Ruling — Heat: Pedal to the Metal

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

To set up the game, follow these steps: 1. Place the game board in the middle of the table [1]. (For a first game, use the USA track and consider racing only 1 lap as a learning experience instead of the regular 2 laps) [1]. 2. Each player chooses a color and takes the car, player mat, Gear pawn, 12 Basic cards in their color, and 3 Starting Upgrade cards in their color [1]. 3. Check the game board to determine how many Heat and Stress cards each player must add to their car (typically 6 Heat and 3 Stress cards) [1]. 4. Place your player mat in front of you [1]. 5. Shuffle the 12 Basic cards, 3 Starting Upgrade cards, and 3 Stress cards together and place this draw deck facedown on the left spot of your player mat [1]. 6. Place the 6 Heat cards faceup on the Engine spot in the middle of the player mat and set your Gear pawn in first gear [1]. 7. Place the remaining Stress cards faceup near the board as a reserve [1]. 8. Randomly place all participating race cars on the starting grid to determine player order for the first round, filling the spots one at a time in ascending order [1]. 9. Draw 7 cards from your draw deck into your hand [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.3 ·

🔧 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 217 ms · ask 5404 ms · total 5641 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5641 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "In “Heat: Pedal to the Metal™” everyone races a car around the track for a given number of laps to determine the best driver. At the start of each round you can shift gears, which dictates how many cards you play that round. You control your car’s speed by adding the value of these cards to move tha", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "This booklet will teach you all the rules to play the core game. We suggest you play your first few races following these rules before trying the Advanced Play and Championship Rules found in the other booklet.", "headingPath": "Read this booklet First!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "H eat waves shimmer from the racetrack, obscuring the first corner. You adjust your goggles as the sun glints off the chrome of race cars slowly being pushed into position around you. The murmur of the crowd, the snap of flags in the wind, the gentle rumble of your engine. A blue summer sky, calm an", "headingPath": "Read this booklet First! · PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™' is played over several rounds. Each round all players ALWAYS complete 4 steps: ➊ - adjust their gear, ➋ - play cards, ➌ - move their car, ➒ - draw back up to seven cards. These mandatory steps are highlighted thanks to the following icon . The remaining steps (4-8) are al", "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "For each symbol played you will add an unknown value between 1 and 4 to your Speed. This is done by flipping the top card of your draw deck: If it is a Basic card ( ), add it to your Play Area. Otherwise, immediately put it in the discard pile and keep flipping until you find a Basic card ( ). The a", "headingPath": "Symbol", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "In 'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™' everyone races a car around the track for a given number of laps to determine the best driver. At the start of each round you can shift gears, which dictates how many cards you play that round. You control your car's speed by adding the value of these cards to move tha", "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "In rare circumstances you can get stuck with so many Heat cards in your hand that you don't have enough playable cards for the gear you're in. If this happens, use as many playable cards as possible and cover the difference with Heat cards. In this case, your car does not move this turn. Instead, wh", "headingPath": "Cluttered Hand", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Reveal the cards in your Play Area, then add all values together to determine your Speed. Values from Upgrade and Stress cards (see below) contribute to that total Speed. Move your car forward by exactly that many Spaces on the track. Always put your car on the Spot closest to the Race Line if avail", "headingPath": "3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
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 22:28

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 Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	0.032787 (at the 2-arm ceiling (0.03279) — the top of a 2-arm fuse; whether more arms ran here was never recorded)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First!	p.1	0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	210
#3	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First! · PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!	p.2	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
#4	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards	p.4	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
#5	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Symbol	p.5	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
#6	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!	p.3	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
#7	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Cluttered Hand	p.7	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
#8	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React	p.5	0.014706 (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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 217 ms · first delta 3467 ms · total 5641 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 217 ms · ask 5404 ms · gateway work 5641 ms · total 5641 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3032
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 295
tok/sec: 138.0 tok/sec — 295 output tokens in 2.138 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 31s 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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 56), 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.