Ruling — Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Forest Shuffle: Dartmoorbg-438402-en-1e

Setup

1. Place the clearing (the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players.[1][2]

2. Set the 3 winter cards and the caves aside.[1][2]

3. Shuffle the remaining cards and return a certain number of them to the game box, unseen, based on the player count: 45 cards for 2 players, 30 cards for 3 players, 15 cards for 4 players, and for 5 players, none (you play with all cards).[1][2]

4. Divide the remaining cards into three face-down piles of similar size.[1][2]

5. Shuffle two winter cards into one of the piles and put the third winter card on top of that pile.[1][2]

6. Place the other two piles on top of the one containing the winter cards to form a draw pile, and place it on the and left side of the clearing.[1][2]

7. Everyone draws 6 cards into their hand.[1][2]

8. Shuffle the 5 caves and put one for each player into the clearing; if playing with fewer than 5 players, return the remaining cards to the game box.[1][2]

9. In reverse turn order, each player takes one cave from the clearing and places it face up in front of them.[1][2]

10. Carry out the effect of each cave in reverse turn order.[1][2][3]

11. The player who last visited a moor starts the game.[1][2]

Gameplay

1. Players take turns in clockwise order, beginning with the start player.[4]

2. On your turn, you must carry out exactly one of two possible actions:[4]

* Draw Two Cards: Draw two cards, one at a time, and add them to your hand.[4] For each card, you may choose to take a face-down card from the top of the stack or a face-up card from the clearing.[4] Your maximum hand size is 10 cards; if you have 9 cards, you may only draw one.[4]

* Play a Card:

* Pay the card's cost by placing that many (other) cards from your hand face up into the clearing.[5] When playing a split card, choose one half to play and pay only its cost.[5]

* Place the card face up in front of yourself in your forest.[5] Split cards must be placed in an empty slot on the corresponding side of a tree, shrub, or terrain.[6][7] If playing an inhabitant on top of a card, slide the unused bottom half of the card under the tree, shrub, or terrain.[6][7]

* If you played a tree, you must also draw the top card from the stack and place it face up in the clearing.[5][7]

* After paying and placing the card, use its effect (if available) and then its bonus (if available).[6][7]

3. Check the clearing: If there are 10 or more cards in the clearing, remove all cards from the clearing and place them onto a separate discard pile.[8]

4. The next player clockwise takes their turn, unless an effect or bonus allows you to take another turn.[8]

Ending the Game

1. The game ends immediately when the third winter card is drawn from the stack.[4][3]

[1] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.2

[2] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.2 · Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.

[3] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.2

[4] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.3 · Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing

[5] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.4 · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains

[6] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.5 · Animals and Plants · Effect and Bonus

[7] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.5

[8] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.6 · Checking the Clearing

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 82 ms · ask 5589 ms · total 5674 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5674 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "4 To play a card from your hand, you must first pay its cost by placing that many (other) cards from your hand face up into the clearing . When playing a split card, choose one half to play and pay only its cost. Normally, it does not matter which cards you discard as payment. Some species, however,", "headingPath": "B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047493, "snippet": "Beginning with the start player, everyone takes turns in clockwise order. On your turn, you must carry out exactly one of two possible actions: For each card, you may choose to take it from the stack or the clearing. OR Pay the card's cost, place it in your forest, and perform its effect and bonus, ", "headingPath": "Game Flow · A)\t Draw Two Cards · B)\t Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "2 If you already know Forest Shuffle, you don't have to read the entire rulebook, but only the text passages marked with this symbol NEW . 1 Place the clearing (i.e., the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players. 2 NEW Set the 3 winter cards and the caves aside. Shuffl", "headingPath": "Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "2 SetupSetup If you already know Forest Shuffle, you don’t have to read the entire rulebook, but only the text passages marked with this symbol NEW . 1 Place the clearing (i.e., the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players. 2 NEW Set the 3 winter cards and the caves as", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.043697, "snippet": "1 Object of the Game Object of the Game The hilly landscape of Dartmoor offers diverse habitats for plants and animals. While dragonflies and other insects bustle along the stream, ponies and sheep graze in the open heathland. You can also discover many a creature in the air and in the undergrowth. ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When the 3rd winter card is revealed, the game ends immediately and you proceed to scoring. You may not finish your turn. Total the points of all visible cards in your forest, and add the number of cards in your cave, if any. This is your score. If you are unsure how a specific card scores, consult ", "headingPath": "End of Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the end of your turn, if there are 10 or more cards in the clearing, the clearing will be emptied. Remove all cards from the clearing and place them onto a separate discard pile. Then your turn ends , and the next player clockwise takes their turn unless an effect or bonus allows you to take anot", "headingPath": "Checking the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "5 Example: 1 You wish to play a Black Alder. 2 To pay for it, you place two cards from your hand face up in the clearing. 3 Because you played a tree, you now also place the top card of the stack face up into the clearing. appendix Animals and Plants The split cards feature various inhabitants of th", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Flow · A)\t Draw Two Cards · B)\t Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Animals and Plants · Effect and Bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Checking the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 971 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 971 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 0.87645 of 2242 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains	p.4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing	p.3	0.047493 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.	p.2	0.046402 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.2	0.044796 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.1	0.043697 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	End of Game	p.7	0.031746 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Checking the Clearing	p.6	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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.5	0.030415 (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 20 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains	p.4	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing	p.3	#2	0.047493 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.2	#4	0.044796 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.2	#13	0.028382 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Checking the Clearing	p.6	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.	p.2	#3	0.046402 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Animals and Plants · Effect and Bonus	p.5	#11	0.02901 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.5	#8	0.030415 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing	p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains	p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Animals and Plants · Effect and Bonus	p.5	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[8]	RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971)	Checking the Clearing	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 82 ms · first delta 1758 ms · total 5674 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 82 ms · ask 5589 ms · gateway work 5674 ms · total 5674 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3417
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 762
tok/sec: 197.6 tok/sec — 762 output tokens in 3.856 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, 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 901), 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.