Ruling — Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Gamebg-150376-en-1e

1. Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards around it as shown or as best accommodates your table.[1]

2. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player.[1]

3. Each player chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck, then re-shuffle the survivor deck.[1]

4. Each player collects a player reference sheet.[1]

5. Players decide which standard main objective they would like to play or pick 1 randomly.[1]

6. Place the main objective card in its space on the colony board and set up the game board according to the main objective's setup instructions.[1]

7. Shuffle the non-betrayal secret objective cards and set aside 2 (facedown) per player, then return the rest to the deck.[1]

8. Shuffle the betrayal secret objective cards and add 1 of them (facedown) to the non-betrayal cards that were set aside, then return the remainder of the betrayal cards to the game box.[1]

9. Shuffle all of the set aside cards together and deal 1 to each player, then return the remaining secret objective cards to the game box without looking at them.[1]

10. Shuffle the crisis cards and place the deck on its space on the colony board.[1]

11. Shuffle and make decks of the survivor, exiled objective and crossroad cards and place the decks off to the side of the play area (players may choose to remove crossroads cards with mature themes prior to the game).[1]

12. Shuffle all of the starter item cards and deal 5 to each player, then return any remaining cards to the game box.[1]

13. Separate the remaining item cards into separate decks according to their location, shuffle each deck, and place it on its corresponding location card.[1]

14. Each player makes 1 of their 2 survivors her group leader, placing it in the respective space on her reference card, and places the other survivor in the player's following, below their player reference sheet.[1]

15. Add the corresponding survivor standees for each player's survivors to the colony.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME SETUP

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 181 ms · ask 6162 ms · total 6345 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6345 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards 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. Each player collects ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047875, "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": 383}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "2 In Dead of Winter, players are a colony of survivors trying to survive a hazardous winter in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. The colony has an objective they are trying to complete, but each player also controls a group of survivors that has a secret objective. Often this secret objective ", "headingPath": "OBJECT OF THE GAME · COMPONENTS · MAIN OBJECTIVE CARDS · SECRET OBJECTIVE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032258, "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: The first player passes the first player token to the player on his right. A new round begins starting with the reveal crisis section of the player tu", "headingPath": "COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES · KILLING ZOMBIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Stop! If you want us to teach you how to play, you can visit plaidhatgames.com and watch a video explanation.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Play a Card: As many times as he likes during his turn, a player may play a card from his hand. To play a card, place it on top of the waste pile. Reminder: For every 10 cards in the waste pile during the check waste step the colony will lose 1 morale. A card with an equip ability is not placed in t", "headingPath": "Actions that do not require an Action Die", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Attack: To perform an attack, a player must choose a survivor he controls and spend an action die equal to or higher than the attack value of that survivor. That player may then choose a target for that attack. The target must be a zombie or a survivor that shares a location with the attacking survi", "headingPath": "Actions that require an Action Die", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "During the game players may be given the option to vote with a thumbs up or down, either because a player initiated a vote to exile or because a crossroads card called for a vote to be cast. Players may take time to deliberate before casting their vote. Once players are ready to vote, count down fro", "headingPath": "VOTING · CARD TEXT · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE · CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 383}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 383 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 383 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 0.92100 of 1633 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 12, 2026 15:08 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 Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	GAME SETUP	p.6	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)		p.7	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
#3	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	OBJECT OF THE GAME · COMPONENTS · MAIN OBJECTIVE CARDS · SECRET OBJECTIVE CARDS	p.2	0.045476 (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: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES · KILLING ZOMBIES	p.13	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
#5	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)		p.1	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))	109
#6	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	Actions that do not require an Action Die	p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	Actions that require an Action Die	p.8	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 Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	VOTING · CARD TEXT · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE · CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · …	p.15	0.029958 (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 55 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 Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	GAME SETUP	p.6	#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 Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)		p.7	#2	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
#3	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)		p.20	#30	0.011111 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)		p.20	#34	0.010638 (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: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	Actions that require an Action Die	p.8	#7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT	p.15	#28	0.011364 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES · KILLING ZOMBIES	p.13	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	OBJECT OF THE GAME · COMPONENTS · MAIN OBJECTIVE CARDS · SECRET OBJECTIVE CARDS	p.2	#3	0.045476 (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 Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 383)	GAME SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 181 ms · first delta 3976 ms · total 6345 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 181 ms · ask 6162 ms · gateway work 6345 ms · total 6345 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3100
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 468
tok/sec: 202.6 tok/sec — 468 output tokens in 2.310 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s 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.

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 312), 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.