RuleSage cited table rulings
← Cahoots

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Cahootsbg-246761-en-1e

1. Shuffle the number cards and deal four face down to each player, which players look at but keep secret.[1]
2. Deal four number cards face up in a row in the middle of the playing area to form four piles.[1]
3. Stack the remaining number cards face down next to one of the piles to form a draw pile.[1]
4. Shuffle the goal cards and create a face down 'goal' pile based on the number of players and chosen difficulty level.[1]
5. Flip four goal cards face up in a row next to the goal pile.[1]
6. If any starting face up number cards complete any goal cards, place those cards in a separate 'wins' pile and replace them with new cards from the goal pile.[1]
7. The player who last ate something orange starts, and play continues to the left.[1]
8. On your turn, play one card from your hand onto one of the four number card piles, ensuring the card matches either the same color or same number as the top card on the pile.[1]
9. Draw back up to four number cards if there are still cards in the deck.[1]
10. If the card played completes any visible goals, immediately collect the related goal cards and place them in your wins pile, then replace them with new cards from the goal pile so that four goals remain visible.[1]
11. If the card does not complete any goals, the next player takes a turn.[1]
12. During play, you are not allowed to state what numbers or colors you have in your hand; the only allowed communication is which piles you would like to play onto or which goal cards you think the team should target next.[2]
13. The game ends when all goal cards are completed (a win), or when the draw pile runs out and all players are out of cards, or if one player cannot legally play a card before all goals are completed (a loss).[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook · p.1 · OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY
[2] RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook · p.2 · NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US!

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 95 ms · ask 2772 ms · total 9009 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 6141 ms · generation 2868 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 1, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "In this cooperative game, everyone works in cahoots to complete a series of goal cards. Each goal card states a specific requirement that needs to be showing on the four face up piles of number cards. Take turns playing cards to one of the four piles, which must either share the same color or same n", "headingPath": "OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1122}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "It's possible that multiple goal cards may be completed on a turn or that a goal card is completed by the face up number cards as soon as it is revealed. In these cases, collect any completed goal cards and replace them with new goals from the pile. Goal cards must be completed exactly how they are ", "headingPath": "NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1122}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1122}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1122}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1122 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1122 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 0.92786 of 1414 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded
Sep 7, 2026 03:04 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY p.1 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US! p.2 0.048387 (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 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 2 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY p.1 #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 Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US! p.2 #2 0.048387 (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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) OBJECT · SETUP · HOW TO PLAY p.1 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Cahoots — Rulebook (corpus doc 1122) NOTES · COMMUNICATION · ENDING THE GAME · YOU WIN IF... · YOU LOSE IF... · FOLLOW US! p.2 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 95 ms · first delta 748 ms · total 9009 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 6141 ms · retrieval 95 ms · ask 2772 ms · gateway work 2868 ms · total 9009 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1205
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
419
tok/sec
201.7 tok/sec — 419 output tokens in 2.077 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 22h, checked 9s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1052), 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.