RuleSage cited table rulings
← Vast: The Crystal Caverns

You asked

How do I setup the game?

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

Asked with: Vast: The Crystal Cavernsbg-170416-en-1e

I looked through Vast: The Crystal Caverns's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook · p.12 · How to Win · Setup · CARDS · TILES · Turn Summary · CAVE TILES · …
Collapse the Cave. To do so, you must first place all of the Cave tiles, then destroy Cave tiles until 5 Crystal tiles have collapsed. If the Knight is not in the game, leave the Treasure cards, Event cards, and Event tokens in the box. TOKENS Put the Omen tokens in the draw bag. Place 10 Treasure t
RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook · p.4 · General Rules · Revealing Dark Tiles
The rules in this chapter are relevant to all five roles in games of Vast: The Crystal Caverns . Though the vast majority of these rules are repeated in the roles' chapters when relevant, they are often less detailed. If this is your first time reading the rulebook, we suggest you read the titles of
RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook · p.14 · How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · 1) Assign Stat Tokens · STATISTICS · 2) Move and Take Actions
Acquire and stash 6 Treasure or Dragon Gem tokens to break your undying curse. Place the Action die, Action cubes, and Stat tokens, their light-gray sides showing, near your player board. Place the Loot Drop token on the '3' space of your Loot Drop Level chart. Before your first turn, place the Thie
RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook · p.10 · How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Move and Use P owers
Shake off your slumber and escape from the Cave. To do this, first move at least 11 Sloth cubes to your Wakefulness track, then move from the underground to the surface, and finally enter the Entrance tile. Place the Sloth cubes in the Sloth boxes on your player board. Place the Eaten Goblins marker
RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook · p.6 · How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Pick Up Hero Cubes
Kill the Dragon by reducing his Health to 0. If there is no Dragon, smash 5 Crystal tokens, then escape the Cave by entering the Entrance tile. Set your Health to 7 and Grit to 0. Set the Knight piece on the Entrance tile. Place the 3 Bomb tokens near your player board. Shuffle the Sidequest deck an
🔧 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; the house's own question, so the offer to ask about setup, turns or the end is withheld)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 194 ms · ask 1914 ms · total 2112 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2112 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 12, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Collapse the Cave. To do so, you must first place all of the Cave tiles, then destroy Cave tiles until 5 Crystal tiles have collapsed. If the Knight is not in the game, leave the Treasure cards, Event cards, and Event tokens in the box. TOKENS Put the Omen tokens in the draw bag. Place 10 Treasure t", "headingPath": "How to Win · Setup · CARDS · TILES · Turn Summary · CAVE TILES · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "The rules in this chapter are relevant to all five roles in games of Vast: The Crystal Caverns . Though the vast majority of these rules are repeated in the roles' chapters when relevant, they are often less detailed. If this is your first time reading the rulebook, we suggest you read the titles of", "headingPath": "General Rules · Revealing Dark Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Acquire and stash 6 Treasure or Dragon Gem tokens to break your undying curse. Place the Action die, Action cubes, and Stat tokens, their light-gray sides showing, near your player board. Place the Loot Drop token on the '3' space of your Loot Drop Level chart. Before your first turn, place the Thie", "headingPath": "How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · 1) Assign Stat Tokens · STATISTICS · 2) Move and Take Actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Shake off your slumber and escape from the Cave. To do this, first move at least 11 Sloth cubes to your Wakefulness track, then move from the underground to the surface, and finally enter the Entrance tile. Place the Sloth cubes in the Sloth boxes on your player board. Place the Eaten Goblins marker", "headingPath": "How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Move and Use P owers", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Kill the Dragon by reducing his Health to 0. If there is no Dragon, smash 5 Crystal tokens, then escape the Cave by entering the Entrance tile. Set your Health to 7 and Grit to 0. Set the Knight piece on the Entrance tile. Place the 3 Bomb tokens near your player board. Shuffle the Sidequest deck an", "headingPath": "How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Pick Up Hero Cubes", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "When you enter a Dark tile, you must reveal it-flipping it to its Lit side-place it, and resolve it. After resolving the tile, gain 1 Grit. When you place the revealed tile, you must connect it to the tile from which you moved. If you moved into the Dark tile through an open side ( no wall ), you mu", "headingPath": "REVEALING AND RESOLVING TILES · MOVING TO THE DRAGON", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place the Entrance tile on the center of the table. Set aside the 9 Crystal tiles and 6 Vault tiles. ( If there is no Thief player, return the Vault tiles to the box. ) Shuffle the other tiles and place four, Dark side up, adjacent to the Entrance tile. Divide the remaining tiles evenly into 3 piles", "headingPath": "Cave Setup · BEWARE! · CAVE TILES · Adjacent · Surrounding", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Kill the Knight by reducing her Health to 0. If there is no Knight, kill the Dragon. If there is no Knight or Dragon, smash 5 Crystal tokens. ( See the Role Variants chapter for more details. ) Place the 3 Goblin pieces ( 1 for each Tribe ) on your player board. Place the Goblin and Strength discs n", "headingPath": "How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · TRIBE STATISTICS · 1) Choose War Card · 2) P opulate Tribes", "sharpsignalDocId": 839}]
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 839 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 839 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
Oct 27, 2026 01:59 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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · CARDS · TILES · Turn Summary · CAVE TILES · … p.12 0.046875 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) General Rules · Revealing Dark Tiles p.4 0.044796 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · 1) Assign Stat Tokens · STATISTICS · 2) Move and Take Actions p.14 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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Move and Use P owers p.10 0.032258 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Pick Up Hero Cubes 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
#6 RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) REVEALING AND RESOLVING TILES · MOVING TO THE DRAGON p.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)) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) Cave Setup · BEWARE! · CAVE TILES · Adjacent · Surrounding p.2 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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · TRIBE STATISTICS · 1) Choose War Card · 2) P opulate Tribes p.8 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 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 66 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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Move and Use P owers p.10 #4 0.032258 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · CARDS · TILES · Turn Summary · CAVE TILES · … p.12 #1 0.046875 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) Cave Setup · BEWARE! · CAVE TILES · Adjacent · Surrounding p.2 #7 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#4 RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) Dragon Turn 1 · Cave Turn 1 p.20 #16 0.013889 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) Objectives · Role Setup p.2 #10 0.026333 (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 Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · TRIBE STATISTICS · 1) Choose War Card · 2) P opulate Tribes p.8 #8 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#7 RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · STATISTICS · 1) Pick Up Hero Cubes p.6 #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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#8 RULEBOOK Vast: The Crystal Caverns — Rulebook (corpus doc 839) How to Win · Setup · Turn Summary · 1) Assign Stat Tokens · STATISTICS · 2) Move and Take Actions p.14 #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

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 194 ms · first delta 1959 ms · total 2112 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 194 ms · ask 1914 ms · gateway work 2112 ms · total 2112 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3597
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 46s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child)
schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 5h, checked 4s 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 774), 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.