Ruling — Dead of Winter: The Long Night

← Dead of Winter: The Long Night

You asked

Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dead of Winter: The Long Nightbg-193037-en-1e

1. Place the colony board in the center of the play area.[1]

2. Place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around the colony board as shown or as best accommodates your table.[1]

3. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player, where each player keeps 2 and returns the others to the deck.[1]

4. Re-shuffle the survivor deck.[1]

5. Each player collects a player reference sheet.[1]

6. Place the chosen main objective card in its space on the colony board and set up the game board according to that main objective's setup instructions.[1]

7. Shuffle the non-betrayal secret objective cards, set aside 2 facedown per player, and return the rest to the game box.[1]

8. Shuffle the betrayal secret objective cards, add 1 facedown to the non-betrayal cards that were set aside, and return the remainder to the game box.[1]

9. Shuffle all of the set aside cards together and deal 1 to each player.[1]

10. Return any remaining secret objective cards to the game box without looking at them.[1]

11. Shuffle the crisis cards and place the deck on its space on the colony board.[1]

12. Shuffle and make decks of the survivor, exiled objective, and crossroad cards and place the decks off to the side of the play area.[1]

13. Shuffle all starter item cards and deal 5 to each player, then return any remaining cards to the game box.[1]

14. Separate the remaining item cards into separate decks according to their location, shuffle each deck, and place them on their corresponding location card.[1]

15. Each player chooses 1 of their 2 kept survivors to be her group leader, placing that survivor card in the respective space on her reference card, and places the other survivor card in her following below her player reference sheet.[1]

16. Add the corresponding survivor standees for each player's survivors to the colony.[1]

17. Separate the remaining standees and tokens, placing them within easy reach of all players.[1]

18. The player whose group leader has the highest influence value receives the first player token.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME SETUP

🔧 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 241 ms · ask 14338 ms · total 14588 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 14588 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The other survivor card is placed in the player's following, below their player reference sheet. The corresponding survivor standees for each player's survivors are added to the colony. Separate the remaining standees and tokens, placing them within easy reach of all players. The player whose group ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Dead of Winter is played over a series of rounds. Each round is divided into 2 phases that must be played in order. Player Turns Phase Colony Phase During the player turns phase resolve the following 3 effects in order. Reveal Crisis: Reveal the top card of the crisis deck. This card's effect will t", "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "During the game players may be given the option to vote with a thumbs up or down, either because a player initiated a vote to exile or because a crossroads card called for a vote to be cast. Players may take time to deliberate before casting their vote. Once players are ready to vote, count down fro", "headingPath": "VOTING · CARD TEXT · RANDOM LOCATIONS · SEARCHING A DECK · ROLL A DIE · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Play a Card: As many times as he likes during his turn, a player may play a card from his hand. To play a card, place it on top of the waste pile. When an event item card is played do not place it in the waste pile but instead remove it from the game. Reminder: For every 10 cards in the waste pile d", "headingPath": "Actions that do not require an Action Die", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the beginning of each player's turn, the player to her right will draw a crossroads card. That player must keep the crossroads card secret, only revealing it if its trigger happens. The text on that card applies to the player taking a turn. If at any time on the player's turn she meets the requir", "headingPath": "RESOLVING CROSSROADS CARDS · Example : REsolving a crisis", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Move Round Tracker: Move the round tracker down 1 space on the round track. If it is moved onto 0 the game immediately ends. Pass First Player Token: At the end of each round, any player may initiate a vote to prevent the first player token from being passed to the next player. If the vote passes, t", "headingPath": "COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Used Action Dice Pool: When a player uses an action die it is placed here. 3 4 1 2 6 7 5 ITEM CARDS 1. Name: This is the name of the item. 2. Symbol Type: There are 7 different types of item cards. 3. Ability: A unique effect the card has when played. 4. Location: This determines what deck this item", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around it as shown or as best accommodates your table. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player. Each player then chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck. Re-shuffle the survivor deck. Eac", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 497 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 497 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 05:57

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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	VOTING · CARD TEXT · RANDOM LOCATIONS · SEARCHING A DECK · ROLL A DIE · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE	p.15	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	Actions that do not require an Action Die	p.10	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	RESOLVING CROSSROADS CARDS · Example : REsolving a crisis	p.12	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	COLONY PHASE · ADDING ZOMBIES	p.13	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)		p.3	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	p.6	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 241 ms · first delta 11003 ms · total 14588 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 241 ms · ask 14338 ms · gateway work 14588 ms · total 14588 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4030
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 482
tok/sec: 137.2 tok/sec — 482 output tokens in 3.513 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s 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 anyone

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 428), 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.