Ruling — Zombicide: Black Plague

← Zombicide: Black Plague

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Zombicide: Black Plaguebg-176189-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Choose a Quest.[1]

2. Place the tiles.[1]

3. Place the doors, Objectives, and all tokens as indicated by the Quest.[1]

4. Each player gathers 1 to 6 Survivors for him to play; players sit around the table in any order they choose, forming a single team.[1]

5. Players take one Dashboard for each of their Survivors, placing the Survivor’s ID Card on it, taking a colored plastic base to attach to the Survivor’s miniature, and taking 5 plastic trackers in the same color.[1]

6. Put aside all Equipment cards with the “Starting Equipment” keyword (a Hammer, a Mana Blast, a Short Bow, and three Short Swords).[1]

7. Set aside the Equipment cards with the “Vault” keyword (Inferno and Orcish Crossbow).[1]

8. Deal the Starting Equipment as you see fit amongst Survivors, ensuring each Survivor starts with at least one card; if a Survivor’s starting Skill lists starting weapons, he receives those cards now.[1]

9. Shuffle the Zombie cards into one deck and the Equipment cards into another, then place both decks face down close to the board.[2]

10. Place the miniatures representing the chosen Survivors on the starting Zone(s) indicated by the Quest.[2]

11. Each player places his Survivors’ Dashboard(s) in front of him, ensuring the sliding arrow is on the “0” space in the blue area of the Danger Bar, and places a tracker in the “0” slot of the Wound Bar and another tracker in the slot for the first (blue) Skill, then places 3 more trackers in the reserve slots on the top of the Dashboard.[2]

12. Decide who will be the first player and give him the first player token.[2]

Quest-Specific Setup Rules:

* Quest 3: The Shepherds: Put the blue and the green Objectives randomly among the red Objectives, face down, and put a Vault artifact randomly in each Vault.[3]

* Quest 5: The Commandry: Put the blue and the green Objectives randomly among the red Objectives, face down, and put a Vault artifact randomly in each Vault.[4]

* Quest (unnamed): Put aside the Necromancer Zombie cards, put the green Objective randomly among the red Objectives, face down, and put a Walker, a Fatty, and a Runner in the marked Zones.[5]

Additional Setup for 7+ Survivors:

* For each Survivor above the sixth, add 1 additional Starting Equipment card from the expansion to the pool of cards to be distributed.[6]

* Add 1 additional Zombie Spawn token per 2 Survivors above the sixth (rounded up) and stack them in the same Zones as existing ones.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.6

[2] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.7

[3] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.42

[4] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.44

[5] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.39

[6] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook · p.37

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 194 ms · ask 7642 ms · total 7839 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7839 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04741, "snippet": "SETUP 1 . Choose a Quest . 2 . Place the tiles . 3 . Place the doors, Objectives, and all tokens as indicated by the Quest . 4 . Each player gathers 1 to 6 Survivors for him to play . Play- ers sit around the table in any order they choose . As they cooperate against the game, all players form a sin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "8 . Shuffle the Zombie cards into one deck and the Equip - ment cards into another . Place both decks face down close to the board . 9 . Place the miniatures representing the chosen Survivors on the starting Zone(s) indicated by the Quest . 10 . Each player places his Survivors’ Dashboard(s) in fron", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 56, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "1 FIRST STEP Choose the first player at the beginning of the game . He receives the “first player” token . 2– PLAYERS’ PHASE The first player activates all of his or her Survivors, one after the other, in any order . When he or she’s done, the next player’s Turn begins . Play clockwise . Each Surviv", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Indicate a Spawn Zone and draw a Zombie card . Read the line on the card that corresponds to the color of the Danger Level of the most experienced Survivor still in the game (Blue, Yellow, Orange, or Red) . Place the number and type of Zombies shown . Repeat this for each Spawn Zone . Always begin w", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Many Quests feature colored doors . Usually, these cannot be opened until some conditions are met, like finding an Objective of the matching color . Read the Quest description to know more . spaWning in buildings Opening a closed building for the first time reveals all the Zombies inside all rooms o", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "• If another Double Spawn card is then drawn, apply it to the following Spawn Zone or building Zone . • If you draw two Double Spawn cards on the same Zone, the next Zone receives four cards’ worth of Zombies! • If the Double Spawn card is drawn for the last Spawn Zone or building Zone, use it for a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "CHAPTERS GAME COMPONENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 GET MEDIEVAL! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 SETUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 GAME OVERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 THE BASICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 39, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "speCial rules • Setup: - Put aside the Necromancer Zombie cards . - Put the green Objective randomly among the red Objectives, face down . - Put a Walker, a Fatty and a Runner in the marked Zones . • I don’t think so. Abominations are considered as Fatties when reading Zombie cards . • What’s this? ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 42, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 44, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 39, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}, {"page": 37, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 371}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 371 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 371 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 0.90541 of 2072 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 12, 2026 13:04 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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.6	0.04741 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.7	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
#3	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.56	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.25	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.20	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.27	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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.2	0.030018 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.39	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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.6	#1	0.04741 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.2	#7	0.030018 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.42	#13	0.026614 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.44	#49	0.009615 (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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.7	#2	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
#6	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.37	#12	0.028382 (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: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.56	#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 Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.39	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.42	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.44	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.39	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Black Plague — Rulebook (corpus doc 371)	p.37	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 194 ms · first delta 4755 ms · total 7839 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 194 ms · ask 7642 ms · gateway work 7839 ms · total 7839 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3760
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 607
tok/sec: 200.5 tok/sec — 607 output tokens in 3.027 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 45s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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 300), 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.