RuleSage cited table rulings
← Ironwood

You asked

How do I setup the game?

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

Asked with: Ironwoodbg-407343-en-1e

I looked through Ironwood'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 Ironwood — Rulebook · p.12
WW03 Ransack Resolve 1 or Spend to Resolve 2: Move 5 .Attack Ferrum. Victory: Steal (rounded up). 1. Place the main board in the middle of the playing area with the solo mode side up . 2. Place the crystals within reach. 3. Take the Woodwalker player board and set out the Ironclad board with its sol
RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook · p.18 · INCREASING THE DIFFICULTY · Attack · Build · Burn
Once you can beat the bot using the described rules, consider the following options to increase the difficulty on a scale of 1-15 levels: Do not ignore, but resolve the action icons in red when instructed (2 levels). During setup, place 2 markers next to the Spirits of the Forest card (3 levels). (D
RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook · p.2
2 3 Table of contents 1 Components 4 General overview 4 Setup 6 Action cards 8 Base cards 9 Special cards 9 Ongoing special cards 1 0 Round steps 9 Round summary 9 1. P reparation Phase 9 2. A ction Phase 1 0 3. Round End Phase 1 1 Faction units 1 1 Fighter 1 2 Golem 1 3 Drill 1 3 Warband 1 3 Map an
RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook · p.8 · DRILL TRACK Drill track
CARGO Unload at Starting position First step: Place 2 crystals on the Cargo area of your player board. Second step: 1st Place 1 additional crystal on the Cargo area of your player board. Secretly look at the top card of the vision card deck and place it back on top of the deck. Recruit one Ironclad
RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook · p.4 · Beta Playtesters
Choose or randomly determine who will play which faction, the Ironclad or the Woodwalkers. Place the main board in the middle of the playing area with the 2-player side up . Each player takes their faction's player board with the 2-player side up . Each player takes their faction's 3 base cards (ind
🔧 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 214 ms · ask 1486 ms · total 1702 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 1702 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 12, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "WW03 Ransack Resolve 1 or Spend to Resolve 2: Move 5 .Attack Ferrum. Victory: Steal (rounded up). 1. Place the main board in the middle of the playing area with the solo mode side up . 2. Place the crystals within reach. 3. Take the Woodwalker player board and set out the Ironclad board with its sol", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Once you can beat the bot using the described rules, consider the following options to increase the difficulty on a scale of 1-15 levels: Do not ignore, but resolve the action icons in red when instructed (2 levels). During setup, place 2 markers next to the Spirits of the Forest card (3 levels). (D", "headingPath": "INCREASING THE DIFFICULTY · Attack · Build · Burn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "2 3 Table of contents 1 Components 4 General overview 4 Setup 6 Action cards 8 Base cards 9 Special cards 9 Ongoing special cards 1 0 Round steps 9 Round summary 9 1. P reparation Phase 9 2. A ction Phase 1 0 3. Round End Phase 1 1 Faction units 1 1 Fighter 1 2 Golem 1 3 Drill 1 3 Warband 1 3 Map an", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "CARGO Unload at Starting position First step: Place 2 crystals on the Cargo area of your player board. Second step: 1st Place 1 additional crystal on the Cargo area of your player board. Secretly look at the top card of the vision card deck and place it back on top of the deck. Recruit one Ironclad ", "headingPath": "DRILL TRACK Drill track", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Choose or randomly determine who will play which faction, the Ironclad or the Woodwalkers. Place the main board in the middle of the playing area with the 2-player side up . Each player takes their faction's player board with the 2-player side up . Each player takes their faction's 3 base cards (ind", "headingPath": "Beta Playtesters", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "If the Ironbot is about to upgrade a Foundation to a Forge and it has multiple controlled Foundations, it chooses the Foundation with the smallest Ironclad Warband, using the Magic die in case of a tie. Once you can beat the bot using the described rules, consider the following options to increase t", "headingPath": "Building Forges", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If on uncontrolled : Otherwise: moves 3 Place 2 Move 2 to Interfere . moves 3 to Interfere 2 to Plunder . From your own deck, remove cards with reference number IC13, IC17, IC27, IC33, IC36. Then, shuffle your deck and place it on the corresponding draw deck area of your player board . Do the same f", "headingPath": "SOLO MODE - AGAINST THE WOODENBOT", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Woodenbot might discover a Totem, either as a result of a action, or during the 'Locate a Totem' step of its turn if the last vision card of the vision deck is revealed. Either way, resolve the following steps: 1 Place a Totem on an adjacent inner forest with the largest Woodwalker Warband. If n", "headingPath": "Discovering a Totem", "sharpsignalDocId": 1182}]
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 1182 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1182 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
Nov 6, 2026 02:57 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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) p.12 0.046898 (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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) INCREASING THE DIFFICULTY · Attack · Build · Burn p.18 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
#3 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) p.2 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
#4 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) DRILL TRACK Drill track p.8 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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Beta Playtesters p.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)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Building Forges p.14 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
#7 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) SOLO MODE - AGAINST THE WOODENBOT p.15 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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Discovering a Totem p.17 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 49 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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) INCREASING THE DIFFICULTY · Attack · Build · Burn p.18 #2 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
#2 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Building Forges p.14 #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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#3 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) SOLO MODE - AGAINST THE WOODENBOT p.15 #10 0.028893 (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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) DRILL TRACK Drill track p.8 #4 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
#5 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) SOLO MODE - AGAINST THE WOODENBOT p.15 #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
#6 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Gain crystals · Draw 2 cards · Remove markers · Action Phase · Your turn p.13 #12 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
#7 RULEBOOK Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) p.12 #1 0.046898 (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 Ironwood — Rulebook (corpus doc 1182) Fading · SOLO MODE - AGAINST THE IRONBOT · VICTORY CONDITIONS · SETUP p.12 #9 0.029762 (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 214 ms · first delta 1555 ms · total 1702 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 1486 ms · gateway work 1702 ms · total 1702 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4035
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
191.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.047 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 1s 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 1112), 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.