RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

How does the mutation strain work?

Answered counted as answered

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

The Mutation challenge adds a 5th (purple) disease that behaves differently from the original four.[1][2] If playing with the Bio-Terrorist challenge, the purple disease cannot be the Virulent Strain.[3] Additionally, when combining the Mutation and Virulent Strain challenges, if a card drawn to resolve a Mutation card is a Virulent Strain city, that card does not count towards Rate Effect.[4]

[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.3 · VIRULENT STRAIN CHALLENGE · Setup · Prepare the Player Deck · Determining the Virulent Strain · Virulent Strain Epidemic Effects · Winning and Losing · …
[4] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook · p.3 · Government Interference · Rate Effect
🔧 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 260 ms · ask 10880 ms · total 11151 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 11151 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 1, "score": 0.028893, "snippet": "3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.028034, "snippet": "The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe", "headingPath": "QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.028021, "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}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.027109, "snippet": "At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.026495, "snippet": "rSBurg lgierS tehran Play Example: On the first turn, Ben does 4 actions: (1) Drive to Chicago (from Atlanta), (2) Drive to San Francisco, (3) Treat Disease in San Francisco, removing a blue disease cube there, and (4) Treat Disease in San Francisco again, removing a second blue disease cube. Baghda", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.026137, "snippet": "1 by Matt Leacock Do you have what it takes to save humanity? As skilled members of a disease-fighting team, you must keep four deadly diseases at bay while discovering their cures. You and your teammates will travel across the globe, treating infections while finding resources for cures. You must w", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.02579, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.025342, "snippet": "Do you have what it takes to save humanity? As skilled members of a disease-fighting team, you must keep four deadly diseases at bay while discovering their cures. You and your teammates will travel across the globe, treating infections while finding resources for cures. You must work together, usin", "headingPath": "by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}]
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": 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": "Government Interference · Rate Effect", "sharpsignalDocId": 219}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 174 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 174 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 21:09

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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) p.1 0.028893 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS p.8 0.028034 (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 Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) BIO-TERRORIST CHALLENGE · Setup · Play p.5 0.028021 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) Discover a Cure p.4 0.027109 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) Discover a Cure p.5 0.026495 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) p.1 0.026137 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · … p.4 0.02579 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) by Matt Leacock · CONTENTS · 59 Player cards · OVERVIEW p.1 0.025342 (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 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) 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
[4] RULEBOOK Pandemic: On the Brink — Rulebook (corpus doc 219) Government Interference · Rate Effect p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 260 ms · first delta 10465 ms · total 11151 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 260 ms · ask 10880 ms · gateway work 11151 ms · total 11151 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4410
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
87
tok/sec
135.1 tok/sec — 87 output tokens in 0.644 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 8s 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 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.