RuleSage cited table rulings
← Star Realms: Frontiers

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Star Realms: Frontiersbg-230253-en-1e

I looked through Star Realms: Frontiers's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.35 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play
When playing with two or more players, for each player in the game, place one card from the top of the Trade Deck face down in front of the Boss. The Boss starts the game with 50 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck
RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.8 · Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards
Players alternate taking turns. Each turn has three phases: Main Phase Discard Phase Draw Phase At any time during your Main Phase you may perform any of the following actions, as many times as you like, in any order you wish: Play cards from your hand. Use the Primary Abilities of in-play Bases. Us
RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.37 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play
The Boss starts the game with 25 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck (8 Scouts and 2 Vipers). Players start with 50 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players have individual Authority and can b
RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.33 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play
The Boss starts the game with 40 Authority per player. Each player starts with a Personal Deck consisting of 7 Scouts and 1 Viper. Players start with 60 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players are a Hydra team (See page 17). After the Boss draws its cards on its turn, follow
RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.41 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play
If playing with two players, add 1 Patrol Boat and 1 Federation Cruiser. Place the Transit Nexus card face down, then shuffle the remaining Acquisition Deck cards and place them face down on top to create the Acquisition Deck. Shuffle the remaining cards from Frontiers to make the Boss' Personal Dec
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 212 ms · ask 5157 ms · total 35308 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 29929 ms · generation 5379 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 35, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "When playing with two or more players, for each player in the game, place one card from the top of the Trade Deck face down in front of the Boss. The Boss starts the game with 50 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Players alternate taking turns. Each turn has three phases: Main Phase Discard Phase Draw Phase At any time during your Main Phase you may perform any of the following actions, as many times as you like, in any order you wish: Play cards from your hand. Use the Primary Abilities of in-play Bases. Us", "headingPath": "Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 37, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 25 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck (8 Scouts and 2 Vipers). Players start with 50 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players have individual Authority and can b", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 33, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 40 Authority per player. Each player starts with a Personal Deck consisting of 7 Scouts and 1 Viper. Players start with 60 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players are a Hydra team (See page 17). After the Boss draws its cards on its turn, follow ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 41, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "If playing with two players, add 1 Patrol Boat and 1 Federation Cruiser. Place the Transit Nexus card face down, then shuffle the remaining Acquisition Deck cards and place them face down on top to create the Acquisition Deck. Shuffle the remaining cards from Frontiers to make the Boss' Personal Dec", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Players take individual turns. Randomly determine which player goes first. Play proceeds clockwise around the table from that player. After each player's turn, the Boss takes a turn. The Boss' special abilities and attacks only affect the player whose turn just ended. Beginner: The Boss doesn't take", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Difficulty Levels · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A player may, during their Main Phase on any turn, scrap every card in the Trade Row. The Trade Row may only be mulliganed once during a challenge, so this ability may only be used if no player has already mulliganed the Trade Row this game. For Bosses that have a hand, they get their normal hand si", "headingPath": "Mulliganing the Trade Row · Challenge Notes", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If an opponent has an Outpost in play, they can't be attacked directly and their non-Outpost Bases can't be attacked or targeted by you until all of their Outposts are destroyed. Whenever you discard a card or acquire a new card from the Trade Row, place that card face-up in your Discard Pile. Any p", "headingPath": "Attacking · Discard Phase · Draw Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 416 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 416 boosted
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 7, 2026 05:04

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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play p.35 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Play · Main Phase · Playing Cards p.8 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play p.37 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play p.41 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Challenge Setup · Difficulty Levels · Boss Order of Play p.31 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Mulliganing the Trade Row · Challenge Notes p.24 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416) Attacking · Discard Phase · Draw Phase p.14 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
timing split
retrieval 212 ms · first delta 5282 ms · total 35308 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 29929 ms · retrieval 212 ms · ask 5157 ms · gateway work 5379 ms · total 35308 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2409
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
142.9 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.063 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 345), 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.