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You asked

When does the game end?

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

Asked with: Dunebg-283355-en-1e

Answered before

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

When does the game end?

Answered Aug 2, 2026 gemma4:26b

When does the game end?

Answered Jul 24, 2026 gemma4:12b

I looked through Dune'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 Dune — Rulebook · p.8 · End of Bidding
Bidding for Treachery Cards continues until all cards available for bid have been auctioned off or a card is not bid on by anyone. If a card is passed on by everyone, all remaining cards are returned to the top of the Treachery Deck and the Bidding Phase is over.
RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.10 · Battle Determination
Wherever two or more players' forces occupy the same territory, battles must occur between those players. Battles continue until just one player's forces or no forces remain in all territories on the map with two exceptions: Players cannot battle one another in a territory if their forces are separa
RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.12 · ALLIANCES (NEXUS)
Once a Shai-Hulud (sandworm) card is turned over on the second or subsequent turns, at the end of the Spice Blow and NEXUS Phase, a Nexus occurs. During a Nexus, all players have a chance to make, join or break Alliances. Once players have had a chance to do so, play continues.
RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.11 · Winning
The winning player loses only the number of forces they dialed on the Battle Wheel. These forces are placed in the Tleilaxu Tanks. The winning player may also keep or discard any of the cards they played.
RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.6 · OBJECT OF THE GAME
Each faction has a set of unique economic, military, strategic, or treacherous advantages. The object of the game is to use these advantages to gain control of Dune. The winner is the First Player to occupy at least 3 strongholds with at least one of their forces during the Mentat Pause Phase. A pla
🔧 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)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 201 ms · ask 6962 ms · total 7173 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 7173 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Bidding for Treachery Cards continues until all cards available for bid have been auctioned off or a card is not bid on by anyone. If a card is passed on by everyone, all remaining cards are returned to the top of the Treachery Deck and the Bidding Phase is over.", "headingPath": "End of Bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Wherever two or more players' forces occupy the same territory, battles must occur between those players. Battles continue until just one player's forces or no forces remain in all territories on the map with two exceptions: Players cannot battle one another in a territory if their forces are separa", "headingPath": "Battle Determination", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once a Shai-Hulud (sandworm) card is turned over on the second or subsequent turns, at the end of the Spice Blow and NEXUS Phase, a Nexus occurs. During a Nexus, all players have a chance to make, join or break Alliances. Once players have had a chance to do so, play continues.", "headingPath": "ALLIANCES (NEXUS)", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The winning player loses only the number of forces they dialed on the Battle Wheel. These forces are placed in the Tleilaxu Tanks. The winning player may also keep or discard any of the cards they played.", "headingPath": "Winning", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each faction has a set of unique economic, military, strategic, or treacherous advantages. The object of the game is to use these advantages to gain control of Dune. The winner is the First Player to occupy at least 3 strongholds with at least one of their forces during the Mentat Pause Phase. A pla", "headingPath": "OBJECT OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Factions either declare a winner (or winners) or take some time to evaluate their positions on the map and then move the Turn Counter to the next position on the Turn Track to begin the next turn.", "headingPath": "9. Mentat Pause Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Allied players' forces are considered the same for the purposes of victory. If together their joint forces hold 4 strongholds in the Mentat Pause Phase, they have jointly won the game.", "headingPath": "Winning", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029572, "snippet": "If both leaders are traitors, each a traitor for the opponent, both players' forces in the territory, their cards played, and their leaders, are lost. Neither player gets any spice. Any player with forces in a sector of a territory in which there is spice may now collect that spice. This is done by ", "headingPath": "Two Traitors", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}]
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 doc 104 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 104 boosted
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 742 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
  • ruling 260 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
debug row retained until
Nov 3, 2026 17:39

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) End of Bidding p.8 0.032787 (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)) 263
#2 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Battle Determination p.10 0.032258 (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
#3 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) ALLIANCES (NEXUS) p.12 0.031746 (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)) 278
#4 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Winning p.11 0.03125 (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)) 204
#5 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) OBJECT OF THE GAME p.6 0.030769 (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 Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) 9. Mentat Pause Phase p.7 0.030303 (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)) 196
#7 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Winning p.12 0.029851 (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)) 184
#8 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Two Traitors p.11 0.029572 (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

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 201 ms · first delta 7054 ms · total 7173 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 201 ms · ask 6962 ms · gateway work 7173 ms · total 7173 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1708
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
136.4 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.066 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 36s 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 35), 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.