Ruling — Betrayal at House on the Hill

← Betrayal at House on the Hill

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Betrayal at House on the Hillbg-10547-en-1e · Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walkbg-198452-en-1e

Based on the provided sources, there are different setup procedures depending on the specific game scenario or phase:

General Game Setup

1. Shuffle the omen cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]

2. Shuffle the item cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]

3. Shuffle the event cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]

4. Find the Basement Landing, Entrance Hall/ Foyer/Grand Staircase, and Upper Landing room tiles and place them from left to right reasonably far apart.[1]

5. Mix all the rest of the room tiles together and put them face down in a stack.[1]

6. Each player puts his or her explorer's plastic figure in the Entrance Hall.[1]

7. Put the dice in a pile within easy reach.[1]

8. Determine who goes first by seeing which explorer has the next birthday.[1]

9. Players take turns clockwise following the first explorer.[1]

10. Set aside the Traitor's Tome and Secrets of Survival haunt books.[2]

11. Each player chooses a character card and picks one explorer.[2]

12. Attach 4 plastic clips to your explorer card, pointing to the starting values for Might, Speed, Knowledge, and Sanity.[2]

Specific Scenario Setup (Spaceship/Tinselvania)

1. Set up the Turn/Damage track with a plastic clip at 10.[3]

2. Gain 1 in each of your traits.[3]

3. If the Theater, Tower, and Underground Lake are not yet in play, search through the room stack until you find them and place them in the house, then shuffle that stack.[3]

4. Put the monsters in rooms according to the Denizens table: Doctor Frank N. Sense in the Operating Laboratory, Monty the Monster in the Gymnasium, Cornucopia in the Master Bedroom, Hedley in the Larder, and Fuchsia in the Dusty Hallway.[3]

Haunt Setup

1. The traitor takes the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room.[4]

2. The traitor reads the starting haunt and the rules for 'The Traitor's New Powers' and 'How Monsters Work'.[4]

3. The rest of the players become heroes and read the haunt with the same number in Secrets of Survival together.[4]

4. The traitor returns to the room.[4]

5. The heroes and the traitor perform any actions the haunt instructs in the 'Right Now' section.[4]

Setup for Name/Contract Mechanics

1. Mix up Obstacle tokens (representing Names) numbered from 1 to the number of players plus two.[5]

2. Give each player a Name token in secret and set aside the other two.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook · p.49 · YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS

[4] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.16 · Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets

[5] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook · p.18 · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BAD GUYS · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · HOW TO FIND A LOOPHOLE IN THE CONTRACT · HOW TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR POSITION · HOW TO MAKE A BARGAIN · …

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 190 ms · ask 9485 ms · total 9679 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9679 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.045605, "snippet": "In Betrayal at House on the Hill, each player chooses an explorer to investigate a creepy old house. As you explore the house, you discover new rooms. Each time you enter a new room, you might find something . . . or something might find you . Explorers change over the course of the game (for better", "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044552, "snippet": "| Shuffle the omen cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them. Do the same with the item cards and the event cards. Find the Basement Landing , Entrance Hall/ Foyer/Grand Staircase , and Upper Landing room tiles. Place them from left to right reasonably far apart. Mix all ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Do the following at the start of the haunt. The traitor takes the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room . He or she reads only the haunt that is starting now. That player also needs to know the rules described in 'The Traitor's New Powers' (page 1 7) and 'How Monsters Work' (page 18). If the player doe", "headingPath": "Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once the haunt begins, the game changes dramatically. Now it's a desperate struggle to win before your opponent does! Before the haunt starts, you must roll 6 dice at the end of your turn each time you draw an omen card. This is called a haunt roll . If you roll less than the total number of omen ca", "headingPath": "THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "| . . . you can do as many of the following actions as you want, in any order: Move. Discover a new room. Use item and omen cards. Attempt a die roll . Make an attack (once during your turn after the haunt starts). Before the haunt starts, you must make a haunt roll at the end of your turn if you dr", "headingPath": "Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030536, "snippet": "Starting with the first player and going to the left, each player takes a turn exploring the house. A Note on Terminology: For simplicity's sake, these rules use 'you' to refer to the character taking the action or affected by the card or tile, whether an explorer (which includes heroes and the trai", "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY · Traits", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029857, "snippet": "turn: Before the haunt starts, each player takes a turn in order, starting with the player whose explorer has the next birthday and going to the left from there, During a turn, you can move, discover rooms, use items, and attempt die rolls. After the haunt starts, you can also make an attack once pe", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 49, "score": 0.028577, "snippet": "Little does the Doctor know that you have a far more sinister scheme. This house is a spaceship, and you plan to blast this house all the way back to your home planet of Tinselvania. Everyone's coming with you on this farout phantasmagoric voyage. ÷ Your explorer is still in the game but has turned ", "headingPath": "YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 945}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 49, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 945}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BAD GUYS · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · HOW TO FIND A LOOPHOLE IN THE CONTRACT · HOW TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR POSITION · HOW TO MAKE A BARGAIN · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 945}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 715 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 715 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 0.90163 of 2023 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 00:45 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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.3	0.045605 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	0.044552 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets	p.16	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
#4	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll	p.15	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
#5	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors	p.6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	HOW TO PLAY · Traits	p.5	0.030536 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?	p.23	0.029857 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook (corpus doc 945)	YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS	p.49	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))	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 — 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.

one thing that looks wrong and is not: a row a floor seated can carry a fused rank LARGER than the pool size above it. The floors draw from the whole fused list, not only from the passages the re-ranker scored — so a rank past the pool is a floor reaching down for something the re-ranker would never have seen, which is exactly what the floors are for.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook (corpus doc 945)	YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS	p.49	#8	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	guaranteed a slot by the base-rulebook floor
#2	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	#2	0.044552 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)		p.2	#11	0.027289 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors	p.6	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook (corpus doc 945)	RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BAD GUYS · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · HOW TO FIND A LOOPHOLE IN THE CONTRACT · HOW TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR POSITION · HOW TO MAKE A BARGAIN · …	p.18	#9	0.028439 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?	p.23	#7	0.029857 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets	p.16	#3	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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.3	#1	0.045605 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook (corpus doc 945)	YOU MUST DO THIS ON EACH HERO'S TURN · RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HEROES · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · DENIZENS	p.49	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets	p.16	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk — Rulebook (corpus doc 945)	RIGHT NOW · WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BAD GUYS · YOU WIN WHEN . . . · HOW TO FIND A LOOPHOLE IN THE CONTRACT · HOW TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR POSITION · HOW TO MAKE A BARGAIN · …	p.18	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 190 ms · first delta 6441 ms · total 9679 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 190 ms · ask 9485 ms · gateway work 9679 ms · total 9679 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3387
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 613
tok/sec: 195.6 tok/sec — 613 output tokens in 3.134 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 23h, checked 7s 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 649), 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.