Ruling — Blood on the Clocktower

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

To setup the game, follow these steps: 1. Gather your players by getting one chair per player and arranging them facing each other in a rough circle or square, leaving a gap between two chairs for the Storyteller to enter and exit [1]. Ensure the center of this space is mostly empty with no tables or floor hazards [1]. 2. Prepare the Grimoire by fastening its two metal clips close to the upper and lower corners of the game box to create a sturdy container [1]. Unfold and assemble the two-piece Grimoire stand and place the Grimoire upon it in a location where players walking around will not accidentally see its contents [1]. Collect all info, night, and shroud tokens anywhere you like within the Grimoire [1]. 3. Choose an edition to play (Trouble Brewing, Bad Moon Rising, or Sects & Violets) [1]. Uncover and add the chosen edition box to the bottom-left part of the Grimoire [1]. Add the night sheet for that edition to the right side of the Grimoire [1]. 4. Prepare the Town Square by putting the board on the floor in the center of the chairs [2][1]. Put one life token per player on the Town Square matching their seating position [2][1]. Put a pile of vote tokens in the center of the Town Square [2][1]. Put the Traveller sheet partially under the Town Square, showing the number of Townsfolk, Outsiders, and Minions [2]. 5. Read the rules to any new players by reading the text on the rules sheet or letting them read it privately; you should demonstrate hand signals as you go [2]. You may also choose to read the part about nominations and executions now, though doing so later when the first nomination begins is often better for learning [2]. 6. Secretly choose characters by taking the appropriate number of Townsfolk character tokens (as listed on the setup sheet) out of the edition box and placing them in the left side of the Grimoire; return all remaining Townsfolk tokens to the box [2]. Repeat this process for any Outsiders, Minions, and the Demon [2]. This must be done secretly so players do not know which characters are in play [2]. 7. If there are more than fifteen players, any excess players must volunteer to be Travellers; give these volunteers the Traveller sheet so they can choose their characters [2]. For these players, you must also: * Let the player choose a Traveller [3]. * Tell the Traveller player in private whether they are good or evil [3]. * Put their Traveller character token in the Grimoire to match their seating position (placing evil tokens upside-down and good tokens right-side-up) [3]. * Place their specific color life token on the Town Square [3]. 8. If any chosen character tokens show an orange flower, add or remove character tokens as described by its almanac entry, ensuring the total number of tokens equals the number of players [4]. 9. If any chosen character tokens show green leaves at the top, add the corresponding reminder tokens for those characters to the Grimoire [4]. Return all remaining reminder tokens to the edition box [4].

[1] RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook · p.12 · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook · p.12 · SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook · p.26 · ADDING TRAVELLERS

[4] RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook · p.13 · SETUP · 8. ADD REMINDER TOKENS TO THE GRIMOIRE.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 892 ms · ask 23638 ms · total 25500 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 25500 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 12, "score": 0.031778, "snippet": "Y OU CAN SET UP A GAME OF CLOCKTOWER by following the instructions on the setup sheet , which are explained in more detail here. 1. GATHER YOUR PLAYERS. Get one chair per player and arrange the chairs facing each other. A rough circle or square is fine, as long as people are sitting in a definite cl", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.031754, "snippet": "Likewise, we recommend you run a game or two with five to ten players to get the hang of things, then try your hand at larger games. 4. PREPARE THE TOWN SQUARE. Put the Town Square board on the floor in the center of the chairs. Put one life token per player on the Town Square matching their seating", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "To include a Traveller in your game, do the following: 1. LET THE PLAYER CHOOSE A TRAVELLER. Take the player aside and give them the Traveller sheet, which is kept under the Town Square. This sheet details which Travellers are available for this game and what their abilities are. Ask the player to c", "headingPath": "ADDING TRAVELLERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "Give these volunteers the Traveller sheet, so they can choose which Travellers they wish to be. You'll find more information about them in TRAVELLER CHARACTERS (page 24). For your first game, we do not recommend that you include Travellers or Fabled. CHOOSING CHARACTERS. The characters you choose wi", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "B EFORE RUNNING THE NIGHT PHASE itself, you'll want to prepare a few things first. Ideally, nights should go quickly and smoothly with a minimum of thinking. If you prepare your night well, you've done all your thinking beforehand! Players may talk amongst themselves freely while you are planning th", "headingPath": "PREPARING THE NIGHT", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.029206, "snippet": "They can play a Traveller even if they join five minutes after you've set up the game, but before you start the first night-just make sure they close their eyes on the first night, then let them choose a Traveller on the first day. That said, we don't recommend adding Travellers if the game is nearl", "headingPath": "ADDING TRAVELLERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.028298, "snippet": "Players that are brought back from the dead, or players that become a new character via a character swap, gain their ability in this way too. If a player becomes a Minion or Demon character, they do not learn who the other evil players are. That information is for the evil players at the beginning o", "headingPath": "ABILITIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.028006, "snippet": "This also encourages players to leave their seats to talk in private to players on the opposite side of the circle, as everybody is close together. Players having private conversations with each other can be a huge part of some games, and is something that really adds new levels of strategy to both ", "headingPath": "RUNNING THINGS SMOOTHLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ADDING TRAVELLERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · 8. ADD REMINDER TOKENS TO THE GRIMOIRE.", "sharpsignalDocId": 159}]
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: 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)
debug row retained until: Oct 31, 2026 21:19

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 Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP	p.12	0.031778 (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 Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP	p.12	0.031754 (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 Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	ADDING TRAVELLERS	p.26	0.030303 (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 Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP	p.12	0.030118 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	PREPARING THE NIGHT	p.14	0.029762 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	ADDING TRAVELLERS	p.26	0.029206 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	ABILITIES	p.22	0.028298 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	RUNNING THINGS SMOOTHLY	p.31	0.028006 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP	p.12	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP	p.12	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	ADDING TRAVELLERS	p.26	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Blood on the Clocktower — Rulebook (corpus doc 159)	SETUP · 8. ADD REMINDER TOKENS TO THE GRIMOIRE.	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 892 ms · first delta 20683 ms · total 25500 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 892 ms · ask 23638 ms · gateway work 25500 ms · total 25500 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4137
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 688
tok/sec: 146.9 tok/sec — 688 output tokens in 4.685 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 58s 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: 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 81), 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.