Ruling — Time's Up! Party

← Time's Up! Party

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Time's Up! Partybg-38713-en-1e

1. Form teams of at least two players.[1]

2. Choose whether the game will use the yellow or the black side.[1]

3. Deal 40 cards between all players.[1]

4. Each player secretly looks at their cards and can trade a card for a new one if it is not to their liking.[1]

5. Create a deck by shuffling together every player's cards.[1]

6. Choose a team to be the starting team.[1]

7. Round 1: A player has the length of a sand timer to get their team to guess as many cards as possible.[2]

8. The player draws the first card and can say whatever they want, but they cannot skip the card, use words that derive from the same words that appear on the card, give clues based on rhyme or things that "sound like", translate the card into another language, or spell the card using sounds or letters.[2]

9. The team can make as many guesses as they want.[2]

10. As soon as the word is correctly guessed, the player places the card face-up on the table and draws the next card.[2]

11. When the time is up, the player passes the deck to the next team, who continue with the current card.[2]

12. When all cards have been guessed, write down the number of cards found by each team and move to the next round with the next team.[2]

13. Round 2: Take the 40 cards from the previous round and shuffle them.[2]

14. The round is identical to the previous one, but the player giving clues can only speak a single word per card, the team can only make a single guess per card, and the clue-giver can choose to skip a card.[2]

15. When the sand timer is empty, the current card and all cards not guessed, skipped, or guessed incorrectly are gathered and added to the deck, which is shuffled for the next team.[2]

16. When all cards have been guessed, write down the number of cards earned by each team and move to the third round with the next team.[2]

17. Round 3: Gather the 40 cards from the previous round and shuffle them.[2]

18. The round is identical to the previous one, but the player giving clues must mime the cards, can hum and make sound effects, and is no longer allowed to speak.[2]

19. When all cards have been guessed, write down the number of cards found by each team.[2]

20. The team who guessed the most cards during all three rounds wins the game.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Time's Up! Party — Rulebook · p.1 · EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:

[2] RULEBOOK Time's Up! Party — Rulebook · p.2 · FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 124 ms · ask 11149 ms · total 11274 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 11274 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 1, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "The rules are the same, but there are no teams any more . Each player plays with the players on their left and on their right. The points are tallied individually. When a player has the deck, the player to their left will guess from their clues. The guessed cards are placed between the two players. ", "headingPath": "EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1247}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "My team contains more than 2 people; whose answer is valid during rounds 2 and 3? Only the fi rst answer counts. Even if a second answer is the right one, the card isn't won. What should we do if a player does something forbidden while making their team guess a card? This card is moved to the bottom", "headingPath": "FAQ", "sharpsignalDocId": 1247}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "A player has the length of a sand timer to get their team to guess as many cards as possible. The player draws the fi rst card and can say whatever they want But they cannot: . > skip the card if it doesn't work for them, > use words that derive from the same words that appear on the card (such as '", "headingPath": "FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?", "sharpsignalDocId": 1247}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1247}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?", "sharpsignalDocId": 1247}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1247 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1247 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 0.90730 of 1823 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:12 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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:	p.1	0.048916 (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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	FAQ	p.1	0.048139 (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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?	p.2	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

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 3 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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:	p.1	#1	0.048916 (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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	FAQ	p.1	#2	0.048139 (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 Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?	p.2	#3	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	EXPERT VARIANT FOR 5 AND 7 PLAYERS · OBJECT OF THE GAME: · SETUP:	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Time's Up! Party — Rulebook (corpus doc 1247)	FIRST ROUND: SPEAK FREELY · SECOND ROUND: ONE WORD · THIRD ROUND: MIME · WHO WON?	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 124 ms · first delta 880 ms · total 11274 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 124 ms · ask 11149 ms · gateway work 11274 ms · total 11274 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1573
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 575
tok/sec: 55.9 tok/sec — 575 output tokens in 10.285 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s 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.

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 1177), 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.