RuleSage cited table rulings
← Dead of Winter: The Long Night

You asked

How do I setup the game for 2

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Dead of Winter: The Long Nightbg-193037-en-1e

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Dead of Winter: The Long Night has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.

How do I setup the game? →

Answered Sep 7, 2026 gemma4:26b read Dead of Winter: The Long Night

How do I setup the game? →

Answered Aug 23, 2026 gemma4:26b read Dead of Winter: The Long Night

I looked through Dead of Winter: The Long Night's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME SETUP
Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around it as shown or as best accommodates your table. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player. Each player then chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck. Re-shuffle the survivor deck. Eac
RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.15 · CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT
Players may choose to play the game cooperatively. Use the hardcore side of the main objective card and do not assign secret objectives. Each player's only objective is to complete the main objective. Players cannot vote to exile a player. During setup, remove from the game every card showing the no
RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.21 · This Section should be read once Special Main Objective R2 has been completed.
Apply them starting with the next round and for the rest of the game. If there are 2-3 non-exiled players, immediately draw 2 Raxxon experiment cards and place their special zombies. If there are 4 or more non-exiled players, immediately draw 3 Raxxon experiment cards and place their special zombies
RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.7 · GAME SETUP
7
RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.13 · COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES
Move Round Tracker: Move the round tracker down 1 space on the round track. If it is moved onto 0 the game immediately ends. Pass First Player Token: At the end of each round, any player may initiate a vote to prevent the first player token from being passed to the next player. If the vote passes, t
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 146 ms · ask 4175 ms · total 4322 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 4322 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around it as shown or as best accommodates your table. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player. Each player then chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck. Re-shuffle the survivor deck. Eac", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Players may choose to play the game cooperatively. Use the hardcore side of the main objective card and do not assign secret objectives. Each player's only objective is to complete the main objective. Players cannot vote to exile a player. During setup, remove from the game every card showing the no", "headingPath": "CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Apply them starting with the next round and for the rest of the game. If there are 2-3 non-exiled players, immediately draw 2 Raxxon experiment cards and place their special zombies. If there are 4 or more non-exiled players, immediately draw 3 Raxxon experiment cards and place their special zombies", "headingPath": "This Section should be read once Special Main Objective R2 has been completed.", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "7", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Move Round Tracker: Move the round tracker down 1 space on the round track. If it is moved onto 0 the game immediately ends. Pass First Player Token: At the end of each round, any player may initiate a vote to prevent the first player token from being passed to the next player. If the vote passes, t", "headingPath": "COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The other survivor card is placed in the player's following, below their player reference sheet. The corresponding survivor standees for each player's survivors are added to the colony. Separate the remaining standees and tokens, placing them within easy reach of all players. The player whose group ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "To set up the Bandit introductory scenario, set up the game as if you are playing with the Bandit module as explained on page 17 of this rulebook, with the following adjustments: Instead of using a normal main objective card, use Special Main Objective card B1. When constructing the stack of facedow", "headingPath": "BANDIT BLITZ", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029643, "snippet": "If you revealed any outsider cards you may place 1 into your hand. Shuffle the remaining cards back into the search deck. 2 3 ALEXIS GREY Librarian 46 LIBRARY: Once per round, when performing a search at the library you may look at and keep 1 additional card. 5 4 ROUND SUMMARY GROUP LEADER SECRET OB", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 497 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 497 boosted
answered-before recall
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
  • ruling 6224 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8
  • ruling 4843 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8
debug row recorded
Sep 7, 2026 22:03 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.6 0.048652 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT p.15 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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) This Section should be read once Special Main Objective R2 has been completed. p.21 0.032787 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.7 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)) 1
#5 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES p.13 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)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.6 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
#7 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) BANDIT BLITZ p.22 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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) p.7 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)) 300

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 59 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.6 #1 0.048652 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.6 #6 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#3 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) This Section should be read once Special Main Objective R2 has been completed. p.21 #3 0.032787 (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
#4 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) THE CHIMP AND THE CODE p.20 #15 0.014085 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) p.7 #8 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
#6 RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) GAME SETUP p.7 #4 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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) THE LONG NIGHT MODULES · THE IMPROVEMENTS MODULE · THE BANDITS MODULE · PLACING BANDITS · ATTACKING A BANDIT p.17 #10 0.028043 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497) CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT p.15 #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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 146 ms · first delta 4214 ms · total 4322 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 146 ms · ask 4175 ms · gateway work 4322 ms · total 4322 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3050
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
173.1 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.052 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 6s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 22h, checked 5s 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 428), 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.