RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

What must be prepared before the first player takes a turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Scythebg-169786-en-1e

Before the first player takes a turn, the following must be prepared:
1. Put 6 technology cubes on your Player Mat on the green boxes that have a black square in the bottom right corner.[1]
2. Place your 4 structure tokens (Armory, Monument, Mine, and Mill) on top of their corresponding boxes.[1]
3. Place your action token next to the Player Mat.[1]
4. Place your remaining 6 workers (meeples) on the rectangles above the Produce action.[1]
5. Each player starts with 2 objective cards that are kept secret from other players.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.8 · PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:
[2] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.26 · FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES
🔧 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 316 ms · ask 9265 ms · total 2039073 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 2029483 ms · generation 9590 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Your Player Mat is where you'll be choosing actions during the game. TECHNOLOGY CUBES: Put 6 technology cubes on your Player Mat on the green boxes that have a black square in the bottom right corner. EXAMPLE The player with the lowest number in the label on their Player Mat will go first. Play proc", "headingPath": "PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Both the Faction Mat and Player Mat indicate your starting cards and track positions in the boxes on the far right of each mat. POWER TOKEN: Place your power token ( ) on the indicated level of the Power Track (on the game board). Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARDS: Draw t", "headingPath": "STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "26 Each player starts the game with 2 objective cards that are kept secret from the other players. You may reveal a completed objective card during your own turn before or after you complete a top- or bottom-row action. If you do, place 1 star token on the objective space of the Triumph Track and di", "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "RESOURCES: All units-characters, mechs, & workers-can carry around resources (any number). TURNS AND PLAYER MATS: On your turn, you must choose a different section of your Player Mat than you did the previous turn. Take either the top-row action, the bottom-row action, or both (starting with the top", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "10 Scythe uses an ongoing action-selection mechanism (no rounds or phases). Players take turns one after another until a player places their 6th star on the board, immediately ending the game. On your turn, do the following in sequential order: Place your action token on a different section of your ", "headingPath": "RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "As your character treks across Eastern Europa, they will encounter a number of local people and situations. Each encounter will present you with three options to determine how you want to interact with the people. The choice you make will often impact the peoples' view of you, represented in the gam", "headingPath": "ENCOUNTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "22 Combat may happen at the end of a player's Move action (after all units have moved but before the player takes a bottom-row action). If that player's character and/or mechs share a territory with an opponent's character and/or mechs, combat occurs. It's possible for this to happen on multiple ter", "headingPath": "F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S · COMBAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Your Faction Mat is where you keep your mechs, stars, and coins. Each Faction Mat also shows a special ability in the upper right corner. STARS: Place your 6 star tokens at the upper left near the faction emblem. Do not put tokens on top of the Recruit One-Time Bonuses (bottom left corner)-you'll ga", "headingPath": "FACTION MAT · QUICK-START CARD · RIVERWALK CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 114 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 114 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 14:48

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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER: p.8 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS p.7 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES p.26 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) HIGHLIGHTED RULES p.31 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS p.10 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) ENCOUNTERS p.24 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S · COMBAT p.22 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) FACTION MAT · QUICK-START CARD · RIVERWALK CARD p.9 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER: p.8 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES p.26 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 316 ms · first delta 8645 ms · total 2039073 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 2029483 ms · retrieval 316 ms · ask 9265 ms · gateway work 9590 ms · total 2039073 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3655
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
132
tok/sec
147.7 tok/sec — 132 output tokens in 0.894 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 54s 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
SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched
BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question)
before the first player

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 2), 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.