You asked
how do i play with 6?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Cribbagebg-2398-en-1e
Answered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Cribbage has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
I looked through Cribbage's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
A standard pack of 52 playing cards is used. (Jokers are discarded.) The four suits are considered equal. The rank and value of the cards are as follows: | card | K | Q | J | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | A | | value | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | The cribbage board
* | | points earned . . . | points earned . . . | | cards | during play | in hand or crib | | Jack turned by dealer as starter card | 2 | - | | Jack in hand or crib of same suit as starter card | - | 1 | | combinations: | | | | • two of a kind (pair) | 2 | 2 | | • three of a kind (triple) | 6 | 6 |
Never play a card which will allow the adversary to make a double score, such as a pair and a fifteen, or a sequence and a fifteen at the same time. Such as the following are all bad plays: 9 on 3; 7 on A; 6 on 3, 4, or 5; 5 on 5; 4 on 7; 3 on 9; A on 7. All these expose you to the immediate rejoind
Of these two discards, that of the 10 and 6 is better than the 10 and 9, because the 10 and 9 might help to form a sequence in the adversary's crib, whereas the 10 and 6 are so far apart that they are very unlikely to be of any use. Cards which are likely to form parts of sequences are called close
The method of forming and pegging these various combinations in play will be better understood if they are described separately. A card once played cannot be taken up again, unless it passes 31. Pairs. If the first card played by the pone should be a 6, and the dealer had a 6 also, the latter would
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 294 ms · ask 3682 ms · total 3978 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3978 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 11, "score": 0.04232, "snippet": "A standard pack of 52 playing cards is used. (Jokers are discarded.) The four suits are considered equal. The rank and value of the cards are as follows: | card | K | Q | J | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | A | | value | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | The cribbage board", "headingPath": "1.3. The Cards · 1.4. The Cribbage Board · 1.5. Outline of Playing Sequence", "sharpsignalDocId": 151}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.040267, "snippet": "* | | points earned . . . | points earned . . . | | cards | during play | in hand or crib | | Jack turned by dealer as starter card | 2 | - | | Jack in hand or crib of same suit as starter card | - | 1 | | combinations: | | | | • two of a kind (pair) | 2 | 2 | | • three of a kind (triple) | 6 | 6 | ", "headingPath": "1.7. Scoring Chart", "sharpsignalDocId": 151}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "Never play a card which will allow the adversary to make a double score, such as a pair and a fifteen, or a sequence and a fifteen at the same time. Such as the following are all bad plays: 9 on 3; 7 on A; 6 on 3, 4, or 5; 5 on 5; 4 on 7; 3 on 9; A on 7. All these expose you to the immediate rejoind", "headingPath": "Q♠ J♣ J♠ 10♣ A♠", "sharpsignalDocId": 223}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030478, "snippet": "Of these two discards, that of the 10 and 6 is better than the 10 and 9, because the 10 and 9 might help to form a sequence in the adversary's crib, whereas the 10 and 6 are so far apart that they are very unlikely to be of any use. Cards which are likely to form parts of sequences are called close ", "headingPath": "K♠ J♡ 5♠", "sharpsignalDocId": 223}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "The method of forming and pegging these various combinations in play will be better understood if they are described separately. A card once played cannot be taken up again, unless it passes 31. Pairs. If the first card played by the pone should be a 6, and the dealer had a 6 also, the latter would ", "headingPath": "K♠ J♡ 5♠", "sharpsignalDocId": 223}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029214, "snippet": "Each played card shall be positioned so as to overlap that player's previously played cards while keeping the identity of all cards visible. Played cards shall not be turned over before all cards of both players are played and the hands counted and pegged. A single card released by the fingers is co", "headingPath": "7.1. The Order of Play · 7.2. Scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 151}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.02901, "snippet": "In this form of the game only five cards are dealt to each player, one at a time. Two of these are laid out for the crib, and the three remaining are used in play, exactly as in the six-card game. Three for Last. The non-dealer on the first hand of each game is allowed to peg three holes as a compen", "headingPath": "FIVE-CARD CRIBBAGE.", "sharpsignalDocId": 223}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.028373, "snippet": "If the first card played by the pone should be a 6, and the dealer had a 6 also, the latter would probably play it, announcing: “Twelve, with a pair,” and pegging two holes. If the pone held a third six he would immediately play it, announcing: “Eighteen, with a pair royal,” and would peg six holes ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 223}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 151 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 151 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 5425 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.6667
- debug row recorded
- Sep 6, 2026 23:32 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 Cribbage — ACC Tournament Rules (2025) (corpus doc 151) | 1.3. The Cards · 1.4. The Cribbage Board · 1.5. Outline of Playing Sequence | p.11 | 0.04232 (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 Cribbage — ACC Tournament Rules (2025) (corpus doc 151) | 1.7. Scoring Chart | p.16 | 0.040267 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | Q♠ J♣ J♠ 10♣ A♠ | p.13 | 0.030777 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | K♠ J♡ 5♠ | p.7 | 0.030478 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | K♠ J♡ 5♠ | p.7 | 0.030118 (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 Cribbage — ACC Tournament Rules (2025) (corpus doc 151) | 7.1. The Order of Play · 7.2. Scoring | p.32 | 0.029214 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | FIVE-CARD CRIBBAGE. | p.13 | 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)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | p.8 | 0.028373 (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 80 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.
one thing that looks wrong and is not: a row a floor seated can carry a fused rank LARGER than the pool size above it. The floors draw from the whole fused list, not only from the passages the re-ranker scored — so a rank past the pool is a floor reaching down for something the re-ranker would never have seen, which is exactly what the floors are for.
| read at | document | heading | page | fused rank | fused RRF score | carried by | how it got its slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | Q♠ J♣ J♠ 10♣ A♠ | p.13 | #3 | 0.030777 (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 | guaranteed a slot by the base-rulebook floor |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | p.8 | #8 | 0.028373 (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 | |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | CRIBBAGE. | p.2 | #30 | 0.013889 (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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | K♠ J♡ 5♠ | p.7 | #20 | 0.024786 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | SOLITAIRE CRIBBAGE. | p.15 | #26 | 0.015385 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | Q♠ J♣ J♠ 10♣ A♠ | p.10 | #38 | 0.010526 (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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | K♠ J♡ 5♠ | p.7 | #4 | 0.030478 (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 Cribbage — Foster's Complete Hoyle (1914) (corpus doc 223) | K♠ J♡ 5♠ | p.7 | #5 | 0.030118 (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
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 294 ms · first delta 3846 ms · total 3978 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 294 ms · ask 3682 ms · gateway work 3978 ms · total 3978 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4366
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 176.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.051 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s ago)
- answerer host (measured by rulesage)
- reachable (for 23h, checked 8s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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 73), 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.