RuleSage cited table rulings
← Spirit Island

You asked

How does an event card resolve at the start of a turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e · Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e

During each Invader Phase, an Event Card is resolved according to these steps:
1. After any Blighted Island effect and before resolving any Earned Fear Cards, draw one Event Card.[1]
2. Determine which of the two possible primary Events to perform based on the Health of the Island (Healthy/Blighted), the Terror Level (I, II, or III), or the Stage of Invasion (I, II, or III).[1]
3. Perform as much of the card's instructions as you can, moving from top to bottom and skipping anything inapplicable or impossible.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island: Branch & Claw — Rulebook · p.8 · EVENT CARDS · BLIGHTED ISLAND

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 286 ms · ask 12916 ms · total 13212 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 13212 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.032522, "snippet": "Players resolve Fast Powers - both Innate Powers printed on their Spirit Panel and Power Cards they played. Power resolution can be done mostly simultaneously. When timing becomes important, Powers may be resolved in whatever order the players want, so long as no Power interrupts another partway thr", "headingPath": "FAST POWER PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "This is the wrap-up phase at the end of each turn. Discard: Players discard all Power Cards played this turn into their personal discard piles. Damage and Elements Clear: All Elements go away. All Damage done during the turn goes away; if you turned any pieces on their sides to note partial Damage, ", "headingPath": "TIME PASSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.031498, "snippet": "You suddenly realize that for the past 4 turns you've been using a Power Card on lands it can't actually target. What to do? The answer is: don't sweat it. Especially on your first play or two, you'll likely make minor mistakes here and there. They're unlikely to break anything: the game will just b", "headingPath": "WHOOPS!", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.03101, "snippet": "If any Fear Cards have been earned (see Fear and Terror, page 12), pick up the whole face-down stack, flip it over and resolve the cards one at a time in the order they were earned. Then discard them to the Fear Discard Space on the board. Use only the effect listed next to the current Terror Level.", "headingPath": "2. FEAR", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030536, "snippet": "As you play Power Cards, put the required Energy on top of them. This will help you remember to pay for them. When you resolve a Power Card, you can push it forward or turn it sideways to note that it has been used. Don't discard it until end of turn, because you may be making use of its Elements fo", "headingPath": "STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029644, "snippet": "Most Stage II cards have a flag icon. Its effect depends on your Adversary. If you are playing without an Adversary, ignore the flag icons. Escalation effects happen as soon as the card is revealed, before Explore, unless the Adversary states otherwise. Some may make changes to how the upcoming Expl", "headingPath": "STAGE II ESCALATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029211, "snippet": "Energy: Each Spirit Phase, gain Energy equal to the highest uncovered number. Card Plays: Each Spirit Phase, play no more than the highest uncovered number. Reclaim One: Each Spirit Phase, you may return one Power Card from discard to hand. Bonus Element: Gained so long as it is uncovered. (All play", "headingPath": "PRESENCE TRACK", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.028595, "snippet": "Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EVENT CARDS · BLIGHTED ISLAND", "sharpsignalDocId": 220}]
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
layering — route
not layered — one pooled read: the books were read together and that read answered, so re-reading them one at a time would spend the same GPU to re-derive an answer already given
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 21:02

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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) FAST POWER PHASE p.8 0.032522 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) TIME PASSES p.10 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
#3 RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) WHOOPS! p.20 0.031498 (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) 2. FEAR p.9 0.03101 (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) STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY p.20 0.030536 (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) STAGE II ESCALATION p.10 0.029644 (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) PRESENCE TRACK p.32 0.029211 (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) TABLE OF CONTENTS p.3 0.028595 (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
[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island: Branch & Claw — Rulebook (corpus doc 220) EVENT CARDS · BLIGHTED ISLAND p.8 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 286 ms · first delta 12205 ms · total 13212 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 286 ms · ask 12916 ms · gateway work 13212 ms · total 13212 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3083
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
126
tok/sec
135.5 tok/sec — 126 output tokens in 0.930 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s 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
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

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.