RuleSage cited table rulings
← Shallow Sea

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Shallow Seabg-428440-en-1e

1. Prepare as you would for a standard game (excluding Ecosystem Cards).[1][2]
2. Place the Lionfish Card next to your Ocean Board.[1]
3. Shuffle all the Coral Tiles and place them into the Coral Pouch.[3]
4. Add the specified amount of Fish to the Fish Pouch based on player count and mix well.[3]
5. Place the Fish Pouch below the Coral Pouch and return any unused Fish to the box.[3]
6. Select 10 types of Sealife Tiles to use in the game.[3]
7. Add the specified amount of Sealife Tiles to the Sealife Pouch based on player count and mix well.[3]
8. Place the Sealife Pouch below the Fish Pouch and return any unused Tiles to the box.[3]
9. Coral Pool: Draw 5 Coral Tiles from the Coral Pouch and lay them face up next to the Coral Pouch.[3]
10. Fish Pool: Draw 5 Fish from the Fish Pouch and place one below each Coral Tile in the Coral Pool; if this is your first game, draw Fish from the pouch that match the colors of the Coral Tiles in the Coral Pool and place them below the corresponding Coral Tiles.[3]
11. Sealife Pool: Draw 5 Sealife Tiles from the Sealife Pouch and lay them face up next to the Sealife Pouch.[3]
12. Select 1 card from each of the Orange and Blue Ecosystem Cards and place them face up next to the Pools, returning unused cards to the box.[3][4]
13. Each player places an Ocean Board in front of them.[3][4]
14. Each player takes 5 Seashells.[3][4]
15. Place 2 Seashells on the Ocean Board and keep the other 3 nearby, outside the Ocean Board.[4]
16. Return any unused Seashells back into the box.[4]
[1] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook · p.12 · GAME SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook · p.12 · GAME SETUP
[3] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME SETUP
[4] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME SETUP
🔧 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 220 ms · ask 10669 ms · total 1755450 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 1744553 ms · generation 10897 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 12, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Prepare a standard game (see page 3) EXCLUDING Ecosystem Cards. NOTE For your first game, use the provided Sealife Tile setup below.", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Prepare as you would for a standard game (see page 3). Then, place the Lionfish Card next to your Ocean Board.", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "· Shuffle all the Coral Tiles and place them into the Coral Pouch. Ensure the Coral Pouch is within easy reach of all players. Refer to the table below for the required number of Fish based on player count. Add the specified amount to the Fish Pouch and mix well. Place the Fish Pouch below the Coral", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Select 1 card from each of the Orange and Blue Ecosystem Cards and place them face up next to the Pools. Return unused cards to the box. For your first game, we recommend using Cryptic Coloration (Orange #1) and Bountiful Caves (Blue #2) . NOTE Each player places an Ocean Board in front of them. Eac", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each player takes a turn, clockwise, until the end of the game. During your turn, perfom the following actions in the order:", "headingPath": "GOAL OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Whenever you need to spend a Seashell, you may instead draw a random Fish from the Fish Pouch and place it on the Lionfish Card. This can be done at any time during the game, as many times as you like. When placing Fish on the Lionfish Card, place the first 2 Fish in the two empty spaces at the top ", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY CHANGES", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In Shallow Sea, you can earn achievements whether you're playing solo or with multiple players. Use the Achievement Record Sheet below to track accomplishments for up to 4 players. Complete all achievements to reach Legendary Mariner and make your name shine! Follow these steps to play in Achievemen", "headingPath": "SCORING", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.029437, "snippet": "The base game includes a total of 22 types of Sealife Tiles, from which players select 10 to use in the game. Players can freely choose their desired combination of Sealife Tiles, but for a more balanced gameplay experience, we recommend following the guide below. Use this guide to create a unique p", "headingPath": "SEALIFE TILES SETUP GUIDE", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 64}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 64 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 64 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 14:39

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 Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.12 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 132
#2 RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.12 0.048131 (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)) 110
#3 RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.3 0.047379 (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 Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.3 0.047371 (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 Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GOAL OF THE GAME p.4 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)) 124
#6 RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAMEPLAY CHANGES p.12 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
#7 RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) SCORING p.13 0.029851 (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 Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) SEALIFE TILES SETUP GUIDE p.20 0.029437 (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 Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.12 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.12 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.3 no quote on the wire
[4] RULEBOOK Shallow Sea — Rulebook (corpus doc 64) GAME SETUP p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 220 ms · first delta 7776 ms · total 1755450 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 1744553 ms · retrieval 220 ms · ask 10669 ms · gateway work 10897 ms · total 1755450 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2176
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
428
tok/sec
139.3 tok/sec — 428 output tokens in 3.072 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 12s 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
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 11), 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.