Ruling — Zombicide: Undead or Alive

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Zombicide: Undead or Alivebg-331224-en-1e

Because the provided sources describe setup procedures for several different missions/game modes rather than a single unified game, the setup steps depend on the specific mission being played:

For the mission involving a Wagon (Hard / 50 Minutes):

1. Split the Survivors as evenly as possible between the 3 Starting Zones.[1]

2. Place 2 Faithful and 4 Townsfolk Companions in the indicated Zones.[1]

3. Give each Objective Zone 2 random Objective tokens.[1]

4. Place the Blue and the Green Objectives randomly among the Red Objectives, facedown.[1]

For the mission involving a Train (Easy / 35 Minutes):

1. Place 2 Faithful and 4 Gunslinger Companions in the indicated Zones.[2]

For the mission involving "Your first Zombies":

1. The player receiving the First Player token during Setup gets a Holy Water card from the Equipment deck as well as an additional Starting Equipment, which they may assign to any Survivor they control.[3]

2. Place a Brute, a Runner, and 2 Walkers in the indicated Zones.[3]

For the mission involving the Mine (8V):

1. Place 2 Faithful and 4 Brawlers Companions in the indicated Zone.[4]

2. Place 6 Objective tokens in the Mine on tile 8V.[4]

For the mission involving the Blue Objective (Easy / 25 Minutes):

1. Place the Blue Objective in the indicated Zone.[5]

For the mission involving "Very Hard / 50 Minutes":

1. Place 2 random Faithful Companions in the indicated Zones and set their ID Cards aside.[6]

2. Place the Blue and the Green Objectives randomly among the Red Objectives, facedown.[6]

3. Set 3 random Bounty Weapons aside.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.51 · HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · · Setup.

[2] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.47 · EASY / 35 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES

[3] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.44 · COMPANIONS GENERAL TRAITS · EASY / 10 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES

[4] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.53 · SPECIAL RULES

[5] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.45 · EASY / 25 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES

[6] RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook · p.53 · OBJECTIVES · THEN… · · Setup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES

That settles it — whose turn was it?

🔧 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 214 ms · ask 3129 ms · total 3345 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3345 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 53, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "Hurry up! The Train won't wait! Accomplish these Objectives in any order: Prospecting for treasure. Get the 3 hidden Bounty Weapons. They can only be acquired by taking Objectives. Heave-Ho! Move the Wagon off the railroad. A faithful gathering. Rally the 2 Faithful Companions. Don't miss the Train!", "headingPath": "OBJECTIVES · THEN… · ·\tSetup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 51, "score": 0.044904, "snippet": "Well, hate to say it, pardners, but the old gal just ain't got no more steam. We were lucky we got as far as we did. It's our own two feet from here on out. Lucky us though, this place is chock full of supplies, probably from folks that fled when the zombies came calling. Class limitations: No Faith", "headingPath": "HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · ·\tSetup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 60, "score": 0.044604, "snippet": "EACH ROUND BEGINS WITH: The first player activates all of their Survivors, one after the other, in any order. When they're done, the next player's Turn begins. Play clockwise. Each Survivor has 3 Actions to spend, chosen from the following list. Unless stated otherwise, each Action may be performed ", "headingPath": "GAME ROUND SUMMARY · 1 PLAYER PHASE · STEP 1 - ACTIVATION: ATTACK OR MOVE · STEP 2 - SPAWN · 3 END PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Using Zombie Spawn tokens, the Mission map shows where Zombies appear at the end of each Zombie Phase. These are the Spawn Zones. Zombie Spawn tokens mark the Spawn Zones' locations. During the Spawn Step, always start from the Starting Spawn Zone, in yellow. Always begin with the Starting Spawn Zon", "headingPath": "STEP 2 - SPAWN", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "26 • UNDEAD OR ALIVE RULES STEP 2 – SPAWN Using Zombie Spawn tokens, the Mission map shows where Zombies appear at the end of each Zombie Phase . These are the Spawn Zones . Z ombie Spawn tokens mark the Spawn Zones’ locations. During the Spawn Step, always start from the Starting Spawn Zone, in yel", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 40, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "IMPORTANT: Train moves are resolved at the end of the Player Phase, before the Zombie Phase. A Mission featuring an empty railroad may feature a Train entering the board (after taking Objectives, for example). When it happens, at the end of the Player Phase, flip tile 10V to its 10R side as the loco", "headingPath": "A TRAIN ENTERING THE BOARD · A TRAIN MOVING ON THE BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.030092, "snippet": "Corpse Pile Spawn Zones may be found in most houses. Using Holy Water will get rid of them and get the poor souls to eternal peace. Corpse Pile Spawn Zone: Corpse Pile Spawn tokens are not set on the board during Setup. Tiles predefine the places where Corpse Pile Spawn tokens are set. They can be d", "headingPath": "SPAWN ZONE TYPES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Place Starting Equipment cards , unused Survivor ID Cards, along with the Wagon and the Gatling Gun reference cards, within view of all players. These are the possible starting weapons for each kind of Survivor. Look for better weapons whenever possible! Survivors have a favorite Equipment type indi", "headingPath": "ZOMBICIDE THROUGH SPACE AND TIME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 51, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · ·\tSetup.", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 47, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EASY / 35 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 44, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPANIONS GENERAL TRAITS · EASY / 10 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 53, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 45, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EASY / 25 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}, {"page": 53, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OBJECTIVES · THEN… · ·\tSetup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1295}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1295 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1295 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 0.88456 of 1334 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 21, 2026 17:18 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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	OBJECTIVES · THEN… · · Setup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES	p.53	0.046635 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.51	0.044904 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	GAME ROUND SUMMARY · 1 PLAYER PHASE · STEP 1 - ACTIVATION: ATTACK OR MOVE · STEP 2 - SPAWN · 3 END PHASE	p.60	0.044604 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	STEP 2 - SPAWN	p.26	0.032787 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)		p.26	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
#6	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	A TRAIN ENTERING THE BOARD · A TRAIN MOVING ON THE BOARD	p.40	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
#7	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	SPAWN ZONE TYPES	p.28	0.030092 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	ZOMBICIDE THROUGH SPACE AND TIME	p.7	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 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 — 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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.51	#2	0.044904 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	EASY / 35 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.47	#16	0.025645 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	COMPANIONS GENERAL TRAITS · EASY / 10 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.44	#18	0.025004 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	SPECIAL RULES	p.53	#43	0.010638 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	GAME ROUND SUMMARY · 1 PLAYER PHASE · STEP 1 - ACTIVATION: ATTACK OR MOVE · STEP 2 - SPAWN · 3 END PHASE	p.60	#3	0.044604 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	SPAWN ZONE TYPES	p.28	#7	0.030092 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	EASY / 25 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.45	#13	0.027598 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	OBJECTIVES · THEN… · · Setup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES	p.53	#1	0.046635 (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 Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	HARD / 50 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · · Setup.	p.51	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	EASY / 35 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.47	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	COMPANIONS GENERAL TRAITS · EASY / 10 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.44	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	SPECIAL RULES	p.53	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	EASY / 25 MINUTES · OBJECTIVES · SPECIAL RULES	p.45	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Zombicide: Undead or Alive — Rulebook (corpus doc 1295)	OBJECTIVES · THEN… · · Setup. · VERY HARD / 50 MINUTES	p.53	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 214 ms · first delta 1231 ms · total 3345 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 214 ms · ask 3129 ms · gateway work 3345 ms · total 3345 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3660
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 399
tok/sec: 195.3 tok/sec — 399 output tokens in 2.043 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 16s 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: 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 1225), 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.