Ruling — Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Gamebg-29368-en-1e

I looked through Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game'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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.16 · Playing Event Cards and Timing · 'Start of the Turn' · Using Cards and Abilities · Canceling Cards and Fights

Event Cards (whether Hero or Zombie), should be fairly clear as to when they should be played. Cards listed as Play Immediately should be played as soon as they are drawn. Some other cards say 'play at the start of a turn'. The start of the turn is defined as: Any point up until the first model move

RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Play Immediately · Remains in Play · Hero Character Sheets · Scenario Cards

Some cards are listed as Play Immediately. As it sounds, these cards must be played as soon as they are drawn. If more than one Play Immediately card is drawn at the same time, you may choose in which order to resolve them (as long as they are all resolved before moving on to the next step in the cu

RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.7 · The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters

For your first game, it is recommended that you play the Basic Game. The Basic Game focuses more on the core rules of the game and is a good introduction for new players or a fast paced alternative for more experienced players. Set aside the two sets of Advanced Cards ( 20 Hero Cards and 20 Zombie C

RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.5

a hand of cards at their disposal to use against the Heroes as they see fit. They also get to draw back up at the start of each new Zombie Turn. There is really only one kind of Zombie Card and that is the Zombie Event (Wood bordered). These represent a host of different abilities that the Zombies c

RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.9 · The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies

Each Game Round is split into two Turns, the Zombie Turn and the Hero Turn. During the Zombie Turn, the Zombie player(s) get to move and attack with their Zombies as well as possibly spawn new Zombies. During the Hero Turn, each Hero gets to take their actions, in any character order they wish. The

🔧 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 94 ms · ask 1947 ms · total 2043 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 2043 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 16, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Event Cards (whether Hero or Zombie), should be fairly clear as to when they should be played. Cards listed as Play Immediately should be played as soon as they are drawn. Some other cards say 'play at the start of a turn'. The start of the turn is defined as: Any point up until the first model move", "headingPath": "Playing Event Cards and Timing · 'Start of the Turn' · Using Cards and Abilities · Canceling Cards and Fights", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Some cards are listed as Play Immediately. As it sounds, these cards must be played as soon as they are drawn. If more than one Play Immediately card is drawn at the same time, you may choose in which order to resolve them (as long as they are all resolved before moving on to the next step in the cu", "headingPath": "Play Immediately · Remains in Play · Hero Character Sheets · Scenario Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.04728, "snippet": "For your first game, it is recommended that you play the Basic Game. The Basic Game focuses more on the core rules of the game and is a good introduction for new players or a fast paced alternative for more experienced players. Set aside the two sets of Advanced Cards ( 20 Hero Cards and 20 Zombie C", "headingPath": "The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "a hand of cards at their disposal to use against the Heroes as they see fit. They also get to draw back up at the start of each new Zombie Turn. There is really only one kind of Zombie Card and that is the Zombie Event (Wood bordered). These represent a host of different abilities that the Zombies c", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045139, "snippet": "Each Game Round is split into two Turns, the Zombie Turn and the Hero Turn. During the Zombie Turn, the Zombie player(s) get to move and attack with their Zombies as well as possibly spawn new Zombies. During the Hero Turn, each Hero gets to take their actions, in any character order they wish. The ", "headingPath": "The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044589, "snippet": "During the Hero Turn, each of the Heroes may take their turn in any order they wish. However, only one Hero may take their turn at a time and must finish before the next Hero begins. During their turn, each Hero individually completes all of the following steps in order. 1 ) Move Action 2 ) Exchange", "headingPath": "The Hero Turn · 1 ) Move Action (Move or Search) · Move - · Search - · 2 ) Exchange Items", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "The Hero Player whose character was just killed now gets to draw a new Hero to control from the remaining unused Hero Character Sheets. Immediately place the figure for the new Hero on the board (as detailed below in the Section Placing New Heroes During the Game ). When a player's last Hero charact", "headingPath": "The Sun Track - Black Zone · Death of Your Last Hero · Placing New Heroes During the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.044283, "snippet": "Many times players will need to roll for a Random Building. To do this, roll a dice and look at the arrows arrayed around the edges of the Town Center Board. This roll determines which L-shaped Outer Board the Random Building is on (Note that a roll of 1 is Hero's Choice which means that the Heroes ", "headingPath": "Rolling a Random Building · Winning the Game · Running Out of Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}]

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 970 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 970 boosted

answered-before recall

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

debug row recorded

Sep 15, 2026 10:19 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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Playing Event Cards and Timing · 'Start of the Turn' · Using Cards and Abilities · Canceling Cards and Fights	p.16	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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Play Immediately · Remains in Play · Hero Character Sheets · Scenario Cards	p.5	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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters	p.7	0.04728 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)		p.5	0.045724 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies	p.9	0.045139 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Hero Turn · 1 ) Move Action (Move or Search) · Move - · Search - · 2 ) Exchange Items	p.11	0.044589 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Sun Track - Black Zone · Death of Your Last Hero · Placing New Heroes During the Game	p.19	0.044563 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Rolling a Random Building · Winning the Game · Running Out of Cards	p.17	0.044283 (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 33 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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Play Immediately · Remains in Play · Hero Character Sheets · Scenario Cards	p.5	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)		p.5	#4	0.045724 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters	p.7	#3	0.04728 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Create Zombie Pool	p.7	#22	0.013514 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …	p.18	#10	0.028577 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	6 ) Place Newly Spawned Zombies	p.10	#24	0.013158 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice	p.8	#19	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
#8	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Playing Event Cards and Timing · 'Start of the Turn' · Using Cards and Abilities · Canceling Cards and Fights	p.16	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 94 ms · first delta 1925 ms · total 2043 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 94 ms · ask 1947 ms · gateway work 2043 ms · total 2043 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2812
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 6s 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: 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

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 900), 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.