Ruling — Zombicide: 2nd Edition

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Zombicide: 2nd Editionbg-286751-en-1e

Because the provided sources describe setup procedures for several different missions/scenarios rather than a single unified game, the setup steps depend on the specific mission being played:

For the mission involving tiles 3V, 4V, 6V, & 8V:

1. Move the Zombie Spawn Token to the Starting Spawn Zone.[1]

2. Place 3 Noise tokens in each highlighted Zone.[1]

3. At the end of Setup, spawn Zombies in both buildings on tiles 4V and 8V as if these doors had just been opened.[1]

For the mission involving tiles 2R, 3V, 4R, 6V, 7R, & 9V:

1. Every Survivor duo has swapped roles.[2]

2. Place a Pimpweapon on each Survivor Dashboard (up to the number of available Pimpweapons).[2]

3. Each Survivor starts with a rallied Companion.[2]

4. Players choose the way each duo is formed.[2]

5. Note the Objective token in the Pimpmobile.[2]

6. Place a Pimpweapon Crate on top of the Pimpmobile.[2]

For the mission involving tiles 1R, 3V, 5V, 6V, 7R, & 8R:

1. Place the Blue and the Green Objectives randomly among the Red Objectives, facedown.[3]

2. Pick a random Survivor ID Card among those the players did not choose for this Mission to become the Leader.[3]

For the mission involving tiles 2V, 3V, 4V, & 9R:

1. Place the Green Objective randomly among the Red Objectives, facedown.[4]

2. Pick a random Survivor ID Card among those not used for this Mission to become the Leader.[4]

For the mission involving tiles 1V, 2V, 3V, & 4V:

1. Note the doors on tiles 2V, 3V, and 4V.[5]

2. Place an Abomination in the indicated Zone.[5]

3. Place 4 doors on the board.[5]

General Setup Rules:

1. For missions featuring Companions, players choose which Companion is set in each of the spots indicated by the Mission.[6]

2. Set aside Companion ID Cards during Setup for all players to see.[6]

3. For Survivors with the [Equipment] Skill, the indicated Equipment card is automatically assigned to them during Setup.[7]

[1] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.43 · Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.

[2] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.55 · Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.

[3] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.56 · Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.

[4] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.45 · Medium / 60 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES

[5] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.52 · Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.

[6] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.33 · DARK ZONES

[7] RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook · p.66

That's the page. Back to 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 285 ms · ask 7122 ms · total 7408 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7408 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 43, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "While everything was collapsing, there was an accident at the nuclear power plant. Before disappearing, the authorities placed a large number of the power plant technicians in a wing of the hospital under quarantine. We must make sure these people are sealed in there forever, especially if they are ", "headingPath": "Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 52, "score": 0.045262, "snippet": "We have slept in many different places in the last weeks. Most of them weren't really secure. Well, that may change in the coming days. We found a nice building with many reinforced doors, and mostly left untouched by the chaos. ' Mostly, ' because some doors are broken. I guess the Abomination we'v", "headingPath": "Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.044982, "snippet": "The tiles predefine places for Pimpweapon Crates and Objective tokens. Closed doors are already drawn on buildings. 4Select the Survivors and distribute them between the players as desired. As they are cooperating against the game, all players form a single team. Players sit around the table in any ", "headingPath": "Veteran Zombicide players, please note:", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 49, "score": 0.043301, "snippet": "We spotted a massive zombie herd coming right at our shelter. Eliminating them would not be an issue, but it could take days. On the other hand, hearing them all night long would certainly drive us mad! The best way is to block the access and divert the infected flow in another direction. To achieve", "headingPath": "Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 68, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "- MOVE: The Zombies that have not Attacked use their Action to Move 1 Zone toward Survivors. NOTE: Runners get 2 Actions, so they can attack twice, attack and move, move and attack, or move twice. STEP 2: SPAWN Using Zombie Spawn tokens, the Mission maps show where Zombies appear at the end of each ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "EDITION ND Entering a building is quite a thrill. Whenever they don't chase someone, zombies gather in the dark, waiting for a victim to ambush. It's better than an amusement park! - Lou Opening a building for the first time reveals all the Zombies waiting in the dark inside. A single building exten", "headingPath": "DOOR ACTION · -SPAWNING IN BUILDINGS", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Runners are fast-moving, tricky, formidable targets. They are a challenge, and I like challenges. Let me show you how to hunt them. - Elle Runners have 2 Actions per Activation. After all Zombies (including Runners) have gone through the Activation Step and resolved their first Action, Runners go th", "headingPath": "-PLAYING RUNNERS · STEP 2: SPAWN · COLORED SPAWN ZONES", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Once the players have activated all their Survivors, the Zombies activate. No single player controls them. The Zombies act all on their own, performing the following steps in order. Each Zombie activates and spends its Action on either an Attack or a Move, depending on the situation. Resolve all the", "headingPath": "DO NOTHING · STEP 1: ACTIVATION · -ATTACK", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 43, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 55, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 56, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 45, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Medium / 60 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 52, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 33, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DARK ZONES", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}, {"page": 66, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 583}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 583 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 583 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 0.86637 of 1594 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 14:08 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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.43	0.046175 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.52	0.045262 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Veteran Zombicide players, please note:	p.6	0.044982 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES	p.49	0.043301 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)		p.68	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
#6	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	DOOR ACTION · -SPAWNING IN BUILDINGS	p.20	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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	-PLAYING RUNNERS · STEP 2: SPAWN · COLORED SPAWN ZONES	p.25	0.030303 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	DO NOTHING · STEP 1: ACTIVATION · -ATTACK	p.23	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 80 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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.43	#1	0.046175 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.55	#15	0.025658 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	DARK ZONES	p.33	#22	0.022246 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)		p.2	#19	0.024145 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.56	#13	0.026847 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 60 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES	p.45	#9	0.029643 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)		p.66	#14	0.026182 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.52	#2	0.045262 (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 Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.43	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.55	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Hard / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.56	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 60 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · -SPECIAL RULES	p.45	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	Medium / 45 minutes · -OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.52	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)	DARK ZONES	p.33	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: 2nd Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 583)		p.66	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 285 ms · first delta 4567 ms · total 7408 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 285 ms · ask 7122 ms · gateway work 7408 ms · total 7408 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3788
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 549
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 549 output tokens in 2.735 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 23h, checked 4s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 515), 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.