Ruling — The Vale of Eternity

← The Vale of Eternity

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Vale of Eternitybg-385529-en-1e

1. Each player chooses a color and takes 2 player markers and 1 player tile of that color.[1]

2. The player who has most recently seen a reptile becomes the first player and receives the first player marker.[1]

3. Place the game board and the score board in the middle of the table.[1]

4. Shuffle all the cards to form a draw pile, leaving space next to it for the discard pile.[1]

5. Put the round marker on the first space on the round track.[1]

6. From the first player and going clockwise, each player gets as many points as their rank in the turn order, and their score marker is placed on the scoring track (the start player gets 1 point, the second player 2 points, etc.).[1]

7. Put the magic stones next to the score board to form the supply.[1]

8. Reveal as many cards as twice the number of players from the draw pile, then sort them by their families and place them in the matching zone around the game board (if the draw pile runs out, shuffle discarded cards to create a new draw pile).[2][3]

9. From the first player and in clockwise order, each player chooses a card and places their player marker on it, provided no other player marker is already on that card.[2][3]

10. From the last player and in counterclockwise order, each player chooses a second card and places their remaining player marker on it.[2][3]

[1] RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook · p.3 · Components · Setting Up the Game

[2] RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook · p.6

[3] RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook · p.6 · 1. Hunting Phase

🔧 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 212 ms · ask 5324 ms · total 47099 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 41555 ms · generation 5544 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "From the first player and in clockwise order, players take their turns. On their turn, players use every available Active effect of the cards in their areas once. If there are multiple Active effects, they may use the effects in the order of their choice. If a player doesn't have any Active effect r", "headingPath": "3. Resolution Phase · End of the Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "From the first player and in clockwise order, players take their turns. On their turn, players use every available Active effect of the cards in their areas once. If there are multiple Active effects, they may use the effects in the order of their choice. If a player doesn’t have any Active effect r", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Reveal as many cards as twice the number of players from the draw pile. Sort them by their families and place them in the matching zone around the game board. NOTE) If the draw pile runs out, shuffle the discarded cards to create a new draw pile. From the first player and in clockwise order, each pl", "headingPath": "1. Hunting Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "From the first player and in clockwise order, players take their turns. A player can take as many actions as desired during their turn. There are 4 kinds of action that players may perform (see right). ㆍPlayers may perform the same action several times. ㆍPlayers may perform actions in the order of t", "headingPath": "2. Action Phase · Sell a Card", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "1. Reveal as many cards as twice the number of players from the draw pile. Sort them by their families and place them in the matching zone around the game board. NOTE) If the draw pile runs out, shuffle the discarded cards to create a new draw pile. 2. From the first player and in clockwise order, e", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "❹ ❶ Each player chooses a color and takes 2 player markers and 1 player tile of that color. ❷ The player who has most recently seen a reptile becomes the first player. They receive the first player marker. ❸ Place the game board and the score board in the middle of the table. ❹ Shuffle all the cards", "headingPath": "Components · Setting Up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "ㆍTo tame a card, retrieve one of the player markers that you placed during the Hunting Phase. Then take the matching card in your hand. ㆍREMINDER: There is no hand limit. ㆍFirst, check whether your areas are full or not. ㆍIf your areas are full (that is, you already have as many summoned cards as th", "headingPath": "Tame a Card · Summon a Card", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "If the effect of a card breaks one of the game rules, the card's effect takes precedence. E.g.) Unless your hand is empty, you must activate the effect of 'Medusa' at the Resolution Phase, which forces you to discard a card from your hand. If the triggering effect is not resolved, the triggered effe", "headingPath": "Effect of Cards · Every effect must be used.", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Components · Setting Up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. Hunting Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 420}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 420 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 420 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 7, 2026 05:09

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 Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	3. Resolution Phase · End of the Round	p.10	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)		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
#3	RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	1. Hunting Phase	p.6	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	2. Action Phase · Sell a Card	p.7	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)		p.6	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	Components · Setting Up the Game	p.3	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	Tame a Card · Summon a Card	p.8	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 The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	Effect of Cards · Every effect must be used.	p.12	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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	Components · Setting Up the Game	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Vale of Eternity — Rulebook (corpus doc 420)	1. Hunting Phase	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 212 ms · first delta 2940 ms · total 47099 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 41555 ms · retrieval 212 ms · ask 5324 ms · gateway work 5544 ms · total 47099 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2466
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 322
tok/sec: 125.6 tok/sec — 322 output tokens in 2.563 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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 349), 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.