Ruling — Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Gamebg-296108-en-1e

In player order, players take turns going around the table.[1][2] On your turn, you may choose one of two types of turns:

Production Turn

1. Keep up to 3 of your current resource dice (wild tokens are not dice) and return the rest to the dice pool.[1]

2. Discard any number of cards from your hand.[1]

3. If you have less than 5 cards in hand, draw cards until you have 5.[1]

4. Take and roll all the dice indicated in the brown boxes on your corporation card and green project cards in play.[1] If there is not enough dice in the dice pool, take as many as you can and gain 1 wild token.[1]

5. Flip back any used blue project cards so they may be used again.[1]

Action Turn

An action turn consists of 1 support action followed by 1 main action:[1]

1. Support Action: You may perform one of the following:

* Gain and roll 1 dice of your choice from the dice pool.[1]

* Pay any resource to turn another dice to any of its sides.[1]

* Pay any resource to draw 2 cards.[1]

* Use a support action on an unused blue card, then flip it sideways to mark it as used.[1]

* Perform another support action as your main action.[1]

2. Main Action: You may perform one of the following:

* Play a card from hand, paying its exact resource cost.[3][1]

* Pay 3 heat resources to increase temperature 1 step.[1]

* Pay 3 water resources to place 1 ocean tile.[1]

* Pay 4 plant resources to place 1 forest tile (and increase oxygen 1 step).[1]

* Pay 3 city resources to place 1 city tile.[1]

* Pay 3 MegaCredit resources to immediately gain 2 VP.[1]

* Use a main action on an unused blue card, then flip it sideways to mark it as used.[1]

Free Actions

* Some blue cards have free actions that can be taken at any time during your turn (before, after, or during support/main actions, or at the start/end of a production turn).[1] Perform the effect and flip the card sideways.[1]

Game End

* The game ends when 2 out of 3 global parameters (oxygen, temperature, or ocean) have been completed.[1][4]

* After the second parameter is completed, all players get one last turn.[5]

* The player with the most VP wins the game.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook · p.3 · PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION

[2] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook · p.2 · OVERVIEW

[3] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook · p.3 · PLAYING a card

[4] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook · p.2 · OVERVIEW

[5] RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:

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 99 ms · ask 4552 ms · total 4653 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4653 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Playing a card is a main action done on your action turn, so make sure to perform your support action first! To play a card from your hand, you must pay the exact resources depicted at the top left of the card (icons must match!). Resources you pay are returned to the dice pool. Wild tokens may be p", "headingPath": "PLAYING a card", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "You always play 50 turns when playing solo. The goal is to complete all 3 global parameters (ocean/temperature/oxygen). If you reach that goal you may also count your final score. If you fail, your score does not count! Use the normal multiplayer rules, and add the following: Board setup: Place 1 ci", "headingPath": "SOLO PLAY · What did you score?", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047183, "snippet": "In player order, the players take turns going around the table. This continues all through the game until 2 out of 3 global parameters have been completed and the game ends. On your turn, you may either choose to produce new resources (production turn) or perform actions (action turn): Keep up to 3 ", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045536, "snippet": "Awards: Take 1 dice of each color from the dice pool, randomly select 3 of them, roll them, and place them on the 3 award spots on the game board. Players compete to have the most of these symbols on the cost of their played cards by the end of the game. Milestones: Randomly select 3 milestone tiles", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, is a card driven dice game where players use special dice to develop their corporations and terraform Mars into a new home for humanity. The dice represent resources that players spend to play cards and perform other actions. During the game you increase your produc", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "Lakefront Resorts (promo): If you place a tile next to an ocean, you gain 2 yellow dice. If that tile is adjacent to more than one ocean, you still only get 2 yellow dice. Manutech (promo): When you play a green gard, you also immediately gain what is indicated in the brown production box on that ca", "headingPath": "CORPORATIONS · RED CARDS · BLUE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045262, "snippet": "The game ends when 2 out of 3 global parameters (ocean/temperature/oxygen) have been completed. Then all players (including the player completing the 2nd parameter) get 1 last turn. Note that increasing the 3rd parameter still gives 2 VP , and you still receive 1 VP for raising an already completed ", "headingPath": "END OF GAME · The player with the highest score wins the game!", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "No re-rolls: You never ever re-roll your dice resources in this game! Whenever a player terraforms (places an ocean tile on the board, or raises temperature or oxygen), that player gains 2 VP and immediately moves his player cube up the VP track on the game board. If oxygen, temperature, or ocean is", "headingPath": "GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING a card", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:", "sharpsignalDocId": 966}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 966 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 966 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 0.87753 of 1731 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 13:45 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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING a card	p.3	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	SOLO PLAY · What did you score?	p.5	0.047371 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION	p.3	0.047183 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	0.045536 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	0.045455 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	CORPORATIONS · RED CARDS · BLUE CARDS	p.6	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
#7	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	END OF GAME · The player with the highest score wins the game!	p.5	0.045262 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:	p.4	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

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 13 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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING a card	p.3	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION	p.3	#3	0.047183 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	CORPORATIONS · RED CARDS · BLUE CARDS	p.6	#6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	milestones · CORPORATE ERA milestones	p.7	#9	0.030214 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:	p.4	#8	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
#6	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	#5	0.045455 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	#4	0.045536 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	SOLO PLAY · What did you score?	p.5	#2	0.047371 (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 Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING THE GAME · PRODUCTION TURN · ACTION TURN · SUPPORT ACTION · MAIN ACTION	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	PLAYING a card	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	OVERVIEW	p.2	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 966)	GAME CONCEPTS · Terraforming give you 2 Victory Points (VP): · Keep on terraforming: · 2 of 3 ends the game: · Immediate VP vs VP at the end of the game: · Placing tiles on the board:	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 99 ms · first delta 1586 ms · total 4653 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 99 ms · ask 4552 ms · gateway work 4653 ms · total 4653 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4065
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 590
tok/sec: 199.9 tok/sec — 590 output tokens in 2.952 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 1s 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 896), 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.