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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Initial Placement · Starting the Game · Turn Summary	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
#2	RULEBOOK Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Before you Begin... · IMPORTANT · Main Board · Power Boards & Trayz · Player Tiles · Speed Tiles · …	p.4	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)		p.42	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Dispersing Loot	p.33	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)		p.42	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Acquiring Cards · Empowered Draw · Card Honor · IMPORTANT · Area Control Overview	p.9	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)		p.55	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 Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Event cards · Advancing Event Cards	p.42	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 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

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.

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Before you Begin... · IMPORTANT · Main Board · Power Boards & Trayz · Player Tiles · Speed Tiles · …	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Adjustable Tile Set · Setting Up · Example: · Using Building Sites · Using Building Sites with the Villages & Hamlets Module · Visiting the Chronogate · …	p.27	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Vindication — Rulebook (corpus doc 450)	Initial Placement · Starting the Game · Turn Summary	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split

retrieval 223 ms · first delta 12842 ms · total 19589 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)

full breakdown

queued 0 ms · retrieval 223 ms · ask 19356 ms · gateway work 19589 ms · total 19589 ms

tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)

4225

tokens out (what the answerer generated)

562

tok/sec

84.1 tok/sec — 562 output tokens in 6.686 s of generation

live seat (read from the running child)

answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 38s 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

BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"

matched words (in the normalized question)

before the first turn

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 381), 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.