set the Schedule · 11.2 Starting Grid Alteration", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.043908, "snippet": "1. Select a Track: Select one of the four tracks. 2. Select a Team: Each player selects a Team and takes the appropriate Team Sheet and matching cars. 3. Select your cars: Each player selects a number of cars from their team based on the number of players involved. | PLAYERS | CARS PER TEAM | | 2 | ", "headingPath": "2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3.4 Action Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6.1 Basics of Movement", "sharpsignalDocId": 1034}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1034 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1034 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 0.90707 of 2873 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:51 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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	GLOSSARY	p.15	0.046898 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	6.1 Basics of Movement	p.6	0.046696 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.4 Action Phase	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands	p.3	0.046147 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	Working the Pack Example · A NOTE FROM THE DESIGNER · Unique Circumstances · Bumping	p.14	0.045285 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.4 Action Phase	p.4	0.04526 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	10.1 Crossing the Finish Line · 10.2 Scoring · 11.0 SEASON RULES · 11.1 Set the Schedule · 11.2 Starting Grid Alteration	p.11	0.044136 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:	p.3	0.043908 (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 41 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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands	p.3	#4	0.046147 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.4 Action Phase	p.4	#6	0.04526 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	6.1 Basics of Movement	p.6	#2	0.046696 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)		p.1	#11	0.028139 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	4.3 Losing a Car (Retirement & Elimination) · 4.4 Using the Team Bar · 4.5 Corners	p.5	#13	0.027222 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	GLOSSARY	p.15	#1	0.046898 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	4.3 Losing a Car (Retirement & Elimination)	p.4	#15	0.027106 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:	p.3	#8	0.043908 (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 Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	2. SETUP · 6. Place Markers:	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.1 Action Segments vs. Turns · 3.2 Sequence of Play for Each Turn · 3.3 Fill Hands	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	3.4 Action Phase	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Thunder Alley — Rulebook (corpus doc 1034)	6.1 Basics of Movement	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 107 ms · first delta 3224 ms · total 7741 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 107 ms · ask 7632 ms · gateway work 7741 ms · total 7741 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3553
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 874
tok/sec: 196.1 tok/sec — 874 output tokens in 4.458 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 24h, 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 964), 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.