Ruling — SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

← SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligencebg-418059-en-1e

For standard player setup:

1. Each player selects a color and takes the corresponding pieces.[1][2]

2. Keep pieces near your player board.[1][2]

3. Take the starting income card in your color.[1][2]

4. Take the appropriate number of tokens for credits and energy as shown on the back of the starting income card (4 publicity, 4 credits, 3 energy).[1][2]

5. Place your publicity counter on the marked space of the publicity track next to the solar system.[1][2]

6. Draw 5 cards from the deck.[1][2]

7. Turn one of your cards into income.[1][2]

8. The player who last saw a UFO will be the starting player; give them the starting player marker.[2]

For solo game setup:

1. Set up the game as you normally would for two players.[3]

2. Choose a difficulty and give the rival the corresponding player board (the 1-star and 2-star difficulties share a board).[3]

3. Give the rival all pieces of one color.[3]

4. Place one of the rival's markers on the starting space of the progress track.[3]

5. Determine a starting player at random; the starting player marker will move between you and the rival after each round.[3]

6. The first player starts with 1 victory point and the other starts with 2.[3]

7. Set both publicity markers to 4.[3]

8. Take the 4 basic action cards (S.1-S.4) and shuffle them face down to form the rival action deck; if playing on 3-star difficulty or higher, randomly select one advanced action card (S.5-S.14) and shuffle it into the deck.[3]

9. Set aside all alien species special action cards.[3]

10. Shuffle level I, II, and III objectives face down into separate stacks.[3]

11. Take the corresponding number of objectives from each stack as indicated by the rival's player board and assemble them with level III at the bottom, level II in the middle, and level I on top.[3]

12. Reveal the top 3 tiles of the assembled objectives stack to serve as the first objectives.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income

[2] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.6

[3] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.22 · SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.

🔧 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 251 ms · ask 11445 ms · total 487059 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 475353 ms · generation 11706 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 22, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "In the solo game, you will compete against a rival research institution. Your goal is to outscore your rival at the end of the game. Set up the game as you normally would for two players. Choose a difficulty and give the rival the corresponding player board. (The 1-star and 2-star difficulties both ", "headingPath": "SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "} Rotate the solar system before choosing your tech. } You pay 1 extra to leave asteroids. } When you tuck a card for income, you also gain that resource immediately. } The first player to pass advances the solar system at the end of their turn, before taking the end-of-round cards. Don't forget to ", "headingPath": "RULES REMINDERS · CARD TERMINOLOGY · SETUP REMINDERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Discard down to 4 cards if you have more than 4. Note: There's no limit in number of cards you can have in your hand during the round. Check whether you rotate the solar system. If you are the first player to pass this round, take the rotation reminder token and set it beside the stack, then rotate ", "headingPath": "MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "PLAYER SETUP Each player selects a color and takes the corresponding pieces. Keep them near your player board. The player who last saw a UFO will be the starting player – give them the starting player marker. Your score starts at 1 if you're the first player, 2 if you're the second player, 3 if you'", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player selects a color and takes the corresponding pieces. Keep them near your player board. Take the starting income card in your color. Your starting resources are shown on the back of the card - 4 publicity, 4 credits, 3 energy, and 5 cards. To track publicity, place your publicity counter o", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "GAME OVERVIEW CARD OVERVIEW The game is played in 5 rounds. The player with the starting player marker takes the first turn of the round. Players take turns in clockwise order, skipping any players that have already passed for the round. At the end of round 5, the final score is calculated and the p", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "As your main action, you can play a card for its effect (the white part of the card). The cost is printed on the card. If the card's effect includes other actions (launching a probe, scanning nearby stars, etc.) you perform the action without paying its standard cost. After resolving the effect, pla", "headingPath": "PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "The game ends after 5 rounds. Once the last player has passed, it is time for final scoring: The player with the most points wins. Break ties in favor of whoever is the bigger Carl Sagan fan. (Just kidding. These are 100-point games. If players have the same score, they have earned that tie.) Each g", "headingPath": "END OF GAME · Gold Scoring Tiles · OTHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 251 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 251 boosted
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 6, 2026 14:16

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. 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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.	p.22	0.048139 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	RULES REMINDERS · CARD TERMINOLOGY · SETUP REMINDERS	p.28	0.045455 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row	p.19	0.044796 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.6	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
#5	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income	p.6	0.032258 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.7	0.03125 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions	p.15	0.030769 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	END OF GAME · Gold Scoring Tiles · OTHER	p.21	0.030415 (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 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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.	p.22	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 251 ms · first delta 7971 ms · total 487059 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 475353 ms · retrieval 251 ms · ask 11445 ms · gateway work 11706 ms · total 487059 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3391
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 507
tok/sec: 138.2 tok/sec — 507 output tokens in 3.669 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

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

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 177), 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.