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

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Spirit Island 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 setup the game?

Answered Aug 12, 2026 gemma4:26b read Spirit Island · Spirit Island: Branch & Claw

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 5, 2026 gemma4:26b read Spirit Island

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 4, 2026 gemma4:26b read Spirit Island

Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e Answered

1. Choose an Adversary and/or Scenario first, as they may change rules of Setup.[1][2]
2. Randomly pick one Island Board per player and arrange them to form the Island.[3]
3. For specific player counts, use these Thematic Board layouts: 1 Player uses Northeast; 2 Players use West and East (touching on the side opposite the Ocean); 3 Players use West, East, and Northeast above East; 4 Players use West, East, Northwest, and Northeast.[4]
4. Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as indicated by the icons in each land.[3]
5. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color.[5]
6. Each player chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards (their starting hand).[5]
7. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card.[5]
8. Each player starts on a different Island Board and follows Setup instructions on the back of their Spirit Panel, which includes putting Presence into one or more lands on their starting board.[5]
9. Players flip their Spirit Panels and place all remaining Presence onto the dashed circles on their Presence Tracks, leaving the leftmost numbers with solid circles uncovered.[5]
10. Shuffle the Minor and Major Power Decks and put them near the board with room for discard piles.[3]
11. Put the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and the Dahan near the board.[3]
12. Create the Invader Deck by mixing 3 Stage I cards (on top), 4 Stage II cards, and 5 Stage III cards (on bottom).[2]
13. To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action: reveal the top card of the Invader Deck, have the Invaders Explore in that land type, and place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space.[6]
[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.22 · ADVERSARIES
[2] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · MAKING THE INVADER DECK
[3] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY
[4] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.23 · THEMATIC BOARD SETUP
[5] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER SETUP
[6] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · INVADERS' STARTING ACTION

Spirit Island: Branch & Clawbg-191831-en-1e Answered

If using the extension to the Invader Board:
1. Add the extension to the Invader Board.[1]
2. Put the Beasts, Wilds, Disease, and Strife tokens in the corresponding areas on the Invader Board extension.[1]
3. Shuffle the Event Deck and put it on the Events space on the Invader Board extension.[1]
4. During Setup, put one [token] and one [token] on each Island Board.[1][2]
5. Put the [token] in the lowest-numbered land with no printed Setup icons.[1][2]
6. Put the [token] in land #2 (with the City).[1][2]
If playing with the thematic side of the Island Boards:
1. Place tokens as indicated by the Setup icons in each land.[1][3]
[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island: Branch & Claw — Rulebook · p.7 · SETUP CHANGES · SHORT ON SPACE?
[2] RULEBOOK Spirit Island: Branch & Claw — Rulebook · p.24 · TOKENS · AIDED BY · NEW TURN ORDER · Spirit Phase · Slow Power Phase (Cards and Innate) Time Passes
[3] RULEBOOK Spirit Island: Branch & Claw — Rulebook · p.17 · SOLO PLAY · THEMATIC MAP

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 18470 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 18470 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 (Spirit Island) ⚠ 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 2884 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
  • ruling 1387 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
  • ruling 993 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
debug row retained until
Nov 3, 2026 21:07

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 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.

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

timing split
retrieval n/a · first delta n/a · total 18470 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 18470 ms · total 18470 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 34s 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.
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
decision
SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
setup
#bookoutcometimings search refsanswer cited streamarmsrow
1 Spirit Island (bg-162886-en-1e) Answered queued 0 ms · search 259 ms · ask 10515 ms · first delta 7873 ms · gateway work 10784 ms 8 6 STREAMED base rulebook doc 58 boosted · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 7 ruling 1692
2 Spirit Island: Branch & Claw (bg-191831-en-1e) Answered queued 0 ms · search 254 ms · ask 7422 ms · first delta 6407 ms · gateway work 7686 ms 8 3 STREAMED no base-rulebook boost — this edition registers no ingested rulebook to anchor retrieval to · no registered errata card matched · keyed on edition 122 ruling 1693

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 7), 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.