Ruling — Kelp: Shark vs Octopus

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Kelp: Shark vs Octopusbg-374595-en-1e

The game is played by alternating turns, starting with the Octopus.[1][2] Turns continue until one player achieves their victory conditions.[1]

As the Octopus:

On your turn, you must take two actions.[3][4] You may perform the same action twice.[3] The three possible actions are:

1. Play a card: Pay the card's cost by revealing the required number of hidden blocks.[3][4] After paying, perform the card's effect; you must be able to complete the full effect to use it.[3] After resolving the card, place it in the matching action slot at the bottom of the board.[3]

2. Draw back up to the size of your hand: You may choose this if you have fewer cards than your hand size; if your hand is empty, you must perform this action.[3] If the draw pile is empty, shuffle the discard pile to form a new draw pile.[3]

3. Discard 1 card from your hand, then hide 1 block: Put the discarded card on the discard pile, ignoring its cost and effect.[3] You may then hide one of your revealed blocks.[3]

At the end of your turn, move any cards you played to the discard pile.[3]

As the Shark:

The Shark's turn has several steps, though only "Draw & Roll" and "Move" must be performed every turn.[5] You must keep the order of steps in mind:[5]

1. Draw & Roll: Draw 2 dice from your bag and roll them once.[5] (Later in the game, you may be able to draw more than 2).[5]

2. Move: Moving is mandatory.[4] You swim from one Current Space to the next.[5] You may swim over Currents to skip spaces, but only if the pips on the dice are decreasing, and you may not swim against increasing numbers on Currents.[4]

The Shark may also use dice for the following:

* Search: Reveal an adjacent block.[4] The value of the die placed must be greater than or equal to the zone value.[4]

* Strike: Attack an adjacent block.[4] If the block is the Octopus, proceed to confrontation.[4]

Victory Conditions:

* The Octopus wins if: They outlast the Shark until it is exhausted,[1] they play all 4 Eat cards and eat all the food blocks,[6] or they place a food block on the last spot on the Food Track.[7] The Shark is exhausted if they place their 7th die on the Hunger Track.[5]

* The Shark wins if: They successfully strike the Octopus and beat them in the final confrontation.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.6 · The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden

[2] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.7 · Actions · - Play a card

[4] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.20 · OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …

[5] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.12 · The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …

[6] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.9 · Learn

[7] RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook · p.10 · Learn · Example: Eat

That settles it — whose turn was it?

🔧 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 255 ms · ask 4566 ms · total 4823 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4823 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "On your turn, you must take two actions. You may perform the same action twice, and there are three possible actions you can choose from. To play a card, you must first pay its cost 2 by revealing the number of hidden blocks indicated on that card. The cost varies between 0-3, and must always be pai", "headingPath": "Actions · - Play a card", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Learn cards allow you to improve your skills, which means improving your deck by gaining better cards and new blocks from beside the board. For example, a card with Learn 2 will allow you to gain either 2 new cards, 2 new blocks, or 1 card and 1 block. Though if you gain an Eat card, you also get th", "headingPath": "Learn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "The players will alternate taking turns, starting with the Octopus. The way each player acts during their turn is different, as you will see below. Turns continue until one player achieves their victory conditions. As the Octopus, you play cards that allow you to move stealthily and manipulate the p", "headingPath": "The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "As the Shark, you swim around the Kelp forest from one Current Space to the next. You roll different dice to move, search, and strike. With each turn, you can become stronger, improving your dice bag and learning new skills as you chase the Octopus. However, as your skill level increases, so does yo", "headingPath": "The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "On your turn, you must take two actions. You may do the same action twice, and there are three possible actions you can choose from. Play a card Pay its cost by revealing block(s). Draw back up to the size of your hand Discard 1 card from your hand. Then hide 1 block, if possible Put the discarded c", "headingPath": "OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.04374, "snippet": "In Kelp , players take on the role of either a Shark, trying to hunt an Octopus, or an Octopus trying to survive. Both players have different goals and paths to victory: for the Octopus, you win by surviving until the end of the game or by eating all of the food blocks. The Shark has only one way to", "headingPath": "Objective of the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Dens: At the beginning of the game, and whenever you are returned to a den (either by a Confrontation, or a trap effect) you are considered to already be on the Current space in front of the den, pointing at the center of the board. On your turn, you will choose which direction to head in when leavi", "headingPath": "SHARK", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The Growth Track grants you permanent abilities. Following the Move and Search steps, place the 1st used Current and all used Search dice on the next empty space(s) on the Growth tiles , proceeding from left to right. Once you have placed 3 dice on a tile, return them to the dice bag and flip the ti", "headingPath": "Growth", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Actions · - Play a card", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Learn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Learn · Example: Eat", "sharpsignalDocId": 1015}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1015 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1015 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 0.87837 of 1891 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 12:11 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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Actions · - Play a card	p.7	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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Learn	p.9	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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden	p.6	0.046875 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …	p.12	0.046239 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …	p.20	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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Objective of the game	p.3	0.04374 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	SHARK	p.18	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
#8	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Growth	p.15	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 29 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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Actions · - Play a card	p.7	#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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden	p.6	#3	0.046875 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …	p.12	#4	0.046239 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Learn	p.9	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Setup	p.5	#17	0.014286 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	SHARK	p.18	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Learn · Example: Eat	p.10	#9	0.02904 (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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …	p.20	#5	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))	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 Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Octopus · Anatomy of Octopus cards · Adjacency · Hidden	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Actions · - Play a card	p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	OCTOPUS · Eat: · Draw & Roll · Currents · Move · Search · …	p.20	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	The Shark · Turn of the Shark · Draw & Roll · Currents · Search · Strike · …	p.12	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Learn	p.9	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Kelp: Shark vs Octopus — Rulebook (corpus doc 1015)	Learn · Example: Eat	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 255 ms · first delta 1847 ms · total 4823 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 255 ms · ask 4566 ms · gateway work 4823 ms · total 4823 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3535
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 586
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 586 output tokens in 2.920 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 25s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 4s 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 945), 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.