Ruling — Pandemic

← Pandemic

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e · Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e

### Standard Game Setup

1. Set out the board and pieces.[1]

2. Place outbreaks and cure markers.[1]

3. Give each player cards and a pawn.[1]

4. Give each player a reference card.[1]

5. Shuffle the Role cards and deal 1 face up in front of each player.[1]

6. Place the matching colored pawns for these roles in Atlanta.[1]

7. Remove from the game the remaining Role cards and pawngs.[1]

8. Take the Epidemic cards out the Player Deck and set them aside until Step 5.[1]

9. Shuffle the other Player cards (City and Event cards).[1]

10. Deal cards to the players to form their initial hands: 4 cards for a 2-player game, 3 cards for a 3-player game, and 2 cards for a 4-player game.[1]

11. Place the outbreaks marker on the “0” space of the Outbreaks Track.[1]

12. Place the 4 cure markers, “vial” side up, near the Discovered Cure Indicators.[1]

13. Put the 6 research stations and disease cubes nearby.[1]

14. Separate the cubes by color into 4 supply piles.[1]

15. Place 1 research station in Atlanta.[1]

### 5-Player Game Setup

1. During setup, deal a Role card to the 5th player and 2 Player cards (as with 4 players) to each player.[2][3]

### Mutation Challenge Setup

1. Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply.[4][5]

2. Put the purple Discovered Cure Indicator and cure marker on the board.[4][5]

3. Put the 2 Mutation cards in the Infection Discard Pile (do not shuffle them into the Infection Deck).[4][5]

4. After dealing cards to players, but before preparing the Player Deck (step 5), shuffle the 3 Mutation Event cards with the remaining Player cards.[4][5]

### Virulent Strain Challenge Setup

1. Put the normal Epidemic cards in the box.[6][7]

2. Select the Virulent Strain Epidemic cards to use by shuffling them face down before taking the needed number (4-7, based on your difficulty level).[6]

3. Put the unused cards away without looking at them.[6]

4. Divide the remaining player cards into face down piles, as equal in size as you can, so that the number of piles matches the number of Virulent Strain Epidemic cards you are using.[6][8][7]

5. Shuffle 1 Virulent Strain Epidemic card into each pile, face down.[6][8]

6. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom.[6][8]

[1] RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook · p.2

[2] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.2

[3] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.2

[4] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.4 · MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections

[5] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.4

[6] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.3 · VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …

[7] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.3

[8] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — 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 254 ms · ask 14581 ms · total 14845 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 14845 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "2 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.044652, "snippet": "3 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the ", "headingPath": "PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031281, "snippet": "During setup, deal a Role card to the 5th player and 2 Player cards (as with 4 players) to each player. Legendary Game Feeling invincible? Try the Legendary difficulty level. Use the Epidemic card in this expansion to play with 7 Epidemic cards. Play any time. Not an action. EVENT Take 2 exTRa acTIo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030798, "snippet": "Set up the game normally (separating the Player cards into 7 piles before shuffling an Epidemic card into each pile). When you draw the 7 th Epidemic, the infection rate remains at 4 (the track maximum). Warning: Not for the faint of heart... Each challenge adds some difficulty, so you may wish to t", "headingPath": "Shuffle · Adding Challenges", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "OVERVIEW This expansion adds a 5th player, 6 roles, 8 events, and 3 challenges to Pandemic. To get started, play the base game with the new roles and events. You may also add a challenge to vary the game some more. We suggest you try the three challenges in order: • Virulent Strain challenge: makes ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 174 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 174 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 20:23

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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.2	0.046642 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.3	0.044652 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …	p.4	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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)	PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo	p.7	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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.2	0.031281 (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 Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)	Shuffle · Adding Challenges	p.2	0.030798 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.1	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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.2	0.030118 (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 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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)	MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections	p.4	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)	VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …	p.3	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[8]	RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219)		p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 254 ms · first delta 10129 ms · total 14845 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 254 ms · ask 14581 ms · gateway work 14845 ms · total 14845 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 5221
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 636
tok/sec: 137.1 tok/sec — 636 output tokens in 4.639 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 21s 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 43), 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.