Ruling — Fallout

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Falloutbg-232918-en-1e

Setup

1. Choose a scenario as a group; for the first game, 'The Commonwealth' is recommended.[1]

2. Take the corresponding scenario sheet and place it above the play area.[1]

3. Shuffle the map tiles separately and construct the map following the image on the back of the chosen scenario sheet, placing appropriate faceup tiles and random facedown tiles in indicated locations.[1]

4. Create piles of S.P.E.C.I.A.L., Caps, trait, and enemy tokens; ensure S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and enemy tokens are facedown and randomized, with enemy tokens separated into individual stacks by type.[1]

5. Separate starting encounter cards (those with a star in the upper-left corner) into two different decks based on their card backs, shuffle them, and place them facedown in the play area.[1]

6. Put the remaining encounter cards and quest cards in numerical order to create the card library.[1]

7. Remove cards from the agenda deck that show a number in the bottom-left corner greater than the current number of players.[2]

8. Separately shuffle the agenda, loot, and asset decks and place them facedim in the play area.[2]

9. Ensure perk cards, unique asset cards, and V.A.T.S. dice are within reach of all players.[2]

10. Deal four asset cards faceup in a line next to the asset deck to form the shop.[2]

11. Randomly determine a first player and move the agenda deck to their right.[2]

12. Proceeding clockwise from the first player, each player chooses a survivor and takes the corresponding figure, character card, and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. token marked with that character's silhouette.[2]

13. Players place their figures in an unoccupied space in the 'Crossroads Camp' tile.[2]

14. Each player takes a player board, places a green peg in the '0' hole, a red peg in the '16' hole, and a gray peg in the hole to the left of the XP track.[2]

15. Each player places their starting S.P.E.C.I.A.L. token in the matching slot on the player board, then draws one additional S.P.E.C.I.A.L. token at random and places it in its slot (if the slot is already occupied, draw a different random token).[2]

16. Each player draws one secret agenda card.[2]

17. Each player takes three Caps.[2]

18. Resolve any effects on the back of the scenario sheet.[2]

19. For each space on the map with an icon matching an icon on an enemy token, place one random enemy token matching that icon faceup in that space.[2]

20. Place the <0xEF><0x8B><0x8C> and <0xEF><0x8B><0x8D> power tokens on the topmost space of the power track on the scenario sheet.[2]

Gameplay

The Game Round

1. Players take turns in clockwise order, starting with the first player.[3]

2. During a turn, a player may perform up to two actions, and can perform the same action multiple times.[3]

3. Possible actions include:

* Explore: Reveal an adjacent facedown map tile.[3]

* Move: Move your figure around the map.[3]

* Quest: Complete one of the available quests.[3]

* Encounter: Draw and resolve an encounter card according to your position on the map.[3]

* Fight: Fight and attempt to kill an enemy in your space.[3]

* Camp: Recover some HP, unexhaust companions, and exchange stuff with other survivors.[3]

4. After a player completes their actions, their turn ends and the next player takes their turn.[3]

5. After all players have taken a turn, enemies on the map activate and attack.[3]

6. A new round begins with the first player taking another turn.[3]

Completing Quests

1. Quests are staged faceup in the play area; one is staged during setup and others are added as the game progresses.[4]

2. To complete an objective:

* If the objective has a <0xEF><0x8B><0x99> icon, you must perform a quest action to complete it after fulfilling requirements.[4]

* If the objective does not have a <0xEF><0x8B><0x99> icon, it is completed automatically upon fulfilling requirements.[4]

3. When a quest is completed, resolve all effects listed in the results bar.[4]

4. If a quest instructs you to place a quest marker, place one matching color token

[1] RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook · p.4 · COMPONENTS

[2] RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook · p.5 · UP

[3] RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook · p.6 · UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR

[4] RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook · p.8 · TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS

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 89 ms · ask 6789 ms · total 25224 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 18344 ms · generation 6880 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY 4 1 2 Choose Scenario: As a group, choose which scenario you would like to play. For your first game, we recommend playing the scenario 'The Commonwealth.' Take the corresponding scenario sheet and place it above the play area. Build the Map: Separately shuffle the  and  map tiles, a", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY 6 Players take turns in clockwise order, starting with the first player. After all players have taken a turn, enemies on the map activate and attack, and then a new round begins with the first player taking another turn. Players continue resolving rounds in this way until a player achi", "headingPath": "UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY 2 ISSUED BY VAULT-TEC DOCUMENTATION DEPARTMENT, JANUARY, 2077--This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the New Amended Espionage Act, 50 U.S.C., 31 and 32. Its transmission or the revelation of its contents in any man", "headingPath": "NOTICE · INTRODUCTION · SURVIVING THE WASTELAND · THE CARD LIBRARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Back of the Scenario Sheet To 'stage,' take the card with that number from the card library and put it into the play area. 5 6 Create Other Decks: Remove all cards from the agenda deck that show a number in the bottomleft corner that is greater than the current number of players. Then, separately sh", "headingPath": "UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045079, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY 14 There are a few more things you need to know before heading out into the wastes! The next few sections will tell you about gaining XP, acquiring traits, and the factions you will confront during your adventures. As you kill enemies, have encounters, and complete quests, you will gai", "headingPath": "WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL RULES · XP AND LEVELING · PERK CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "LEARN TO PLAY 8 To gain influence in the wasteland, you are going to have to help other people, whether it be some random wastelanders or one of the powerful factions determined by the scenario. All of the ways you can help people are represented by quests. All quests available for you to complete a", "headingPath": "TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044237, "snippet": "Many encounters and quests require you to complete a test. Each test shows one or more S.P.E.C.I.A.L. tokens followed by a difficulty number; for example:  4 . To perform the test, you roll the three V.A.T.S. dice and count the number of hit (  ) icons shown on the dice results. If the number equ", "headingPath": "PERFORMING TESTS · TEST EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "We're not going to sugarcoat it: it's dangerous out there. There are mutated creatures, raiders, and worse things waiting for a bright-eyed survivor to come along. You are going to need to be prepared to fight off these enemies. You can perform a fight action to choose one enemy in your space to fig", "headingPath": "FIGHT ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1164}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1164 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1164 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 0.88598 of 3324 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:06 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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	COMPONENTS	p.4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR	p.6	0.047712 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	NOTICE · INTRODUCTION · SURVIVING THE WASTELAND · THE CARD LIBRARY	p.2	0.046696 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP	p.5	0.046154 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL RULES · XP AND LEVELING · PERK CARDS	p.14	0.045079 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS	p.8	0.045037 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	PERFORMING TESTS · TEST EXAMPLE	p.9	0.044237 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	FIGHT ACTION	p.11	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

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 25 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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	COMPONENTS	p.4	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	TEST EXAMPLE · SHOP: BUYING AND SELLING · CAPS! · I NVENTORY AND EQUIPMENT	p.10	#12	0.027826 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR	p.6	#2	0.047712 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS	p.8	#6	0.045037 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	PERFORMING TESTS · TEST EXAMPLE	p.9	#7	0.044237 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	Results Bar	p.8	#10	0.028405 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	LOYALTY · SOLO PLAY	p.15	#9	0.028475 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP	p.5	#4	0.046154 (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 Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	COMPONENTS	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	UP · THE GAME ROUND · RESOLVING A TURN · YOU, THE SURVIVOR	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Fallout — Rulebook (corpus doc 1164)	TERRAIN · QUEST ACTION · Quest Card · QUEST MARKERS · CARD RESULTS	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 1671 ms · total 25224 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 18344 ms · retrieval 89 ms · ask 6789 ms · gateway work 6880 ms · total 25224 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3297
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 200.8 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.100 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 22s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s 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 1094), 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.