Ruling — Specter Ops

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Specter Opsbg-155624-en-1e

2-3 Player Setup

1. Decide which player will be the A.R.K. agent; the rest of the players will be Raxxon hunters.[1][2]

2. Unfold the game board and place it in the center of the play area, making separate piles of each token type within reach of all players.[1][2]

3. Place the ‘occupy vehicle’ card to the side of the game board and place the vehicle token on space K17.[1][2]

4. Determine the location of the 4 mission objectives: the agent player rolls a 6-sided die to determine the first mission objective in section 1, finds the matching objective, circles it on the movement sheet, and places a mission token (blue Raxxon side up) on that location on the board.[1][2] Repeat this process for the second mission objective in section 2, and repeat for the third and fourth objectives.[1][2]

5. For 3 players, each hunter player chooses 1 hunter, placing the chosen hunter figure on the occupy vehicle card and the chosen hunter character card face up in front of them.[1][2] For 2 players, the hunter player selects 2 hunters to play.[1][2]

6. The agent player secretly chooses an agent and places that agent's character card face down in front of her.[1][3][4][2]

7. The agent player takes all equipment cards (unique and generic) and secretly chooses 3 to place face down in front of her, then places the remaining cards back in the game box.[1][3][4][2]

4-Player Setup

1. One player plays as the A.R.K. Agent and the other 3 players play as Raxxon Hunters.[5]

2. The agent player rolls the die secretly to determine and mark mission objectives on her movement sheet; these objectives are not placed on the game board and hunters do not know their locations at the start.[5]

3. The vehicle token starts on space K23 with all 3 hunters in it.[5]

4. The agent player takes 5 equipment cards instead of 3 and starts with 2 additional HP.[5]

5. Place the Exit Point token on the H1 space, which is also an escape point.[5]

5-Player Setup

1. One player plays as the A.R.K. Agent and the other 4 players play as Raxxon Hunters, one of whom is a traitor secretly on the agent's side.[5]

2. The agent player rolls the die secretly to determine and mark mission objectives on her movement sheet; these objectives are not placed on the game board and hunters (including the traitor) do not know their locations at the start.[5]

3. The vehicle token starts on space K23 with all 4 hunters in it.[5]

4. At the end of setup, the agent player collects 4 secret role cards, looks at them, and hands each hunter player 1 card face down.[5]

5. During setup, hunter players are dealt 1 secret role card; a card with the blue Raxxon symbol means the hunter is loyal to Raxxon, while a card with the red A.R.K. symbol means the hunter is a traitor working with the agent.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME SET UP

[2] RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME SET UP

[4] RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook · p.3

[5] RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook · p.7 · 4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …

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 228 ms · ask 6983 ms · total 7213 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7213 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "If none of the players have ever played a game of Specter Ops, we recommended starting with the 2- or 3-player version of the game. With fewer rules in the 2-3 player version, it is a good way to learn the game. The main portion of this rulebook describes the setup and gameplay for the 2-3 player ga", "headingPath": "GAME SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "The agent player secretly chooses an agent and places that agent's character card face down in front of her. During the game, when the agent's figure would be placed on the board, the agent player reveals her character card and places the corresponding figure on the board. The agent player takes all", "headingPath": "GAME SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "3 3 If none of the players have ever played a game of Specter Ops, we recommended starting with the 2- or 3-player version of the game. With fewer rules in the 2-3 player version, it is a good way to learn the game. The main portion of this rulebook describes the setup and gameplay for the 2-3 playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "In the 2-player game, the hunter player selects 2 hunters to play. 6. The agent player secretly chooses an agent and places that agent’s character card face down in front of her. During the game, when the agent’s figure would be placed on the board, the agent player reveals her character card and pl", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "Playtime: 90 minutes When playing with 4 players, 1 player will play as the A.R.K. Agent and the other 3 players will play as the Raxxon Hunters. When rolling to determine mission objectives, the agent player will roll the die secretly and mark the objectives on her movement sheet. The mission objec", "headingPath": "4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "Before or after moving, the agent player may use 1 of the equipment cards she chose during setup. The text of an equipment card describes its effect. Equipment cards have a number of charges on them indicating how many times the card can be used per game. After using an equipment card, mark that car", "headingPath": "USING EQUIPMENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The agent player then places a mission token on the corresponding location on the game board with the blue Raxxon side of that token facing up. The agent player repeats this to determine the remaining 3 mission objectives.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Having rolled a two for section 1, she circles that mission objective on her movement sheet. The agent player then places a mission token on the corresponding location on the game board with the blue Raxxon side of that token facing up. The agent player repeats this to determine the remaining 3 miss", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 817}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 817 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 817 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 0.89702 of 2282 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 17:42 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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	0.047875 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …	p.7	0.045285 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	USING EQUIPMENT CARDS	p.4	0.045002 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	0.030769 (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))	222
#8	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	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

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 42 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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	#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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …	p.7	#5	0.045285 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.4	#11	0.014286 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.4	#10	0.014493 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	USING EQUIPMENT CARDS	p.4	#6	0.045002 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	#3	0.047875 (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 Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	GAME SET UP	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Specter Ops — Rulebook (corpus doc 817)	4 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 4 -PLAYER GAME · COMPLETING MISSIONS · ADDITIONAL ESCAPE POINT · 5 -PLAYER RULES · SETUP FOR THE 5 -PLAYER GAME · …	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 228 ms · first delta 3442 ms · total 7213 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 228 ms · ask 6983 ms · gateway work 7213 ms · total 7213 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4343
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 730
tok/sec: 200.0 tok/sec — 730 output tokens in 3.650 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 752), 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.