Ruling — Dice Hospital

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dice Hospitalbg-218121-en-1e

Standard Game Setup

1. The starting player is the person who most recently visited a hospital, or a player chosen at random, and is given the First Player token.[1]

2. Give each player a Starting Hospital board and 2 score markers in their chosen colour.[1]

3. Each player takes 3 nurses (white meeples) and places them in the Nurses' Station area on the centre of their player board.[1]

4. Take a number of ambulances equal to one more than the number of players (using the lowest numbered ambulances available), flip them to show the side with no dice icons, and place them in the middle of the table in number order.[1]

5. Return any unused ambulances to the box.[1]

6. Place the score/round board next to the play area.[1]

7. Each player places one score marker next to the score track and keeps the other in front of them to identify their colour.[1]

8. Place the round marker so the '1' space of the round track is visible.[1]

9. Shuffle the Department tiles and place them into a face-down stack.[1]

10. Take a number of tiles from the top of the Department deck equal to one less than the number of players and place them face up near the ambulances.[1]

11. Shuffle the Specialist cards and place them in a face-down deck.[1]

12. Take a number of cards from the top of the Specialist deck equal to one less than the number of players and place them face up near the ambulances.[1]

13. In a 2-player game, the First Player must choose to reveal either an additional Department tile or an additional Specialist card during setup.[1]

14. Place all other meeples in a general supply near the middle of the table.[1]

15. Place the Blood bag and Fatality tokens in a general supply nearby.[1]

16. Place dice in the bag according to the number of players: use all 63 dice for a 4-player game; for a 3-player game, remove 3 dice of each colour (9 total) and return them to the box; for a 2-player game, remove 6 dice of each colour (18 total) and return them to the box.[1]

17. Starting with the First Player and moving clockwise, each player draws 3 dice at random from the bag as starting patients.[1]

18. Shuffle the Hospital Administrator cards and deal 2 cards secretly to each player; each player chooses one to keep face up next to their hospital and returns the others to the box.[2]

19. Give each player a Reference card.[2]

Solo Play Setup Changes

1. Do not use the ambulances.[3]

2. Do not choose a Hospital Administrator card.[3]

3. Remove 10 dice of each colour and return them to the box, placing the rest in the bag.[3]

4. Shuffle the deck of Medical Report cards and randomly deal six of them face up, forming 2 rows of 3 cards.[3]

5. Draw 4 dice from the bag and roll them; re-roll any 1 or 6 results until all dice show values which are neither 1 nor 6.[3]

6. Choose 3 out of 4 dice to be placed in your Wards and return the unused die to the bag.[3]

7. At the beginning of Phase 2, reveal 1 Specialist card and 1 Department tile; choose either to claim and return the other to the bottom of its stack.[3]

Optional/Variant Setup

1. If using Event cards, shuffle the deck and place it face down nearby.[4]

2. For a more challenging variant, each player takes 5 patient dice from the bag instead of 3, setting the values to 3, 3, 4, 5, and 5 in any colour combination, and placing them in the untreated spaces of a ward.[4][2]

3. If using the Experimental Medicine mini-expansion, sort the base Department tiles into two sets of 12; in a 2-3 player game, remove one set; in a 4-player game, remove 8 at random from one set and return to the box; then shuffle the remaining tiles with the 8 expansion tiles to create a stack of 20 (for 2-3 players) or 24 (for 4 players).[5]

4. Create the Specialist card deck by shuffling 12 cards from the base set with the 12 expansion cards, resulting in 24 cards total.[5]

5. If using promo Specialist cards, randomly select another Specialist card from the deck during setup,

[1] RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook · p.10 · SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT

[4] RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook · p.9 · OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS

[5] RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook · p.15 · EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE MINI-EXPANSION · DRUG TRIAL CENTRE: · EXPERIMENTAL THERAPY: · PATHOLOGIST: · REGISTRAR: · PHYSIOTHERAPIST: · …

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 204 ms · ask 6158 ms · total 6366 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6366 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The player who has most recently visited a hospital is the starting player and is given the First Player token. Alternatively, choose a starting player at random. Give each player a Starting Hospital board and 2 score markers in their chosen colour. Each player also takes 3 nurses (white meeples) wh", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.04741, "snippet": "In a 3-player remove 3 dice of each colour (9 in total) and return them to the box, placing the rest in the bag. In a 2-player game, remove 6 dice of each colour (18 in total) and return them to the box, placing the rest in the bag. Starting with the First Player and moving clockwise, each player dr", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "Once you have played the game a number of times, you may want to try including one or more of the following optional rules for increased variety and additional challenges. A special deck of Event cards is provided, which can be included in your game of Dice Hospital. During game setup, shuffle this ", "headingPath": "OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "When this meeple heals any patient, heal a different patient (of any colour/colours) of value 4, 5, or 6 one step. The Kickstarter edition of the game includes two additional promo Specialist cards. To use a promo card, during game setup randomly select another Specialist card from the deck, return ", "headingPath": "GENERAL PRACTITIONER: · CONSULTANT: · ADMISSIONS NURSE:", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "Dice Hospital can be played as a solo game. To do so, you need to use the Medical Report cards. These cards show a certain combination of colours required to complete them and how many points they are worth. Do not use the ambulances. Do not choose a Hospital Administrator card. Remove 10 dice of ea", "headingPath": "SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "Each player then counts the number of patients they discharged during that round and scores points according to the table on the right. Scores are tracked using the appropriate score markers on the score board. After scoring, all discharged patients are returned to the bag. As a special scoring bonu", "headingPath": "PHASE 5 - DISCHARGED PATIENTS · PHASE 6 - SHIFT CHANGE · END GAME SCORING", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "For your first game, it is recommended that each player individually activates their hospital one at a time, in ambulance order, so that every player can see what is happening. This will ensure that everyone is playing by the correct rules. However, since there is no interaction between the players ", "headingPath": "SIMULTANEOUS PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The First Player draws 3 dice at random from the bag for each ambulance. E.g. in a 3-player game, there are 4 ambulances, so 12 dice are drawn from the bag. These dice are then rolled. If any of the dice show a value of 1 or 6 then that die is re-rolled until it produces a value other than 1 or 6. L", "headingPath": "PHASE 1 - PATIENT INTAKE", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE MINI-EXPANSION · DRUG TRIAL CENTRE: · EXPERIMENTAL THERAPY: · PATHOLOGIST: · REGISTRAR: · PHYSIOTHERAPIST: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 814}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 814 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 814 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 0.89879 of 3221 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 26, 2026 14:07 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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	0.048412 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	0.04741 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS	p.9	0.046176 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GENERAL PRACTITIONER: · CONSULTANT: · ADMISSIONS NURSE:	p.13	0.046175 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT	p.10	0.046154 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	PHASE 5 - DISCHARGED PATIENTS · PHASE 6 - SHIFT CHANGE · END GAME SCORING	p.8	0.045805 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	SIMULTANEOUS PLAY	p.5	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
#8	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	PHASE 1 - PATIENT INTAKE	p.4	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 31 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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	#1	0.048412 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT	p.10	#5	0.046154 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS	p.9	#3	0.046176 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	PHASE 5 - DISCHARGED PATIENTS · PHASE 6 - SHIFT CHANGE · END GAME SCORING	p.8	#6	0.045805 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	SIMULTANEOUS PLAY	p.5	#7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE MINI-EXPANSION · DRUG TRIAL CENTRE: · EXPERIMENTAL THERAPY: · PATHOLOGIST: · REGISTRAR: · PHYSIOTHERAPIST: · …	p.15	#9	0.029643 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GENERAL PRACTITIONER: · CONSULTANT: · ADMISSIONS NURSE:	p.13	#4	0.046175 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	#2	0.04741 (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 Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	GAME SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	SOLO PLAY RULES · GAME SETUP CHANGES · MEDICAL REPORT CARDS · · PHASE 1: PATIENT INTAKE · PHASE 2: HOSPITAL IMPROVEMENT	p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	OPTIONAL RULES · EVENT CARDS · HARD MODE · OPENING CRISIS: · FINAL ROUND COLLECTIONS	p.9	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Dice Hospital — Rulebook (corpus doc 814)	EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE MINI-EXPANSION · DRUG TRIAL CENTRE: · EXPERIMENTAL THERAPY: · PATHOLOGIST: · REGISTRAR: · PHYSIOTHERAPIST: · …	p.15	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 204 ms · first delta 1169 ms · total 6366 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 204 ms · ask 6158 ms · gateway work 6366 ms · total 6366 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4279
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.103 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 9s 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 749), 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.