Ruling — The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

← The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Crew: The Quest for Planet Ninebg-284083-en-1e

Depending on the number of players and specific mission requirements, the setup involves the following steps:

**General Setup**

1. Distribute all playing cards to the players.[1]

2. If task cards are in the game, divide them among the players before any communication occurs.[2]

3. If applicable, distribute task cards.[3]

**Setup with Task Tokens**

1. Place the indicated task tokens face up in the center of the table.[4]

2. Draw the task cards and place them from left to hand starting with the first task token, ensuring no token is assigned to more than one card.[4]

**Two-Player Setup**

1. Put the four rocket card aside.[5]

2. With the remaining 39 large playing cards, put seven face down in a row, one next to another.[5]

3. Put an additional seven cards face up in a row on the first seven covered cards.[5]

4. Shuffle the four rockets in with the remaining cards and distribute these face down and evenly between both players so each has 13 cards.[5]

5. Each player puts a radio communication token (with the green side up) and a reminder card in front of themselves.[5]

6. Place the distress signal tokens face down.[5]

7. Shuffle the 36 small task cards and display them as a face-down stack.[5]

**Three-Player Variant Setup**

1. Return all green playing cards, task cards, and the rocket card with the value of one to the box.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game

[2] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.5 · Trick-taking game · Communication

[3] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.12 · DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY · HELP MECHANIC: DISTRESS SIGNALS

[4] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.15

[5] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.19 · PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS

[6] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.21 · TIPS AND VARIANTS · Challenge for Three · CREATE YOUR OWN MISSIONS

🔧 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 309 ms · ask 9946 ms · total 1930026 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1919761 ms · generation 10265 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04598, "snippet": "In each round, each crew member plays a card in a clockwise order. These cards make up the trick. The highest card played wins the trick. The initial card played sets the suit that must be played for each trick. This is applicable for both color cards and rocket cards. If a suit cannot be followed, ", "headingPath": "Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "No communication is also communication. This means that often, you can directly attempt to win your tasks, when no one communicates. Most of the time it is easier to win a card that you don't have in your hand. This is especially true for the low-value cards. With rockets, you can easily win cards o", "headingPath": "TIPS AND VARIANTS · Challenge for Three · CREATE YOUR OWN MISSIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "As commander, Tom starts the game. He opens the first trick with his pink 9 and hopes to win the pink 1 . Julia plays a pink 5 in the trick. Daniel does not have any pink cards in his hand and therefore plays a card of his choice: the yellow 2 . Caro has a pink 1 and plays it in the trick. Tom has t", "headingPath": "MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each task specifies a playing card that must be won. A task is fulfilled when its owner wins the corresponding playing card in a trick. When all the tasks of the respective mission are fulfilled, you have completed the mission. If a task is fulfilled by a crew member who does not possess the appropr", "headingPath": "MISSION SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "actually receives the assignment and reveals the task cards. The mission is fulfilled when the crew member has completed all the tasks. Your commander may not choose himself or herself. If a mission displays this symbol, your commander takes over the distribution of the task cards. Prepare the missi", "headingPath": "Commander's decision · Commander's distribution · PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Carry out the following steps before each mission: Shuffle the 40 large playing cards and distribute them face down and equally to all crew members. If there are three of you playing, one person will get one more card than the rest. After the last trick, the card that is left remains unplayed. Each ", "headingPath": "MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The Crew is a cooperative, mission-based trick-taking game. What does this mean? You win together, or you lose together - only if each of you is successful, and you help each other, will you be able to complete the missions and win the game. Your journey spans 50 different missions, each with a uniq", "headingPath": "GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After handing over the task card, one crew member has one more task and one member has one less than before. The total number of tasks does not change, so you may not place a task back on the stack. You do not have to increase the number of attempts in the logbook by one when you use this additional", "headingPath": "PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Trick-taking game · Communication", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY · HELP MECHANIC: DISTRESS SIGNALS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 21, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TIPS AND VARIANTS · Challenge for Three · CREATE YOUR OWN MISSIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 283 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 283 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 14:42

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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game	p.4	0.04598 (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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	TIPS AND VARIANTS · Challenge for Three · CREATE YOUR OWN MISSIONS	p.21	0.045805 (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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!	p.11	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
#4	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE	p.10	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
#5	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Commander's decision · Commander's distribution · PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS	p.18	0.031746 (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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE	p.8	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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game	p.3	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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.19	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 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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game · Communication	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY · HELP MECHANIC: DISTRESS SIGNALS	p.12	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)		p.15	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.19	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	TIPS AND VARIANTS · Challenge for Three · CREATE YOUR OWN MISSIONS	p.21	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 309 ms · first delta 7746 ms · total 1930026 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1919761 ms · retrieval 309 ms · ask 9946 ms · gateway work 10265 ms · total 1930026 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3303
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 333
tok/sec: 136.2 tok/sec — 333 output tokens in 2.445 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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 212), 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.