Ruling — Pavlov's House

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Pavlov's Housebg-219101-en-1e

I looked through Pavlov's House'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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.31 · Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:

7.2.2 Elite: At the Elite difficulty level, two Tactics Cards will be in play during the Wehrmacht Card Phase. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take the top two cards from ea

RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.30 · 7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:

Once you have beaten the normal version of Pavlov's House, you can try the game with increased difficulty. Tactics cards represent strategic planning by the elements of the German 6th Army that are assaulting Pavlov's House. 7.2.1 Veteran: At the Veteran difficulty level, one Tactics Card will be in

RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.32 · Setup:

Add the Wehrmacht Riflemen card marked 'Competitive' to the '1' deck, then set up the Wehrmacht and Resupply cards as normal. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of Tactics Cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take th

RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.8 · Playing the Game: Soviet Cards

62nd Army Command Post: You can use this action to do one of the following: Recover: Remove a Disrupted Token from the 62nd Army Command Post location ( position 18, on the game board). Resupply: Place any combination of up to 5 Ammunition, First Aid, Food, and Sapper Tokens from the stock onto the

RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook · p.20 · Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards

Storm Group cards represent an opportunity for the defenders of Pavlov's House to initiate a Storm Group Assault against a nearby German strongpoint. When you reveal a Storm Group Card, place it in the Storm Group box in Pavlov's House. If there was already a Storm Group Card in the box, remove that

🔧 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 151 ms · ask 3292 ms · total 3446 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 3446 ms

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

[{"page": 31, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "7.2.2 Elite: At the Elite difficulty level, two Tactics Cards will be in play during the Wehrmacht Card Phase. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take the top two cards from ea", "headingPath": "Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Once you have beaten the normal version of Pavlov's House, you can try the game with increased difficulty. Tactics cards represent strategic planning by the elements of the German 6th Army that are assaulting Pavlov's House. 7.2.1 Veteran: At the Veteran difficulty level, one Tactics Card will be in", "headingPath": "7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Add the Wehrmacht Riflemen card marked 'Competitive' to the '1' deck, then set up the Wehrmacht and Resupply cards as normal. Sort the Tactics Cards by the number on the lower right of the front of the card. Shuffle each deck of Tactics Cards separately and place each of the decks face down. Take th", "headingPath": "Setup:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045688, "snippet": "62nd Army Command Post: You can use this action to do one of the following: Recover: Remove a Disrupted Token from the 62nd Army Command Post location ( position 18, on the game board). Resupply: Place any combination of up to 5 Ammunition, First Aid, Food, and Sapper Tokens from the stock onto the ", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Soviet Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "Storm Group cards represent an opportunity for the defenders of Pavlov's House to initiate a Storm Group Assault against a nearby German strongpoint. When you reveal a Storm Group Card, place it in the Storm Group box in Pavlov's House. If there was already a Storm Group Card in the box, remove that", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.044764, "snippet": "Pavlov's House can be played as a two player cooperative game with no modifications. One player takes the role of the operational-level commanders that contributed to the defense of the strongpoint by performing all of the actions during the Soviet Card Phase. The other player takes the role of the ", "headingPath": "7.3 Cooperative (Two Players) · 7.4 Competitive (Two Players or Three Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "Place Wehrmacht Counter A Machine Gunners card is revealed. You roll a die and the result is a 4. A Machine Gunners counter should be placed on the first Wehrmacht counter location on the '4' track. You have the option of whether to attempt to Suppress the Machine Gunners. If you try to Suppress the", "headingPath": "Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards · Gameplay Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.04311, "snippet": "Pavlov's House is divided into turns. Each turn consists of the following phases: Soviet Card Phase: Take three actions with Soviet Cards Wehrmacht Card Phase: Play three Wehrmacht Cards Soviet Counter Phase: Move three Soviet Counters, then take three actions with Soviet Counters The game board dep", "headingPath": "1.1 Game Overview · 1.2 The Game Board · 1.3 Line of Sight · Wehrmacht Counter Location", "sharpsignalDocId": 1223}]

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 1223 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 1223 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 20, 2026 09:26 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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.31	0.04866 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.2 Tactics Cards [Increased Difficulty] · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.30	0.048139 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Setup:	p.32	0.047883 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.8	0.045688 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards	p.20	0.045055 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	7.3 Cooperative (Two Players) · 7.4 Competitive (Two Players or Three Players)	p.32	0.044764 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.16	0.044557 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	1.1 Game Overview · 1.2 The Game Board · 1.3 Line of Sight · Wehrmacht Counter Location	p.6	0.04311 (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 39 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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Counters · Attack (Exhausts Counter) · Suppress (Exhausts Counter) · Gameplay Example:	p.22	#12	0.02837 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards · Gameplay Example:	p.16	#7	0.044557 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Wehrmacht Cards	p.20	#5	0.045055 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards · Special Rule: Improved Communications	p.9	#11	0.02904 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.10	#9	0.029418 (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 Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Setup:	p.32	#3	0.047883 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Variants · Setup: · Gameplay Example:	p.31	#1	0.04866 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Pavlov's House — Rulebook (corpus doc 1223)	Playing the Game: Soviet Cards	p.8	#4	0.045688 (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 151 ms · first delta 3302 ms · total 3446 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 151 ms · ask 3292 ms · gateway work 3446 ms · total 3446 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3881
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 176.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.051 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 9s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 8s 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 1153), 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.