Ruling — That Time You Killed Me

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: That Time You Killed Mebg-344258-en-1e

Standard Setup

1. Arrange the past era, present era, and future era boards in a row between the players, ensuring all boards are oriented the same way.[1]

2. Each player chooses either white or black and takes the 7 player pieces and focus token in their color.[1]

3. The white player places a player piece on the '1' space on each of the 3 boards.[1]

4. The black player places a player piece on the '16' space on each of the 3 boards.[1]

5. Each player places their remaining 4 pieces in front of themselves to create their supply.[1]

6. Choose a first player (the loser of the previous game goes first if this is not the first game of the day).[1]

7. The first player places their focus token on their side of the past board.[1]

8. The second player places their focus token on their side of the future board.[1]

*Note: In this setup, white is the first player.[1] *

How to Take a Turn

On your turn, you must take the following steps in order:

1. Choose an active copy of yourself in the era where your focus token is.[2]

2. Take any 2 actions with your active copy.[2]

3. Move your focus token to a different era of your choice.[2]

Actions and Movement

* Movement: You can use move actions to travel around your current era, moving 1 space in any orthogonal direction.[3] You may use multiple move actions to travel multiple spaces in a single turn, but you cannot move through walls.[3]

* Pushing: Moving into a space your opponent occupies will push them into the next space.[3] If you push an opponent into a wall or another copy of themself, they die.[3] Pushing an opponent into another opponent causes a paradox, which removes both copies of your opponent.[4]

* Time Travel: You can travel one era with each action.[5] You cannot use a single action to travel from the past to the future (or vice versa), but you can use two actions to travel two eras, one era at a time.[5] The space you travel to must be empty in both other eras.[5]

Victory and Ending the Game

* Winning: Your goal is to eliminate your opponent from at least two eras on the timeline.[2] You check for victory at the end of your own turn; if your opponent has copies in only one era (or no eras) at the end of your turn, you immediately win.[6][2]

* Conceding/Drawing: A player can concede the game at any time.[5] Players can agree to a draw if neither has a chance of winning; in a draw, the player who went second becomes the first player for the next game.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.4 · ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced

[2] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.6 · Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy

[3] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.8 · Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …

[4] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.9 · Causing a Paradox

[5] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.12 · YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW

[6] RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook · p.12 · CHECKING FOR VICTORY

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 109 ms · ask 5187 ms · total 37540 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 32242 ms · generation 5298 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Competitors who have different levels of experience in abstract strategy games and/or murdering people can consider giving one player a starting disadvantage to even the playing field. Before starting the game, the more skilled player removes pieces from their supply and returns them to the box. The", "headingPath": "ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Coordinating your copies across time is no trivial task. Though having many copies lets you affect different parts of the timeline, you can only activate one copy each game turn. This is where your temporal focus comes into play. Your focus token marks the era that you're paying attention to on any ", "headingPath": "Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "That Time You Killed Me is a narrative game that introduces new scenarios with unique rules and components as you play. As with any game about mucking about across time, you must play through this content in a strict , unalterable order . Do not open anything unless you are explicitly instructed to!", "headingPath": "Before you get started...", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "An important detail you may have overlooked in that bit about 'How to Win' (pg. 6) is that each player only checks for victory at the end of their own turn . This means that no matter what you do, you can't lose on your own turn . It's still usually a bad idea to put yourself in a losing position on", "headingPath": "CHECKING FOR VICTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "Before you get started... That Time You Killed Me is a narrative game that introduces new scenarios with unique rules and components as you play. As with any game about mucking about across time, you must play through this content in a strict, unalterable order. Do not open anything unless you are e", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You can use your actions to move around your current era and push your opponent. When you push your opponent into a wall or another copy of themself , they die . Use move actions to travel around your current era Move 1 space in any orthogonal direction within your current era. . Moving is very diff", "headingPath": "Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Whenever you place a new copy of yourself on the timeline, it comes from your supply . Your supply is the collection of extra copies that are not on the timeline at the start of the game. These represent the number of new 'yous' you can make before you've stretched the timeline too thin. Note that w", "headingPath": "YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The first step of each turn is to choose a single copy of yourself to take actions. The copy you choose must be in the era where your focus token currently is. Don't worry: due to the inherent dangers involved in time travel, it's not recommended for married folk, so all your copies are single. Whit", "headingPath": "step 1: Choose Copy · step 2: Take Actions · NO LEGAL ACTIONS · step 3: Shift Focus · ACTING THROUGH TIME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Causing a Paradox", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CHECKING FOR VICTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1240}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1240 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1240 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 0.90015 of 2023 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:10 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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy	p.6	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
#3	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Before you get started...	p.3	0.046642 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	CHECKING FOR VICTORY	p.12	0.046635 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)		p.3	0.046432 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …	p.8	0.031746 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW	p.12	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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	step 1: Choose Copy · step 2: Take Actions · NO LEGAL ACTIONS · step 3: Shift Focus · ACTING THROUGH TIME	p.7	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 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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced	p.4	#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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Before you get started...	p.3	#3	0.046642 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	CHECKING FOR VICTORY	p.12	#4	0.046635 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Causing a Paradox	p.9	#15	0.013333 (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
#5	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW	p.12	#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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …	p.8	#6	0.031746 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy	p.6	#2	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
#8	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)		p.3	#5	0.046432 (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 That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	ADJUSTING FOR SKILL GAPS · Standard Setup · Advanced	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Temporal Focus · How to Win · HMM... WAIT… UM... · How to Take a Turn · step 1: Choose Copy	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Standard Actions: Movement · Move Action · Action: Move · Pushing your Opponent · Effect: Push · Effect: Squish · …	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	Causing a Paradox	p.9	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	YOUR SUPPLY OF SELF · TRAVELING MORE THAN 1 ERA · Some Final Thoughts · CONTENT OVERRULES THE RULEBOOK · CONCEDING · CALLING A DRAW	p.12	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK That Time You Killed Me — Rulebook (corpus doc 1240)	CHECKING FOR VICTORY	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 109 ms · first delta 2104 ms · total 37540 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 32242 ms · retrieval 109 ms · ask 5187 ms · gateway work 5298 ms · total 37540 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3150
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 620
tok/sec: 200.6 tok/sec — 620 output tokens in 3.091 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 8s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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: 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 1170), 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.