RuleSage cited table rulings
← Skull King

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Skull Kingbg-150145-en-1e

1. Remove the Blank cards, the Loot cards, the Kraken, and the White Whale from the deck before starting.[1]
2. Separate the player aids and bid cards.[1]
3. Distribute the player aid cards and a set of bid reminder cards to each player.[1]
4. Place any remaining player aids and bid cards in the box.[1]
5. Shuffle the deck.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook · p.4 · SETTING SAIL
🔧 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 217 ms · ask 4425 ms · total 2034415 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 2029765 ms · generation 4650 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Remove the following from the deck before starting: the Blank cards, the Loot cards, the Kraken, and the White Whale. You'll use these when you learn the advanced rules. Separate the player aids and bid cards. Distribute the player aid cards and a set of bid reminder cards to each player. Place any ", "headingPath": "SETTING SAIL", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Once bidding is complete, the player to the left of the dealer leads out the first trick by playing a card face up in the center of the table. In clockwise order, each other player plays a card following the rules outlined in the previous sections. The person who played the highest-ranking card wins", "headingPath": "ON YOUR TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "After the cards are dealt and you've studied your hand, you'll decide the exact number of tricks you predict you will win in that round. Remember, the higher a card's value, the more likely you are to win a trick. Once you're all ready, you'll pound your fists on the table in unison three times whil", "headingPath": "Bidding", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "When you lead a trick, you may choose to play either a suit card or a special card. When a special card is led, the rules for the suit in play are altered as follows: When an Escape, Tigress as an escape, or Loot is lead, the next player sets the suit that must be followed, unless they play one of t", "headingPath": "Leading with Special Cards · Leading with an Escape · Leading with a Character", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Shuffle and deal 3 hands (yes, you read that correctly). Y ou'll bid and play following the same rules as normal, but with one spooky twist. Y ou'll be joined by Graybeard's ghost! However, he'll need a little help from you to play his cards (not having a body is a real bummer). Each round, you and ", "headingPath": "Two-Player Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "6 Skull King is played over 10 rounds. 1 card is dealt to each player in the first round, 2 are dealt in the second, and so on, ending with 10 cards dealt to each player in round 10. The entire deck, including all cards played in the previous round, is shuffled at the start of each round. 8 Players ", "headingPath": "Key Terms · Dealing Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Loot cards (2) : Time to get yerself some treasure me hearties! When you play a loot card, you enter into an alliance with the player who captures it. If both of you bid correctly, you are each awarded 20 bonus points . Captain's Log: If you lead a trick with a loot card and the cards that follow ar", "headingPath": "Additional Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "(A) Name: Pretty sure you know what goes here. (B) Round: Round number (you typically play 10). (C) Cards Dealt: Usually same as the round number. (D) Bid and Result: Number of tricks you predict to win that round followed by the amount you actually won. (E) Bi d Points: Points earned or lost based ", "headingPath": "The Scoresheet", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETTING SAIL", "sharpsignalDocId": 115}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 115 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 115 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 14:44

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 Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) SETTING SAIL p.4 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
#2 RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) ON YOUR TURN p.13 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
#3 RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) Bidding p.7 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
#4 RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) Leading with Special Cards · Leading with an Escape · Leading with a Character p.12 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
#5 RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) Two-Player Rules p.21 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
#6 RULEBOOK Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) Key Terms · Dealing Cards p.6 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 Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) Additional Cards p.25 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 Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) The Scoresheet p.17 0.029412 (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 Skull King — Rulebook (corpus doc 115) SETTING SAIL p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 217 ms · first delta 3972 ms · total 2034415 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 2029765 ms · retrieval 217 ms · ask 4425 ms · gateway work 4650 ms · total 2034415 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1901
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
88
tok/sec
139.9 tok/sec — 88 output tokens in 0.629 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 30s 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 37), 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.