Ruling — Pictomania (Second Edition)

← Pictomania (Second Edition)

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Pictomania (Second Edition)bg-252526-en-1e

To play, follow these steps:

Setup

1. For the first round, shuffle the green deck, draw 3 cards at random, and place them in the holder.[1]

2. Keep the number cards and letter cards in separate decks and shuffle them separately.[1]

3. Place the black scoring tokens in the center of the table.[1]

4. Each player chooses a different color and takes the pencil, guessing cards, and scoring tokens in that color.[2]

5. Each player takes a piece of drawing paper and folds it in half to create a four-page booklet.[2]

6. Place your scoring tokens on the left side of your drawing paper.[2]

7. Randomly deal each player one secret letter card and one secret number card.[3]

The Round

1. Look at your letter and number cards at the same time to identify which of the three word cards is yours and which of the seven words you should try to draw.[3]

2. Place your letter and number cards face down in a stack in front of your drawing paper.[3]

3. Everyone draws at the same time, attempting to draw the assigned word without modifying the drawing once the first guess is made.[4][5]

4. When finished drawing, turn your paper toward other players and begin guessing what they are drawing.[5]

5. To make a guess, find the word on the three word cards, find your guessing card with the same number, and place it face down on the stack beside that drawing.[5]

6. You cannot make more than one guess on another player's drawing, and once a guess is made, it cannot be changed.[4][5]

7. When you have finished guessing, take one of the black scoring tokens from the middle of the table (usually the one with the most stars).[5]

8. Once you have taken a black scoring token, you are done drawing and guessing.[4]

9. The round ends when the last player takes a black scoring token.[5]

Scoring

1. In turn, each player flips over the stack of cards by their drawing to reveal their assigned letter and number.[6]

2. Check the guesses in the stack from top to bottom (the order of players who guessed).[6]

3. If a guess is correct, give the player your scoring token with the most stars by placing the token on their card and handing the card to them.[6]

4. If a guess is wrong, place the guessing card in the center of the table and do not give out a scoring token.[6]

5. To calculate your score, add up all the stars on tokens on the right side of your drawing (correct guesses and your black scoring token) and subtract all the stars on the left side (tokens remaining because players failed to guess your word).[7]

6. Write your score inside the star on your drawing paper.[7]

7. After the fourth and final round, fold your drawing paper to see all four scores and a fifth star for your total score.[8] The player with the highest total wins.[8]

[1] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.5 · SETTING UP

[2] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · SETTING UP

[3] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.6 · YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START

[4] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.10 · ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES

[5] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.7 · DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.

[6] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.8 · HOW WELL DID YOU DO?

[7] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.9 · YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO

[8] RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.11 · DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY

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 102 ms · ask 4592 ms · total 15027 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 10331 ms · generation 4696 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "The game is played in four rounds , each with a different deck of word cards. With the green cards on the card holder, you are all ready for round one. Take a minute to give everyone a chance to read the 21 words. Note that words on the same card tend to be related to each other. That is what makes ", "headingPath": "YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "The game has four decks, each with a different difficulty level, as shown on the first page of this rulebook. You can play each round with a progressively more difficult deck. Give it a try! Some words may seem really tough, but those can be really fun, too. Don't forget you can always replace a car", "headingPath": "DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Now you are ready to draw. Be careful! Your card will have many words similar to your word. You need to draw a picture that looks like your word, but not like the other words. Don't be afraid to use the entire page - bigger pictures are easier to recognize from the other side of the table. Be quick.", "headingPath": "DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "As the other players evaluate their stacks, you get tokens for your correct guesses. Keep them on the right side of your drawing, as well as the bonus token you took when you finished guessing. These are your points. Your own tokens started on the left of your drawing. If all players guessed your wo", "headingPath": "YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Now it's time to see which guesses were correct. In turn, each player should flip over the stack of cards by their drawing. When you flip over your stack of cards, your assigned letter and number will be on top. Now everyone knows which word you were drawing. The other players' guesses are in order,", "headingPath": "HOW WELL DID YOU DO?", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player chooses a different color and takes the pencil, guessing cards, and scoring tokens in that color. Return the unused colors to the box. Each player also takes a piece of drawing paper . Fold the paper in half to create a little booklet with four pages, one for each round of the game. Plac", "headingPath": "SETTING UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "All rounds follow the same rules. Here are some details that may have been overlooked the first time through: \u0007 You must attempt to draw the word you were assigned. (More drawing rules can be found on the last page.) \u0007 Once you have made your first guess, you cannot modify your drawing. \u0007 Once you m", "headingPath": "ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "For the first round, you need only green word cards . Shuffle the green deck. Draw 3 cards at random and place them in the holder. Set the rest of the deck aside. The card holder should be placed where everyone can comfortably see and read the cards. There are 7 black number cards and 6 black letter", "headingPath": "SETTING UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETTING UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETTING UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HOW WELL DID YOU DO?", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1037}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1037 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1037 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 0.91455 of 2247 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 02:58 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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START	p.6	0.047875 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY	p.11	0.047163 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.	p.7	0.047123 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO	p.9	0.045928 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	HOW WELL DID YOU DO?	p.8	0.032787 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.4	0.032258 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES	p.10	0.029851 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.5	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 14 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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START	p.6	#1	0.047875 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY	p.11	#2	0.047163 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	HOW WELL DID YOU DO?	p.8	#5	0.032787 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO	p.9	#4	0.045928 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES	p.10	#7	0.029851 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.5	#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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.4	#6	0.032258 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.	p.7	#3	0.047123 (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 Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	SETTING UP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR FIRST ROUND · ROUND START	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	ROUND TWO · COMPLETE SCORING RULES	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DRAWING · GUESSING · YOU CAN NOW PLAY YOUR FIRST ROUND OF PICTOMANIA.	p.7	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	HOW WELL DID YOU DO?	p.8	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	YOUR SCORE · ROUND TWO	p.9	no quote on the wire
[8]	RULEBOOK Pictomania (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 1037)	DIFFICULTY OF EACH ROUND · FINISHING THE GAME · MORE COMPETITIVE PLAY	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 102 ms · first delta 1335 ms · total 15027 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 10331 ms · retrieval 102 ms · ask 4592 ms · gateway work 4696 ms · total 15027 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2926
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 667
tok/sec: 201.5 tok/sec — 667 output tokens in 3.310 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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 967), 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.