RuleSage cited table rulings
← Pandemic

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

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

### 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
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 246 ms · ask 10045 ms · total 10300 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 10300 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.032018, "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": 0.032002, "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": 2, "score": 0.031545, "snippet": "2-infect draw the bottom card from the infection deck and put 3 cubes on that city. discard that card. 3-intensify shuffle the cards in the infection discard pile and put them on top of the infection deck. Montreal Canada 1-incRease move the infection rate marker forward 1 space. 2-infect draw the b", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031498, "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}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.02967, "snippet": "The Mutation challenge adds a 5 th purple disease to the game that appears in unpredictable ways. Players must either cure all 5 diseases or cure the 4 other diseases and have no purple disease cubes on the board. Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply. Put the purple Disco", "headingPath": "MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029199, "snippet": "This expansion adds a 5 th player, 6 roles, 8 events, and 3 challenges to Pandemic. Virulent Strain challenge: makes one disease particularly nasty in unpredictable ways. 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 sug", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.027497, "snippet": "The Mutation challenge adds a 5th purple disease to the game that appears in unpredictable ways. Players must either cure all 5 diseases or cure the 4 other diseases and have no purple disease cubes on the board. Setup Put the 12 purple disease cubes near the other cubes as a supply. Put the purple ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.027106, "snippet": "This challenge pits one player, the Bio-Terrorist, against the others, seeking to create panic throughout the world with a 5 th disease. This challenge works with 3 or 4 players. 5 players (1 Bio-Terrorist and 4 other players) is not recommended. The Bio-Terrorist wins if the other players lose and ", "headingPath": "BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}, {"page": 2, "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}, {"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}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of)
layering — route
not layered — one pooled read, because one book was in scope and there is nothing to split
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 20:44

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 TWO-ARM fuse (full-text + vector), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.03279 — both arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). Measured healthy band on this fuse: 0.016–0.033. 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 Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.2 0.032018 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) Shuffle · Adding Challenges p.2 0.032002 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.2 0.031545 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.2 0.031498 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) MUTATION CHALLENGE · Setup · The Mutation (Purple) Disease · Mutation Cards · Mutation Event Cards · Infections p.4 0.02967 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · … p.2 0.029199 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.4 0.027497 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play p.5 0.027106 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033) 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
[1] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) OVERVIEW · New Roles · New Events · Borrowed Time · Mobile Hospital · New Assignment · … 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) 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
[5] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.3 no quote on the wire
[6] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.3 no quote on the wire
[7] 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
[8] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 246 ms · first delta 7079 ms · total 10300 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 246 ms · ask 10045 ms · gateway work 10300 ms · total 10300 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
5014
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
434
tok/sec
138.0 tok/sec — 434 output tokens in 3.146 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 10s 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
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

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.