Ruling — Courtisans

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Courtisansbg-402283-en-1e

1. Place the game mat in the center of the table.[1]

2. Shuffle all Courtier cards without looking at them.[1]

3. Randomly remove cards without revealing them according to the number of players: remove 30 cards for 2 players, 18 cards for 3 players, 6 cards for 4 players, and do not remove any cards for 5 players.[1]

4. Deal 3 Courtier cards, face down, to each player, and have everyone look at their own cards without revealing them.[2]

5. Place all remaining Courtier cards as a face down deck near the game mat.[2]

6. Deal 2 Secret Mission cards (one blue and one white) to each player; players secretly look at them and keep them nearby.[2]

7. Randomly choose a first player.[2]

8. Play in successive turns in clockwise order.[3]

9. On your turn, play all 3 cards in your hand by placing one, face up, in each of the following three areas: around the Queen's table, in your domain, and in an opponent's domain.[3]

10. You may play your 3 cards in any order, as long as you place one card per area.[3]

11. Spies are always played face down instead of face up, and no one can look at a played spy, even the player who played it.[4]

12. When playing a spy around the Queen's table, place it in the Queen's column, above or below her seat on the mat, to hide its family.[4]

13. If you place an assassin in an area, you may choose to eliminate one other Courtier card in that area, which is then removed from the game; however, guards cannot be eliminated by assassins.[5]

14. If an assassin is placed around the Queen's table, you may eliminate any card in that area, regardless of family or placement.[5]

15. After playing your 3 cards, draw 3 new cards from the top of the deck for your next turn; if the deck is empty, that was your last turn.[3]

16. The game ends when the deck is empty and no one has cards in their hand.[3][6]

17. At the end of the game, all spies are revealed, and those at the Queen's table are moved to their family without changing their level (above or below the mat).[6]

18. Determine each family's status at the Queen's table: families with more cards above the mat are esteemed, those with more below are fallen from grace, and if there is no majority, the family is neutral.[6]

19. Calculate scores: each card in an esteemed family earns 1 point, while each card in a fallen from grace family causes you to lose 1 point.[7]

20. Nobles count as two cards, whether in a player's domain or around the Queen's table.[4][8]

21. Each player reveals their Secret Mission cards; meeting a condition is worth 3 extra points, while unfulfilled cards are worth nothing.[8]

22. The player with the most points wins; in the case of a tie, tied players share victory.[3][8]

[1] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.1 · OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.2 · COMPONENTS

[3] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.3 · COMPONENTS

[4] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.6 · IN YOUR DOMAIN

[5] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.7

[6] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.8 · IN YOUR DOMAIN

[7] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.4 · COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN

[8] RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook · p.9 · IN YOUR DOMAIN

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 108 ms · ask 4265 ms · total 4375 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4375 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "A game of Courtisans plays in successive turns in clockwise order. Starting with the first player, each player plays their turn completely, then the player to their left, and so on. The game ends when the deck is empty, and no one has cards in their hand. Each player then scores their cards. The pla", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "In Courtisans, you receive and play 3 cards on each of your turns. One is played at the Queen's table to sway a family's influence... in a positive or negative manner. The two other cards are played in your domain and in an opponent's domain, and can be worth positive or negative points, depending o", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Some courtiers have a role, shown on the art with an item and in the corners of the card as an icon. There are 4 different roles and they each have a special effect. At the end of the game, each noble counts as two cards, whether in a player's domain or around the Queen's table. Spies are always pla", "headingPath": "IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Whenever you place an assassin in an area, you may eliminate one other Courtier card in that area. This effect triggers whether an assassin is played in a player’s domain, or at the Queen’s table. The card is removed from the game. If you place an assassin around the Queen’s table, you may eliminate", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "AROUND THE QUEEN'S TABLE (above or below the game mat) Place the card in the column of the matching family. Choose whether to place it above or below the game mat. When the game ends, the families with more cards above than below the mat will be esteemed . Those with more cards below the mat than ab", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "GAME END AND SCORING The game ends when the Courtier deck is empty and no one has cards left in hand. All spies (face down cards) are now revealed. Those at the Queen’s table are moved to their family, without changing their level: cards above the mat stay above the mat, and those below the mat stay", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The game ends when the Courtier deck is empty and no one has cards left in hand. All spies (face down cards) are now revealed. Those at the Queen's table are moved to their family, without changing their level: cards above the mat stay above the mat, and those below the mat stay below the mat. Then ", "headingPath": "IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "90 Courtier cards (6 families with 15 cards each) 20 Secret Mission cards (10 white and 10 blue) 1 game mat 3 2 Deal 3 Courtier cards, face down, to each player. Everyone looks at their own cards without revealing them. 3 Place all remaining Courtier cards as a face down deck, near the game mat. 4 T", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IN YOUR DOMAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1011}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1011 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1011 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 0.89646 of 2202 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 13:58 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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.3	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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.1	0.048139 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.6	0.048131 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)		p.7	0.045476 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.4	0.03125 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)		p.8	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
#7	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.8	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
#8	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.2	0.029412 (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 11 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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.3	#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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.6	#3	0.048131 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.4	#5	0.03125 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.9	#11	0.014085 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.8	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.2	#8	0.029412 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)		p.7	#4	0.045476 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.1	#2	0.048139 (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 Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	OVERVIEW AND GOAL OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)		p.7	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.8	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	COMPONENTS · IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.4	no quote on the wire
[8]	RULEBOOK Courtisans — Rulebook (corpus doc 1011)	IN YOUR DOMAIN	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 108 ms · first delta 792 ms · total 4375 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 108 ms · ask 4265 ms · gateway work 4375 ms · total 4375 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1905
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 717
tok/sec: 202.9 tok/sec — 717 output tokens in 3.534 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 27s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 6s 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 941), 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.