You asked
What does a badlands token do?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e · Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e
I looked through Spirit Island'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.
There are no tokens in Spirit Island for tracking Damage. Instead models are built to be rotated to help track Damage done to them. (For more details, see sidebars on page 15 and 16.)
A few Powers have temporary effects on a land (such as 'Invaders skip all Actions'). There are Reminder Tokens you can use to mark those lands for the turn if you want; just remember to remove them at the end of the turn! REMINDER TOKENS
Explorer: A type of Invader. Does 1 Damage, has 1 Health. Town: A type of Invader. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. 1 Fear when destroyed. City: A type of Invader. Does 3 Damage, has 3 Health. 2 Fear when destroyed. Dahan: A clan/village of local Islanders. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. Fear: Fright done
Some Powers let you Defend a target land, which reduces Damage done by Invaders to the land and/or Dahan. 'Defend 2' means 'Whenever Invaders deal Damage in target land this turn, reduce by 2 the Damage done to the land and to Dahan.' If multiple Defend effects are used in one land, they add togethe
Adversaries are specific colonizing Powers from the world of Spirit Island. Including an Adversary in a game is optional, but doing so adds an additional layer of depth and strategy to the game. Be sure to choose your foe before Setup begins, as some may change the rules of Setup. The Adversary Pane
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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 267 ms · ask 8431 ms · total 8707 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 8707 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 18, "score": 0.031778, "snippet": "There are no tokens in Spirit Island for tracking Damage. Instead models are built to be rotated to help track Damage done to them. (For more details, see sidebars on page 15 and 16.)", "headingPath": "DAMAGE TOKENS?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030622, "snippet": "A few Powers have temporary effects on a land (such as 'Invaders skip all Actions'). There are Reminder Tokens you can use to mark those lands for the turn if you want; just remember to remove them at the end of the turn! REMINDER TOKENS", "headingPath": "SINGLE-TURN EFFECTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "Explorer: A type of Invader. Does 1 Damage, has 1 Health. Town: A type of Invader. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. 1 Fear when destroyed. City: A type of Invader. Does 3 Damage, has 3 Health. 2 Fear when destroyed. Dahan: A clan/village of local Islanders. Does 2 Damage, has 2 Health. Fear: Fright done", "headingPath": "ICONOGRAPHY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029139, "snippet": "Some Powers let you Defend a target land, which reduces Damage done by Invaders to the land and/or Dahan. 'Defend 2' means 'Whenever Invaders deal Damage in target land this turn, reduce by 2 the Damage done to the land and to Dahan.' If multiple Defend effects are used in one land, they add togethe", "headingPath": "DEFEND", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.028718, "snippet": "Adversaries are specific colonizing Powers from the world of Spirit Island. Including an Adversary in a game is optional, but doing so adds an additional layer of depth and strategy to the game. Be sure to choose your foe before Setup begins, as some may change the rules of Setup. The Adversary Pane", "headingPath": "ADVERSARIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.028139, "snippet": "Unless a Power explicitly says otherwise: It only affects one single target land. 'Destroy up to 3 Explorers' will let you destroy up to 3 Explorers in the same land - not in multiple different lands. If a Power has multiple effects, they ALL apply to the same land. It only affects the current turn.", "headingPath": "GENERAL PRINCIPLE: ONE LAND! ONE TURN! ONE USE!", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.027746, "snippet": "Growth Gain Energy Play and pay for Power Cards Fast Power Phase (Cards and Innate) Invader Phase Blighted Island Effect Fear Effects Ravage: Invaders Damage the land and Dahan. Add Blight if the land takes 2 or more Damage. Surviving Dahan fight back. Build: If Invaders are present, add a Town or C", "headingPath": "Spirit Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.027364, "snippet": "The Invaders have begun to colonize your Island! While not specifically aiming to exterminate you, their colonization and 'taming' of the land has upset the natural balance. The goal of the game is to drive off the Invaders by meeting the victory conditions of the current Terror Level. As more Invad", "headingPath": "INVADERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
- 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 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 58 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 20:32
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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | DAMAGE TOKENS? | p.18 | 0.031778 (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)) | 183 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | SINGLE-TURN EFFECTS | p.17 | 0.030622 (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)) | 237 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | ICONOGRAPHY | p.32 | 0.029762 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | DEFEND | p.18 | 0.029139 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | ADVERSARIES | p.22 | 0.028718 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | GENERAL PRINCIPLE: ONE LAND! ONE TURN! ONE USE! | p.17 | 0.028139 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | Spirit Phase | p.32 | 0.027746 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS | p.15 | 0.027364 (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
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 |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 267 ms · first delta 8561 ms · total 8707 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 267 ms · ask 8431 ms · gateway work 8707 ms · total 8707 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 2889
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 28s 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
- 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
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 7), 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.