You asked
How do I set up the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAnswered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Pandemic has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
The answerer couldn't ground a confident answer in the rulebook. The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe
You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard
delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the
Each player has a role with special abilities to improve your team's chances. The Contingency Planner may, as an action, take an Event card from anywhere in the Player Discard Pile and place it on his Role card. Only 1 Event card can be on his role card at a time. It does not count against his hand
PariS atlanta After doing 4 actions, draw the top 2 cards together from the Player Deck. If your draws include any Epidemic cards, immediately do the following steps in order: Increase: Move the infection rate marker forward 1 space on the Infection Rate Track. St. PeterSBurg london eSSen Milan liMa
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 1302 ms · ask 4995 ms · total 6387 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 6387 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 8, "score": 0.030886, "snippet": "The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe", "headingPath": "QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the ", "headingPath": "PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Each player has a role with special abilities to improve your team's chances. The Contingency Planner may, as an action, take an Event card from anywhere in the Player Discard Pile and place it on his Role card. Only 1 Event card can be on his role card at a time. It does not count against his hand ", "headingPath": "ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "PariS atlanta After doing 4 actions, draw the top 2 cards together from the Player Deck. If your draws include any Epidemic cards, immediately do the following steps in order: Increase: Move the infection rate marker forward 1 space on the Infection Rate Track. St. PeterSBurg london eSSen Milan liMa", "headingPath": "Manila DRAW CARDS · EPIDEMIC CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "When a disease outbreak occurs, move the outbreaks marker forward 1 space on the Outbreaks Track. Then, place 1 cube of the disease color on every city connected to the city. If any of them already has 3 cubes of the disease color, do not place a 4 th cube in those cities. Instead, in each of them, ", "headingPath": "OUTBREAKS · TURN END · EVENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Do you have what it takes to save humanity? As skilled members of a disease-fighting team, you must keep four deadly diseases at bay while discovering their cures. You and your teammates will travel across the globe, treating infections while finding resources for cures. You must work together, usin", "headingPath": "by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 121}]
- citations (raw)
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
- answered-before recall
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 2002 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 887 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Oct 31, 2026 13:56
retrieval — what the search arm returned
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS | p.8 | 0.030886 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · … | p.4 | 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo | p.7 | 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT | p.8 | 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | Manila DRAW CARDS · EPIDEMIC CARDS | p.6 | 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | Discover a Cure | p.4 | 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | OUTBREAKS · TURN END · EVENT CARDS | p.7 | 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 121) | by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW | p.1 | 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) | 300 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 1302 ms · first delta 6265 ms · total 6387 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 1302 ms · ask 4995 ms · gateway work 6387 ms · total 6387 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3987
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 51s ago)
- 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 43), 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.