Ruling — Pandemic

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Refused — answer could not be verified against the rulebook counted as refused 2 of 2 books answered

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

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Pandemic 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 set up the game? →

Answered Aug 8, 2026 gemma4:26b read Pandemic

How do I set up the game? →

Answered Aug 2, 2026 gemma4:26b

Pandemicbg-30549-en-1e Answered

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 any remaining Role cards and pawns from the game.[1]

8. Take the Epidemic cards out of 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 based on the number of players: 4 cards for a 2-player game, 3 cards for a 3-player game, or 2 cards for a 4-player game.[1]

11. Set the game's difficulty level by using either 4, 5, or 6 Epidemic cards (for Introductory, Standard, or Heroic games) and remove any unused Epidemic cards from the game.[2]

12. 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 Epidemic cards being used.[2]

13. Shuffle 1 Epidemic card into each pile, face down, and stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom.[2]

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

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

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

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

18. Place the infection rate marker on the left-most “2” space of the Infection Rate Track.[2]

19. Shuffle the Infection cards and flip over 3 of them, putting 3 disease cubes of the matching color on each of these cities.[2]

20. Flip over 3 more cards and put 2 disease cubes on each of these cities.[2]

21. Flip over 3 more cards and put 1 disease cube on each of these cities.[2]

22. Place these 9 cards face up on the Infection Discard Pile.[3][2]

23. The other Infection cards form the Infection Deck.[3][2]

[1] RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook · p.2

[2] RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook · p.3

Pandemic: On the Brinkbg-40849-en-1e Answered

### Standard Game Setup

1. Add the 6 new Role cards to the base game Role cards before shuffling and dealing 1 Role card to each player.[1][2]

2. Add the 8 new Event cards to the 5 base game Event cards and shuffle them face down.[1][2]

3. Add 2 Event cards per player to the Player cards, before shuffling and dealing Player cards to each player.[1][2]

4. For a 5-player game, deal a Role card to the 5th player and 2 Player cards to each player.[3][1][2]

### Virulent Strain Challenge Setup

1. Put the normal Epidemic cards in the box.[4][5]

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).[4][5]

3. Put the unused cards away without looking at them.[4][5]

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.[4][6][5]

5. Shuffle 1 Virulent Strain Epidemic card into each pile, face down.[4][6][5]

6. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom.[4][6]

### Mutation Challenge Setup

1. Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply.[7][8]

2. Put the purple Discovered Cure Indicator and cure marker on the board.[7][8]

3. Put the 2 Mutation cards in the Infection Discard Pile (do not shuffle them into the Infection Deck).[7][8]

4. After dealing cards to players, but before preparing the Player Deck, shuffle the 3 Mutation Event cards with the remaining Player cards.[7][8]

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

[2] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.2 · OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …

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

[4] 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 · …

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

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

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

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

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

REFUSED_UNVERIFIED — Refused — answer could not be verified against the rulebook

corpus profile

live

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search null ms · ask null ms · total 18846 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 18846 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

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=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

layering — route

layered — the question is setup-shaped, so every book was read on its own (the setup-shape lens below shows the pattern that matched)

layering — how this ask was counted

counted as REFUSED_UNVERIFIED — carried by layer 1 (Pandemic) ⚠ the row says REFUSED_UNVERIFIED but its books roll up to ANSWERED; layer 2 ANSWERED; 0 not read; rung: ANSWERED ▸ ABSTAINED ▸ UNATTRIBUTABLE ▸ REFUSED

layering — books not run

layer valve: rulesage.table.max-layers = 8 (today's setting, not necessarily the one this ask ran under). A book the valve trims is not read and leaves NO row of its own, so it cannot be listed above or counted in the census — an empty list here means the corpus breaker marked nobody, not that nothing was left out.

layering — queued between books

queued between layers: 0 ms of the 0 ms total queue wait (every wait after the first is a mid-ask wait, because the generation permit is released and re-taken for each book)

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 2002 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
ruling 887 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148

debug row retained until

Nov 3, 2026 20:37

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.

no payload was recorded for this ruling (the call never returned one)

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

no payload was recorded for this ruling (the call never returned one)

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval n/a · first delta n/a · total 18846 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 n/a ms · ask n/a ms · gateway work 18846 ms · total 18846 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 30s ago)
stream path: not requested — no progress token attached (stream-answers off, or a non-streaming caller)
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: REFUSED_UNVERIFIED — Refused — answer could not be verified against the rulebook
abstain rationale: withheld BY DESIGN: this refusal's text is the drafted answer that failed the quote gate, and nothing unverified serves (D-9) — it is never recorded, here or anywhere a reader can reach

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

layers — one row per book this ask read

#	book	outcome	timings	search refs	answer cited	stream	arms	row
1	Pandemic (bg-30549-en-1e)	Answered	queued 0 ms · search 250 ms · ask 8166 ms · first delta 4632 ms · gateway work 8427 ms	8	3	STREAMED	base rulebook doc 174 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 43	ruling 1477
2	Pandemic: On the Brink (bg-40849-en-1e)	Answered	queued 0 ms · search 246 ms · ask 10161 ms · first delta 7220 ms · gateway work 10419 ms	8	8	STREAMED	no base-rulebook boost — this edition registers no ingested rulebook to anchor retrieval to · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 121	ruling 1478

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: each book this ask READ got its own errata gate, keyed on that book's own edition — so an expansion's registered cards were matched against that expansion's own layer rather than left outside the match. The per-layer table above shows what each one sent, and any book that was not read ran no gate at all.