Ruling — Witch's Brew

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Witch's Brewbg-34084-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:

1. Setup: Each player picks a color and takes 12 role cards of that color, 3 ingredients (1 red, 1 green, and 1 white drop), and 2 gold nuggets.[1] Place ingredients, gold nuggets, and 45 potion vials in separate supplies in the middle of the table.[1] Sort cauldrons and potion shelves by value and place them face up in the middle of the table.[1] Shuffle the 8 spell books and place them face up near the other sets.[1] Players choose a starting player using any method they prefer.[1]

2. Set Selection: At the beginning of each set, each player simultaneously selects 5 of their 12 role cards to use in the set.[1] These 5 cards are kept secretly in the hand, and the other 7 are placed face down in a stack in the player's play area.[1]

3. Starting a Round: The starting player (the player who won the full action of the last role card in the previous round, or the player to the left if the winner has no cards) begins the set by selecting one of his five hand cards, placing it face up in his play area, and announcing the card's title by saying, "I am the [card title]!".[2][3] The starting player must always try for the full action and may not choose the favor.[3]

4. Taking Turns: In clockwise order, other players must perform one of the following based on whether they have the card played by the previous player:

* If the player does not have the card, they say, "Pass!".[2][4]

* If the player has the card, they must play it face up in their play area and choose one of two options:

* Full Action: The player announces they will take over the action by saying the words at the top of the card (e.g., "I am the witch!").[2] If another player later in the round also claims the role, the previous player must place their card face down on their stack and is done for the round.[2][5]

* The Favor: The player says, "So be it!", accepting the previous player's claim.[2] The player then executes the favor described on the lower part of the card.[2] This action can be chosen by several players and cannot be lost to another player.[2]

* After choosing, the player places their card face down on their stack of face down cards.[2]

5. Completing a Round: After all players have taken their turns, the player who still has the role card face up in their play area wins the right to the full action and executes the action described on the upper part of the card.[2] The player who won the full action right starts the next round.[3]

6. Ending a Set and the Game: A set ends when all players have played all 5 cards in their hands.[6] The next set begins with players selecting 5 new cards.[6] The game ends at the end of a set when players have collectively collected at least four potion cards with ravens on them.[6]

7. Scoring: To determine the winner, each player adds the victory points in the glass bulbs of their potion cards to the number of potion vials they have to get their total victory points.[6] The player with the most points wins.[7] In the event of a tie, the player with the most ingredients and gold nuggets left wins.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.2 · Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME

[2] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.3 · The potion contest begins!

[3] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.4 · Further important rules:

[4] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.3 · The potion contest begins!

[5] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.4 · The potion contest begins!

[6] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.5 · The next set · Game end

[7] RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook · p.1 · Overview · 99 cards: · OVERVIEW

That settles it — whose turn was it?

🔧 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 92 ms · ask 5288 ms · total 35133 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 29751 ms · generation 5382 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "The player, who wins the right to the full action, must choose to execute the upper action described on the card. He may not select the lower action. A player may always choose to abstain from taking the action he is allowed, either because he cannot afford it or chooses not to do it for another rea", "headingPath": "Further important rules:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "The starting player begins the set by selecting one of his five hand cards and placing it face up in his play area. He then announces what card he has chosen by reading out loud the title of the card, for example, 'I am the witch!' Thus, the player indicates he plans to take the role of the witch th", "headingPath": "The potion contest begins!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047073, "snippet": "He then places his card face down on his face down stack and begins a new round by selecting a card from his hand, placing it face up in his play area and announcing, 'I am the….!' When a player plays a role card, he reads aloud the words from the top, 'I am...!' In clockwise order, the other player", "headingPath": "The potion contest begins!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Each player picks a color and takes: the 12 role cards of his color (card back shows player color), 3 ingredients (1 red, 1 green, and 1 white drop), and 2 gold nuggets. The players place the ingredients and gold nuggets in their play areas (the areas before them on the table). These are visible to ", "headingPath": "Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Players use the 2 red role cards to acquire potion shelves predominately at the expense of their fellow players. Cutpurse : the player with the full action right 'relieves' each fellow player of one third of his gold nuggets (rounded down). However, the cutpurse does not place these gold nuggets in ", "headingPath": "THE ROLE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "Players use the 3 green role cards to get new ingredients. · Wolf keeper, Snake hunter, and Herb collector : depending on the role card won, the player with the full action right, takes either three red (wolf blood), three white (snake venom), or three green (herb juice) drops from the supply in the", "headingPath": "The Role cards · GAME END · THE ROLE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.043935, "snippet": "Whenever a player acquires a caldron (regardless whether by full action or favor), he can place any one additional ingredient from his play area back into the supply to take one potion vial from the supply, which he places in his play area. The player may use this ability only to covert one addition", "headingPath": "THE ROLE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030478, "snippet": "Assistant : the player with the full action right, can trade one of his gold nuggets for any three ingredients. Thus, he places one gold nugget from his play area back in the supply and takes three drops from the supply, which he places in his play area (2 red and 1 green or 3 white, etc.). The play", "headingPath": "THE ROLE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The potion contest begins!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Further important rules:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The potion contest begins!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The potion contest begins!", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The next set · Game end", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Overview · 99 cards: · OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 1196}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1196 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1196 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 0.90646 of 2555 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:07 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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Further important rules:	p.4	0.047883 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.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))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.3	0.047073 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME	p.2	0.046898 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	THE ROLE CARDS	p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The Role cards · GAME END · THE ROLE CARDS	p.5	0.045228 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	THE ROLE CARDS	p.6	0.043935 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	THE ROLE CARDS	p.6	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

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 15 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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.3	#2	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
#2	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	V ariant (for 3 or 4 players) · VARIANT	p.7	#10	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
#3	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.4	#9	0.030018 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Overview · 99 cards: · OVERVIEW	p.1	#13	0.028175 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The next set · Game end	p.5	#11	0.029199 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Further important rules:	p.4	#1	0.047883 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME	p.2	#4	0.046898 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.3	#3	0.047073 (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 Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Preparation · PREPARATION · Setup for 4 players: · Playing the game · Select role cards · PLAYING THE GAME	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Further important rules:	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The potion contest begins!	p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	The next set · Game end	p.5	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Witch's Brew — Rulebook (corpus doc 1196)	Overview · 99 cards: · OVERVIEW	p.1	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 92 ms · first delta 1509 ms · total 35133 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 29751 ms · retrieval 92 ms · ask 5288 ms · gateway work 5382 ms · total 35133 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3203
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 765
tok/sec: 200.5 tok/sec — 765 output tokens in 3.816 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 6s 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 1126), 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.