You asked
How do I setup the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Finspanbg-436126-en-1e
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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 225 ms · ask 9381 ms · total 9617 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 9617 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "1 Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply. 2 Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply. These 10 cards have dark gray corners and a different back than other fish cards. 3 Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards", "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "E F 3", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031498, "snippet": "A Place an ocean mat (your 'ocean') in front of you. B Choose a player color and gain the 6 divers of that color. C Place 1 egg token on each of the 2 starting egg spaces (printed on forage fish) in your ocean. Forage fish are the three fish printed on your ocean mat. D Place 1 young token on the st", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "Go to stonemaiergames.com/games/finspan/rules-faq", "headingPath": "WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO OR READ THE FAQ?", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03009, "snippet": "Each turn, you will either play a fish or dive into your ocean. You will take 6 turns during each of the 4 weeks (a total of 24 turns per player during the entire game). You will typically spend the beginning of the game playing low-cost fish cards and laying eggs, the middle of the game playing hig", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029644, "snippet": "Playing a fish involves choosing a fish card from your hand, paying its cost, and placing it on your ocean mat. Thematically, this represents you discovering this fish in an area of your ocean. Follow these steps to play a fish card: PLACE A DIVER. Place an available diver in the gray box at the upp", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.028814, "snippet": "Designed by David Gordon and Michael O'Connell Art by Ana María Martínez, Catalina Martínez, and Mesa Schumacher with support from Natalia Rojas Developed by Elizabeth Hargrave 1-5 players · 45-60 minutes · ages 10+ · competitive You are a marine researcher seeking to find and observe an array of aq", "headingPath": "A WINGSPAN GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.028405, "snippet": "Post it on the Finspan Facebook group, on BoardGameGeek, or in the Finspan channel of the Stonemaier Games Discord server: stonemaiergames.com/discord", "headingPath": "HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE?", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 55}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 54 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 54 boosted
- 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
- Nov 3, 2026 05:08
retrieval — what the passage search returned
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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.
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 rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS | p.2 | 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | PLAYER SETUP | p.3 | 0.032002 (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)) | 5 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | PLAYER SETUP | p.2 | 0.031498 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO OR READ THE FAQ? | p.12 | 0.030777 (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)) | 49 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW | p.4 | 0.03009 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | PLAY A FISH CARD | p.4 | 0.029644 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | A WINGSPAN GAME | p.1 | 0.028814 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? | p.12 | 0.028405 (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)) | 150 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
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.
the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Finspan: Sharks & Reefs — Rulebook (corpus doc 55) | GLOBAL & PLAYER SETUP | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54) | PLAYER SETUP | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 225 ms · first delta 6489 ms · total 9617 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 225 ms · ask 9381 ms · gateway work 9617 ms · total 9617 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 1910
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 428
- tok/sec
- 138.5 tok/sec — 428 output tokens in 3.090 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 5), 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.