You asked
How do I play?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Wondrous Creaturesbg-400366-en-1e
I looked through Wondrous Creatures'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.
You can play up to 2 Creature Cards from your hand to your reserve. A Creature Card obtained through the "Place a Crew Member" Action is not yet a Creature collected into your reserve. You must play the card by paying the costs that each Creature needs as food. Only the cards that are played this wa
Each player chooses a player color and takes the following in 13 their color: Take a Player Board and place it in front of you. q Take 3 Crew Members and place them next to your Player Board. r Take 6 Achievement Markers and place them on the left side of your Player Board. s Take 4 Resource Tracker
Each player performs 1 Basic Action during their turn. There are a total of 4 Basic Actions: Place a Crew Member, Play a Card(s), Complete an Achievement, and Recharge. Place a Crew member on the Map and obtain resources or Creature Cards from adjacent Habitats, and/or acquire Eggs. This is the most
In other words, the 1st player starts the game with one of each resource. 2nd Player: Move any 1 Resource Tracker one space to the right. This means the 2nd player starts with 2 of any 1 desired resource type and 1 each of the remaining three resource types. 3rd Player: Move any 2 Resource Trackers
k Shuffle the remaining Time Tokens and place them face-down on the remaining yellow-bordered spaces of the Time Track. l For 3-players, only 4 Time Tokens are used. The unused Time Token is returned to the game box. NOTE Place a Time Tracker on the first space of the Time Track. m Place the Trophie
🔧 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 184 ms · ask 4855 ms · total 5042 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 5042 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 12, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "You can play up to 2 Creature Cards from your hand to your reserve. A Creature Card obtained through the \"Place a Crew Member\" Action is not yet a Creature collected into your reserve. You must play the card by paying the costs that each Creature needs as food. Only the cards that are played this wa", "headingPath": "2. play a card(s)", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045607, "snippet": "Each player chooses a player color and takes the following in 13 their color: Take a Player Board and place it in front of you. q Take 3 Crew Members and place them next to your Player Board. r Take 6 Achievement Markers and place them on the left side of your Player Board. s Take 4 Resource Tracker", "headingPath": "player setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.040775, "snippet": "Each player performs 1 Basic Action during their turn. There are a total of 4 Basic Actions: Place a Crew Member, Play a Card(s), Complete an Achievement, and Recharge. Place a Crew member on the Map and obtain resources or Creature Cards from adjacent Habitats, and/or acquire Eggs. This is the most", "headingPath": "iv. basic actions · 1. place a crew member · The placed Crew member interacts with all adjacent Habitats. · Habitat · Habitat Icon", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "In other words, the 1st player starts the game with one of each resource. 2nd Player: Move any 1 Resource Tracker one space to the right. This means the 2nd player starts with 2 of any 1 desired resource type and 1 each of the remaining three resource types. 3rd Player: Move any 2 Resource Trackers ", "headingPath": "player setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "k Shuffle the remaining Time Tokens and place them face-down on the remaining yellow-bordered spaces of the Time Track. l For 3-players, only 4 Time Tokens are used. The unused Time Token is returned to the game box. NOTE Place a Time Tracker on the first space of the Time Track. m Place the Trophie", "headingPath": "ii. game setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "When you satisfy the conditions indicated on an Achievement Card, you can complete the Achievement. To obtain a high score, it's important to complete Achievements that fit your strategy faster than the other players. Select an Achievement Marker: Once you have met the condition for an Achievement, ", "headingPath": "3. complete an achievement", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Players have differing Captain abilities depending on their chosen Captain Board. Captain abilities are initially locked at the beginning of the game and become available after accomplishing the first Achievement. When unlocked, the Captain's ability activates each time the Captain is placed on the ", "headingPath": "Captain Ability", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "If all the Trophies on the Main Board have been depleted, the current player finishes their current turn, then every other player takes one more turn, in order - after which the game ends. Once the game is over, scores are calculated in the following order: End Card Scores in your reserve. Ending Sc", "headingPath": "end of the game conditions · score calculations · 4. 3 VPs per Trophy. · deciding the winner", "sharpsignalDocId": 381}]
- 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 381 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 381 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 09:28 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | 2. play a card(s) | p.12 | 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | player setup | p.6 | 0.045607 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | iv. basic actions · 1. place a crew member · The placed Crew member interacts with all adjacent Habitats. · Habitat · Habitat Icon | p.9 | 0.040775 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | player setup | p.6 | 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | ii. game setup | p.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)) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | 3. complete an achievement | p.15 | 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | Captain Ability | p.16 | 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | end of the game conditions · score calculations · 4. 3 VPs per Trophy. · deciding the winner | p.20 | 0.029851 (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 65 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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | player setup | p.6 | #4 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | player setup | p.6 | #2 | 0.045607 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | creature cards | p.30 | #25 | 0.023643 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | ii. game setup | p.5 | #42 | 0.012346 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | creature cards | p.31 | #9 | 0.028612 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | Hand | p.10 | #17 | 0.025383 (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 Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | NOTE | p.11 | #21 | 0.024725 (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 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Wondrous Creatures — Rulebook (corpus doc 381) | 2. play a card(s) | p.12 | #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 184 ms · first delta 4883 ms · total 5042 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 184 ms · ask 4855 ms · gateway work 5042 ms · total 5042 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3433
- 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 2s ago)
- answerer host (measured by rulesage)
- reachable (for 23h, checked 3s 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 310), 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.