You asked
What does a badlands token do?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain 0 of 2 books answeredAsked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e · Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e
Read together first; no grounded answer, so each book was read on its own.
Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
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
The answerer's own words:
I don't have enough information.
Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
Spirit Island: Branch & Claw has nothing to add here — an expansion's rulebook only speaks where it changes the game, so silence on a base-game question is the book working, not failing.
The answerer's own words:
I don't have enough information.
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
-
- Spirit Island — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search null ms · ask null ms · total 23507 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 23507 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 books were read together first and that read did not answer, so each book was then read on its own
- layering — how this ask was counted
- counted as ABSTAINED — carried by layer 1 (Spirit Island); layer 2 ABSTAINED; 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 — the pooled probe
- ABSTAINED — queued 0 ms · search 257 ms · ask 8396 ms · first delta 8555 ms · gateway work 8662 ms · refs 8
- 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
-
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 21:02
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
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)
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval n/a · first delta n/a · total 23507 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 23507 ms · total 23507 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
layers — one row per book this ask read
| # | book | outcome | timings | search refs | answer cited | stream | arms | row |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| probe | every book, read together (bg-162886-en-1e) | Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below | queued 0 ms · search 257 ms · ask 8396 ms · first delta 8555 ms · gateway work 8662 ms | 8 | 0 | STREAMED | base rulebook doc 58 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 | ruling 1665 |
| 1 | Spirit Island (bg-162886-en-1e) | Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below | queued 0 ms · search 244 ms · ask 7874 ms · first delta 8014 ms · gateway work 8128 ms | 8 | 0 | STREAMED | base rulebook doc 58 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 | ruling 1666 |
| 2 | Spirit Island: Branch & Claw (bg-191831-en-1e) | Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below | queued 0 ms · search 268 ms · ask 6439 ms · first delta 6596 ms · gateway work 6717 ms | 8 | 0 | STREAMED | 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) · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 | ruling 1667 |
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.