RuleSage cited table rulings
← Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Forest Shuffle: Dartmoorbg-438402-en-1e

1. Place the clearing (the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players.[1][2]
2. Set the 3 winter cards and the caves aside.[1][2]
3. Shuffle the remaining cards and return a certain number of them to the game box, unseen, based on the player count: 45 cards for 2 players, 30 cards for 3 players, 15 cards for 4 players, and all cards for 5 players.[1][2]
4. Divide the remaining cards into three face-down piles of similar size.[1][2]
5. Shuffle two winter cards into one of the piles and put the third winter card on top of that pile.[1][2]
6. Place the other two piles on top of the pile containing the winter cards to form a draw pile, and place it on the left side of the clearing.[1][2]
7. Everyone draws 6 cards into their hand.[1][2]
8. Shuffle the 5 caves and put one for each player into the clearing, returning any remaining cards to the game box if playing with fewer than 5 players.[1][2]
9. In reverse turn order, each player takes one cave from the clearing and places it face up in front of them.[1][2]
10. Carry out the effect of each cave (found on the right half of the card) in reverse turn order, noting that the effect of cave no. 4 is only dealt with at the end of the game.[1][2]
11. The player who last visited a moor starts the game.[1][2]
[1] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.2
[2] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook · p.2 · Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.

So says the rulebook. So plays 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 203 ms · ask 3174 ms · total 3379 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 3379 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "2 SetupSetup If you already know Forest Shuffle, you don’t have to read the entire rulebook, but only the text passages marked with this symbol NEW . 1 Place the clearing (i.e., the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players. 2 NEW Set the 3 winter cards and the caves as", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "2 If you already know Forest Shuffle, you don't have to read the entire rulebook, but only the text passages marked with this symbol NEW . 1 Place the clearing (i.e., the game board) in the center of the play area, within reach of all players. 2 NEW Set the 3 winter cards and the caves aside. Shuffl", "headingPath": "Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Beginning with the start player, everyone takes turns in clockwise order. On your turn, you must carry out exactly one of two possible actions: For each card, you may choose to take it from the stack or the clearing. OR Pay the card's cost, place it in your forest, and perform its effect and bonus, ", "headingPath": "Game Flow · A)\t Draw Two Cards · B)\t Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "4 To play a card from your hand, you must first pay its cost by placing that many (other) cards from your hand face up into the clearing . When playing a split card, choose one half to play and pay only its cost. Normally, it does not matter which cards you discard as payment. Some species, however,", "headingPath": "B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Then carry out the effect of this cave (on the right half of the card) , also in reverse turn order. The effect of cave no. 4 is only dealt with at the end of the game. Then the game starts. Example: You chose cave no. 3 and draw 3 additional cards from the stack. Then you have to discard 3 of your ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "At the end of your turn, if there are 10 or more cards in the clearing, the clearing will be emptied. Remove all cards from the clearing and place them onto a separate discard pile. Then your turn ends , and the next player clockwise takes their turn unless an effect or bonus allows you to take anot", "headingPath": "Checking the Clearing", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "1 Object of the Game Object of the Game The hilly landscape of Dartmoor offers diverse habitats for plants and animals. While dragonflies and other insects bustle along the stream, ponies and sheep graze in the open heathland. You can also discover many a creature in the air and in the undergrowth. ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When the 3rd winter card is revealed, the game ends immediately and you proceed to scoring. You may not finish your turn. Total the points of all visible cards in your forest, and add the number of cards in your cave, if any. This is your score. If you are unsure how a specific card scores, consult ", "headingPath": "End of Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts.", "sharpsignalDocId": 971}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 971 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 971 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 0.87357 of 1052 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded
Sep 11, 2026 17:44 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.2 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts. p.2 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
#3 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing p.3 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
#4 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains p.4 0.03125 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.2 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Checking the Clearing 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.1 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) End of Game 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 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 20 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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.2 #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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.2 #5 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#3 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · Playing a Card · Trees, Shrubs and Terrains p.4 #4 0.03125 (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 Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) End of Game p.7 #8 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#5 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.7 #10 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
#6 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Checking the Clearing 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
#7 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Game Flow · A) Draw Two Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing · A) Draw Two Cards · Winter Cards · B) Play a Card and Check the Clearing p.3 #3 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
#8 RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts. p.2 #2 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

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
[1] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor — Rulebook (corpus doc 971) Components · Setup · NEW The caves are distributed before the game starts. p.2 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 203 ms · first delta 1522 ms · total 3379 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 203 ms · ask 3174 ms · gateway work 3379 ms · total 3379 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3142
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
366
tok/sec
202.2 tok/sec — 366 output tokens in 1.810 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 50s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 23h, checked 1s 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
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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 901), 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.