RuleSage cited table rulings
← 20 Strong

You asked

How do I setup the game?

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

Asked with: 20 Strongbg-373167-en-1e

I looked through 20 Strong'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 20 Strong — Rulebook · p.10 · GAME FLOW · ACTIVATION
20 Strong is played in rounds. Each round, you identify one or more conflict cards to face, roll dice, make a series of decisions, and deal with the results. Rounds continue until you win or lose. Each round has two parts: Activation and Engagement . In this part, one or more conflict cards become a
RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook · p.4 · TABLE OF CONTENTS · WINNING & LOSING · COMPONENTS · RULES
4 Winning. Generally, you win 20 Strong by defeating a boss. Each deck has specific rules for achieving victory. Losing. If your Health is ever reduced below 1, you lose the game. This 20 Strong core box contains 20 dice, one chip and chip holder, this rulebook, and a deckbox containing the Solar Se
RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook · p.12 · ENGAGEMENT
The Strategy phase has three steps. You may be able to repeat the phase, carrying out its steps again. Commit Dice. The first step of the Strategy phase is to Commit dice, which entails selecting the dice from the dice pool that you would like to use for this Strategy phase. Generally, you may commi
RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook · p.17 · ENDGAME
Skip Activation. For the first Activation of endgame, the deck will contain instructions regarding selecting a boss to activate and what other conflict cards to activate, if any. Skip Activation in all subsequent rounds. Undefeated Cards Remain. In the Cleanup step during the endgame, do not discard
RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook · p.11 · ACTIVATION · ENGAGEMENT
The additional enemies icon is also on several enemies and applies during Activation, though it is not an effect. After activating an enemy with , activate additional enemies equal to the number indicated, one at a time. If any of those enemies have , they must be resolved as well. Engagement consis
🔧 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 251 ms · ask 827 ms · total 1084 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 1084 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 10, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "20 Strong is played in rounds. Each round, you identify one or more conflict cards to face, roll dice, make a series of decisions, and deal with the results. Rounds continue until you win or lose. Each round has two parts: Activation and Engagement . In this part, one or more conflict cards become a", "headingPath": "GAME FLOW · ACTIVATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.04598, "snippet": "4 Winning. Generally, you win 20 Strong by defeating a boss. Each deck has specific rules for achieving victory. Losing. If your Health is ever reduced below 1, you lose the game. This 20 Strong core box contains 20 dice, one chip and chip holder, this rulebook, and a deckbox containing the Solar Se", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS · WINNING & LOSING · COMPONENTS · RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The Strategy phase has three steps. You may be able to repeat the phase, carrying out its steps again. Commit Dice. The first step of the Strategy phase is to Commit dice, which entails selecting the dice from the dice pool that you would like to use for this Strategy phase. Generally, you may commi", "headingPath": "ENGAGEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Skip Activation. For the first Activation of endgame, the deck will contain instructions regarding selecting a boss to activate and what other conflict cards to activate, if any. Skip Activation in all subsequent rounds. Undefeated Cards Remain. In the Cleanup step during the endgame, do not discard", "headingPath": "ENDGAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The additional enemies icon is also on several enemies and applies during Activation, though it is not an effect. After activating an enemy with , activate additional enemies equal to the number indicated, one at a time. If any of those enemies have , they must be resolved as well. Engagement consis", "headingPath": "ACTIVATION · ENGAGEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Gain Item Rewards. If any of the conflict cards you defeated this round has an item reward, either Single-use or Ongoing , you may gain the item by placing its card in your inventory. Cleanup. Place all conflict cards that remain in your active area - both defeated AND undefeated - in the discard . ", "headingPath": "RESOLVE PHASE · ENDGAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "time, in any order, and you are not required to apply all rolled hits. Each time you apply a die, check to see if the state of play has changed. This most commonly happens when the amount of damage on a conflict card equals or exceeds its Health, at which point it is defeated . Any During effects on", "headingPath": "ENGAGEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "6 Bosses are the final enemies you must defeat in order to win. Conflict cards are the enemies or obstacles you must face along the way. 17 of the dice in 20 Strong are unit dice . Unit dice can be red, purple, blue, green, or yellow. Each has miss sides that are blank and hit sides showing one of t", "headingPath": "DECKS · UNIT DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1168}]
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 1168 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1168 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 25, 2026 15:26 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) GAME FLOW · ACTIVATION p.10 0.047643 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) TABLE OF CONTENTS · WINNING & LOSING · COMPONENTS · RULES p.4 0.04598 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ENGAGEMENT p.12 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
#4 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ENDGAME p.17 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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ACTIVATION · ENGAGEMENT p.11 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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) RESOLVE PHASE · ENDGAME p.16 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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ENGAGEMENT p.13 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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) DECKS · UNIT DICE p.6 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 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 30 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) GAME FLOW · ACTIVATION p.10 #1 0.047643 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) RESOLVE PHASE · ENDGAME p.16 #6 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#3 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ENGAGEMENT p.12 #3 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#4 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) REWARD/EFFECT CLARIFICATIONS · KEY TERMS p.21 #14 0.014286 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) TABLE OF CONTENTS · WINNING & LOSING · COMPONENTS · RULES p.4 #2 0.04598 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) ENDGAME p.17 #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
#7 RULEBOOK 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) TABLE OF CONTENTS p.3 #10 0.02938 (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 20 Strong — Rulebook (corpus doc 1168) STAT DICE · CHIP · SETUP p.9 #9 0.029387 (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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 251 ms · first delta 944 ms · total 1084 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 251 ms · ask 827 ms · gateway work 1084 ms · total 1084 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1694
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 2s 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.
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
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1098), 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.