RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

explain how to setup the game

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Scythe 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.

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 8, 2026 gemma4:26b read Scythe

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 2, 2026 gemma4:26b

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 2, 2026 gemma4:26b

I looked through Scythe's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.7 · PLAYER MAT
POWER TOKEN: Place your power token ( ) on the indicated level of the Power Track (on the game board). Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARDS: Draw the indicated number of combat cards. The number of combat cards you have is public information, but the content of those cards i
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.9 · QUICK-START CARD
We recommend that you don't try to teach every little rule to new players. Instead, give each player a quickstart card. This card contains key information about units on one side, and the other side covers broad concepts and gives players something specific to do for their first five turns. Your fir
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.7 · WORKERS
Place 1 worker on each of the territories connected to your home base by land (a total of 2 workers). COINS: Gain the indicated amount of coins and place them on your Faction Mat. While the number of coins you have during the game is not hidden information, you are never required to reveal their tot
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.28 · SAMPLE SCORING ROUND
The first time you play Scythe, we recommend that you run a sample scoring round during the game so players have a feel for the actual end-game scoring in advance. After any player places their first star, pause the game to let players calculate their current score. This is just for the sake of exam
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.31 · HIGHLIGHTED RULES
RESOURCES: All units-characters, mechs, & workers-can carry around resources (any number). TURNS AND PLAYER MATS: On your turn, you must choose a different section of your Player Mat than you did the previous turn. Take either the top-row action, the bottom-row action, or both (starting with the top
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:12b think:false 4eb23ef187e2
timings
search 180 ms · ask 5837 ms · total 6030 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 6030 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 7, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "POWER TOKEN: Place your power token ( ) on the indicated level of the Power Track (on the game board). Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARDS: Draw the indicated number of combat cards. The number of combat cards you have is public information, but the content of those cards i", "headingPath": "PLAYER MAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "We recommend that you don't try to teach every little rule to new players. Instead, give each player a quickstart card. This card contains key information about units on one side, and the other side covers broad concepts and gives players something specific to do for their first five turns. Your fir", "headingPath": "QUICK-START CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Place 1 worker on each of the territories connected to your home base by land (a total of 2 workers). COINS: Gain the indicated amount of coins and place them on your Faction Mat. While the number of coins you have during the game is not hidden information, you are never required to reveal their tot", "headingPath": "WORKERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The first time you play Scythe, we recommend that you run a sample scoring round during the game so players have a feel for the actual end-game scoring in advance. After any player places their first star, pause the game to let players calculate their current score. This is just for the sake of exam", "headingPath": "SAMPLE SCORING ROUND", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "RESOURCES: All units-characters, mechs, & workers-can carry around resources (any number). TURNS AND PLAYER MATS: On your turn, you must choose a different section of your Player Mat than you did the previous turn. Take either the top-row action, the bottom-row action, or both (starting with the top", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Each player starts the game with 2 objective cards that are kept secret from the other players. You may reveal a completed objective card during your own turn before or after you complete a top- or bottom-row action. If you do, place 1 star token on the objective space of the Triumph Track and disca", "headingPath": "O B J E C T I V E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Shuffle the encounter cards and put them on the board. OBJECTIVE CARDS (BEIGE): Shuffle the objective cards and put them on the board. STRUCTURE BONUS TILE: Randomly select one of the structure bonus tiles and place it face-up at the bottom of the Popularity Track.", "headingPath": "ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) :", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Pay the cost (depending on what is shown on all exposed red rectangles before taking the Produce action), choose up to 2 different territories you control, and all workers on those territories may produce. On the territories you selected for production, each worker may produce 1 token. The resource ", "headingPath": "PRODUCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 44}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
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 1815 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.5588
  • ruling 741 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.5588
  • ruling 688 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.5588
debug row retained until
Oct 14, 2026 07:30

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) PLAYER MAT p.7 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
#2 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) QUICK-START CARD p.9 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
#3 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) WORKERS p.7 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) SAMPLE SCORING ROUND p.28 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) HIGHLIGHTED RULES p.31 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) O B J E C T I V E S p.26 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : p.6 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) 265
#8 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 44) PRODUCE p.13 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

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.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 180 ms · first delta n/a · total 6030 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 180 ms · ask 5837 ms · gateway work 6030 ms · total 6030 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
decision
SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
setup

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 2), 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.