You asked
How do I play?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Star Wars: Imperial Assaultbg-164153-en-1e
I looked through Star Wars: Imperial Assault'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.
This Rules Reference Guide does not teach players how to play the game. Players should first read the Learn to Play booklet, then use this Rules Reference Guide as needed when playing the game. 'I only hope that when the data is analyzed, a weakness can be found. ' - Leia Organa, A New Hope This gui
The table space in front of a player is known as his play area. This is where a player keeps all game components that belong to him but are not on the game board, including his Hero sheet, Item cards, Deployment cards, Class cards, and more. Abilities on cards and Hero sheets in a player's play area
Before starting a new campaign, perform the following steps. Choose Player Roles: Players choose one player to take on the role of the Imperial player. All other players are Rebel players. Players retain these roles for the entirety of the campaign. Choose Heroes: Each Rebel player chooses one Hero
During a campaign, players resolve a series of story and side missions. The rules and maps for each mission are found in the Campaign Guide. During each Mission Stage, the heroes choose one active mission to resolve. -The campaign log lists the type of active mission the heroes can choose during eac
During a skirmish, players play Command cards to resolve a wide range of powerful abilities. During setup, each player draws three Command cards into his hand. Command cards in a player's hand are kept secret from his opponent. Each player draws one Command card each Status Phase, plus one additiona
🔧 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 175 ms · ask 4199 ms · total 7698 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 3321 ms · generation 4377 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "This Rules Reference Guide does not teach players how to play the game. Players should first read the Learn to Play booklet, then use this Rules Reference Guide as needed when playing the game. 'I only hope that when the data is analyzed, a weakness can be found. ' - Leia Organa, A New Hope This gui", "headingPath": "stop! · IntroductIon · Golden rules · card InterpretatIons · tImInG · Glossary", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "The table space in front of a player is known as his play area. This is where a player keeps all game components that belong to him but are not on the game board, including his Hero sheet, Item cards, Deployment cards, Class cards, and more. Abilities on cards and Hero sheets in a player's play area", "headingPath": "play area · push · ranGed attack · reach", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Before starting a new campaign, perform the following steps. Choose Player Roles: Players choose one player to take on the role of the Imperial player. All other players are Rebel players. Players retain these roles for the entirety of the campaign. Choose Heroes: Each Rebel player chooses one Hero ", "headingPath": "campaIGn setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "During a campaign, players resolve a series of story and side missions. The rules and maps for each mission are found in the Campaign Guide. During each Mission Stage, the heroes choose one active mission to resolve. -The campaign log lists the type of active mission the heroes can choose during eac", "headingPath": "sTory And side missions · Building the Side MiSSion deck · forCed missions", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "During a skirmish, players play Command cards to resolve a wide range of powerful abilities. During setup, each player draws three Command cards into his hand. Command cards in a player's hand are kept secret from his opponent. Each player draws one Command card each Status Phase, plus one additiona", "headingPath": "command cards · component lImItatIons", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.044103, "snippet": "To set up a skirmish mission, perform the following steps. Bring Armies and Command Cards: Both players simultaneously place their Deployment cards faceup in their play areas. Then each player shuffles his deck of 15 Command cards and places it by his Deployment cards. Determine Initiative: The play", "headingPath": "skirmish mission seTup", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.041756, "snippet": "Each player can only use one copy of each unique card at a time. These cards are identified by a bullet ( · ) before the name, for example, ' · Darth Vader. ' Unique cards are identified by name only. Sub-names, affiliations, and abilities are not taken into account when determining which cards have", "headingPath": "unIque · vIllaIns · walls · wInnInG the Game · Winning in A CAmpAign · Winning A skirmish mission", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When a figure performs a move, it gains movement points equal to its Speed. Performing a move does not move the figure ; it only provides movement points that may be spent during that figure's activation. This means that a figure may use its first action to perform a move, followed by an attack, and", "headingPath": "movement", "sharpsignalDocId": 284}]
- 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 284 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 284 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 09:27 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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | stop! · IntroductIon · Golden rules · card InterpretatIons · tImInG · Glossary | p.2 | 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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | play area · push · ranGed attack · reach | p.21 | 0.048172 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | campaIGn setup | 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 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | sTory And side missions · Building the Side MiSSion deck · forCed missions | p.17 | 0.047123 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | command cards · component lImItatIons | p.8 | 0.045928 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | skirmish mission seTup | p.18 | 0.044103 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | unIque · vIllaIns · walls · wInnInG the Game · Winning in A CAmpAign · Winning A skirmish mission | p.25 | 0.041756 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | movement | p.19 | 0.029412 (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 60 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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | play area · push · ranGed attack · reach | p.21 | #2 | 0.048172 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | campaIGn setup | p.7 | #3 | 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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | Interact · InterIor spaces · Interrupt | p.15 | #12 | 0.026709 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | actIvatIon | p.3 | #34 | 0.012195 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | skirmish mission seTup | p.18 | #6 | 0.044103 (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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | claIm · class cards · cleave | p.8 | #9 | 0.028665 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | command cards · component lImItatIons | p.8 | #5 | 0.045928 (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 Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Rulebook (corpus doc 284) | stop! · IntroductIon · Golden rules · card InterpretatIons · tImInG · Glossary | p.2 | #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
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 175 ms · first delta 4233 ms · total 7698 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 3321 ms · retrieval 175 ms · ask 4199 ms · gateway work 4377 ms · total 7698 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3655
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 180.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.050 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 12s ago)
- answerer host (measured by rulesage)
- reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 208), 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.