RuleSage cited table rulings
← Darwin's Journey

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Darwin's Journeybg-322289-en-1e

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Darwin's Journey 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 8, 2026 gemma4:26b read Darwin's Journey

How do I setup the game?

Answered Aug 8, 2026 gemma4:26b read Darwin's Journey

I looked through Darwin's Journey'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.

RULEBOOK Darwin's Journey — Rulebook · p.4 · Main Board · For your first game
Place the main board with the side corresponding to the number of players face up. One side of the board is for one-, two- & three-player games , while the other side is for four-player games. Shuffle the 12 Special Action tiles, then draw 6 and place them face up on the corresponding Diary. Place t
RULEBOOK Darwin's Journey — Rulebook · p.6 · Player Setup · Crew Cards Setup · Option 1: First Play Setup
Each player places in front of them the following items that match their player color: 1 Personal Board 2 remaining Explorers 5 Workers 5 Tents 6 Personal Lens Tokens 1 Cube 12 Stamps Place 4 workers onto worker spots on the bottom left of the personal board (2A). The 5 th worker (2B) will only ente
RULEBOOK Darwin's Journey — Rulebook · p.7 · Option 2: Standard Setup · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles
Shuffle the deck of Crew cards and deal 4 cards to each player. Each player selects one card to keep and places it face down in front of them. Players pass the remaining cards to their left. This process repeats until each player has three cards face down in front of them. Place all cards not chosen
RULEBOOK Darwin's Journey — Rulebook · p.26 · Darwin's Journey Solo Rules · Select Alfred's Difficulty · Main Board · Player Setup · Gaining Crew Cards · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles
Darwin's Journey can be played solo, where the player competes against an artificial opponent named Alfred. Each player board has an Alfred opponent on its opposite side. There are several difficulty levels of Alfred that can be chosen: Select an Alfred difficulty level and place the associated boar
RULEBOOK Darwin's Journey — Rulebook · p.11 · Round Structure · Action Phase · Modifier Icons · Board Actions · Gain Victory Points · Gain Coins
Each of the game's five rounds consists of four phases completed in order. On each player's turn, they must place a single worker from their personal board onto a location on the main board. If a player no longer has any available workers, they must pass, and they take no more turns for the rest of
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 279 ms · ask 8364 ms · total 349509 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 340856 ms · generation 8653 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Place the main board with the side corresponding to the number of players face up. One side of the board is for one-, two- & three-player games , while the other side is for four-player games. Shuffle the 12 Special Action tiles, then draw 6 and place them face up on the corresponding Diary. Place t", "headingPath": "Main Board · For your first game", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Each player places in front of them the following items that match their player color: 1 Personal Board 2 remaining Explorers 5 Workers 5 Tents 6 Personal Lens Tokens 1 Cube 12 Stamps Place 4 workers onto worker spots on the bottom left of the personal board (2A). The 5 th worker (2B) will only ente", "headingPath": "Player Setup · Crew Cards Setup · Option 1: First Play Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Shuffle the deck of Crew cards and deal 4 cards to each player. Each player selects one card to keep and places it face down in front of them. Players pass the remaining cards to their left. This process repeats until each player has three cards face down in front of them. Place all cards not chosen", "headingPath": "Option 2: Standard Setup · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "Darwin's Journey can be played solo, where the player competes against an artificial opponent named Alfred. Each player board has an Alfred opponent on its opposite side. There are several difficulty levels of Alfred that can be chosen: Select an Alfred difficulty level and place the associated boar", "headingPath": "Darwin's Journey Solo Rules · Select Alfred's Difficulty · Main Board · Player Setup · Gaining Crew Cards · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "Each of the game's five rounds consists of four phases completed in order. On each player's turn, they must place a single worker from their personal board onto a location on the main board. If a player no longer has any available workers, they must pass, and they take no more turns for the rest of ", "headingPath": "Round Structure · Action Phase · Modifier Icons · Board Actions · Gain Victory Points · Gain Coins", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "Many placement locations have Wax Seal requirements that must be met to place a specific worker there. Each player starts the game with four workers on their personal board, and each worker starts with one Wax Seal in their corresponding row. Each player's fifth worker will never have any Wax Seals ", "headingPath": "Wax Seal Requirements · Perform Location Actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Follow the standard 'Player Setup' instructions with the following changes: During step #1, ensure that the personal board is showing the Alfred side. Place Alfred's personal board directly above your own. Find the 2 Alfred Bonus Track cards of Alfred's color. Randomly place them above the two indic", "headingPath": "Alfred Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place one Coin to the right of each row of the Museum display. Place one cube of each player color on the red book at the start of the victory point track. From now on these cubes are referred to as victory point markers. Place one cube of each player color onto the large book at the start of the Th", "headingPath": "For your first game", "sharpsignalDocId": 282}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 282 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 282 boosted
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 1852 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
  • ruling 1827 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
debug row retained until
Nov 6, 2026 14:13

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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Main Board · For your first game p.4 0.047875 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Player Setup · Crew Cards Setup · Option 1: First Play Setup p.6 0.047643 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Option 2: Standard Setup · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles p.7 0.046875 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Darwin's Journey Solo Rules · Select Alfred's Difficulty · Main Board · Player Setup · Gaining Crew Cards · Drafting Starting Personal Objective Tiles p.26 0.046244 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Round Structure · Action Phase · Modifier Icons · Board Actions · Gain Victory Points · Gain Coins p.11 0.045921 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Wax Seal Requirements · Perform Location Actions p.10 0.045285 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) Alfred Setup p.26 0.032787 (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 Darwin's Journey — Rulebook (corpus doc 282) For your first game p.5 0.030303 (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
timing split
retrieval 279 ms · first delta 8534 ms · total 349509 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 340856 ms · retrieval 279 ms · ask 8364 ms · gateway work 8653 ms · total 349509 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3739
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
142.9 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.063 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 57s 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
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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)
set up

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 211), 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.