You asked
When can I play a critter for free?
Answered counted as answeredWhen you can play a critter for free is when you have a Construction in your city that is related to the Critter, and you place an "Occupied" token on that Construction. This allows you to play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. You may only do this once per Construction. [1] Additionally, the Postal Pigeon allows you to play a card worth up to 3 points for free when activated, and the Queen allows you to play any card from your hand or the Meadow cards worth up to 3 points for free when you place a worker there. [2] However, the specific condition for playing a Critter for free is only explicitly stated in,[1] which describes using a related Construction with an "Occupied" token. Final answer: When the Construction listed in the top left of the Critter card is already in your city, you may play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. [1]
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)
- qwen3:4b-instruct-2507-q4_K_M@0edcdef34593
- timings
- search 150 ms · ask 9817 ms · total 9968 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued n/a ms · generation 9968 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You may pay the required cost in berries to play the Critter card, or if the Construction listed in the top left of the Critter card is already in your city, you may play the Critter card without paying the cost in berries. Important: When playing a Critter for free by using the related Construction", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Dungeon can only have up to 2 prisoners, but the second cell must be unlocked by having a Ranger in your city. Ever Tree: At game end, worth 1 point for each purple Prosperity card in your city, including this Ever Tree. Ever Tree can grant 1 of any Critter for free. Fair Grounds: When played and du", "headingPath": "CONSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Peddler: W hen played and during Production, you may trade up to 2 of your resources for 2 of any other resource. Trade with the general supply, not other players. Postal Pigeon: When played, reveal 2 cards from the deck. You may immediately play 1 of these worth up to 3 points, for free. Discard th", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "Castle: At game end, worth 1 point for each Common Construction in your city. Cemetery: When you place a worker here, reveal 4 cards from the draw pile or discard pile and play 1 of them for free. Discard the others. Your worker must stay here permanently. Cemetery may only have up to 2workers on it", "headingPath": "CONSTRUCTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "If you have placed all of your workers and you cannot play a card or do not wish to, then you must prepare for the next season. On your turn, bring back all of your deployed workers, then gain the listed bonuses for the next season, as shown atop the Ever Tree. After doing so, your turn is finished,", "headingPath": "PREPARE FOR SEASON", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "In Everdell, you will be deploying workers to various locations on the board in order to gather resources, which you will use to play cards faceup in front of you, forming your own woodland city. Each turn you will perform only one of three possible actions: Place a Worker Play a Card Prepare for Se", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "When playing Everdell solo, you will be competing against a cantankerous old rodent known as Rugwort and his pack of rowdy, rambunctious, rat ruffians. He will be returning to Everdell for three years in a row, each time bearing a new title of nastiness. You must find a way to overcome his dastardly", "headingPath": "SOLO RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "You do not gain the 3 berrie s. This card cannot be combined with any other cardplay ing abilities including the Inn, any Forest locations that allow you to play a card, or cards like the Dungeon. Judge: When playing a Critter or Construction, you o ro e nhn listed cost with 1 of any other resource ", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
- gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
- 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 7, 2026 01:28
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. 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.10 | 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CONSTRUCTIONS | p.20 | 0.031746 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.19 | 0.03125 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CONSTRUCTIONS | p.20 | 0.030214 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | PREPARE FOR SEASON | p.12 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | OVERVIEW | p.3 | 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | SOLO RULES | p.16 | 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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.18 | 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 |
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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.10 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) | CRITTERS | p.19 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 150 ms · first delta n/a · total 9968 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued n/a ms · retrieval 150 ms · ask 9817 ms · gateway work 9968 ms · total 9968 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s ago)
- stream path
- not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
- 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
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 10), 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.