Ruling — Unsettled

You asked

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

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

Asked with: Unsettledbg-290484-en-1e

I looked through Unsettled'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 Unsettled — Rulebook · p.3 · Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout

Don't try to sort and put away everything ahead of time. Most components will eventually be stored in the same trays they are displayed in during play. Setting up your first game will also be setting up storage of the components. It's best to keep each planet's components separate from one another (

RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.12 · Basic Turn Overview · Set 2 Focus to Take Actions, REST 1 (required) (pg 14-16)

Before diving into the details of exactly how everything works, let's build a broad foundation of what a turn entails with high-level summaries! On your turn, you take actions by placing your focus cubes on action spaces. Optionally, you may also move, activate LUNA, and/or take free actions. When y

RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.34 · Advanced Directives - Index

→ Any effects that occur 'at the start' of your turn may be interrupted and jumped-in-front-of by free actions. Resolve 'start of turn' effects in whatever order you wish, each as a unique effect. We see that expression on your face and feel not the least bit sympathetic - you were told not to read

RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.29 · At the Start (of a turn / of your turn) · Avatar (pg 16) · Awareness (pg 14) · Black Marker

→ Any effects that occur 'at the start' of a turn must be resolved before any regular actions (focus action, MOVE, LUNA, etc.) are performed by the active explorer. → If there are multiple effects, resolve them in the order you wish, each as a standalone effect. → You MAY use free actions prior to r

RULEBOOK Unsettled — Rulebook · p.35 · Must Be Present · Mystery Cards (pg 8)

A highly contextual term. Use the language on the card to understand. → Generally speaking, 'must be present' means that the thing in question must be on the node that the action indicates it needs to be on. → Often this means that something must be present on the node where the action is taking pla

🔧 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 297 ms · ask 14588 ms · total 15922 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 1020 ms · generation 14902 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Don't try to sort and put away everything ahead of time. Most components will eventually be stored in the same trays they are displayed in during play. Setting up your first game will also be setting up storage of the components. It's best to keep each planet's components separate from one another (", "headingPath": "Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Before diving into the details of exactly how everything works, let's build a broad foundation of what a turn entails with high-level summaries! On your turn, you take actions by placing your focus cubes on action spaces. Optionally, you may also move, activate LUNA, and/or take free actions. When y", "headingPath": "Basic Turn Overview · Set 2 Focus to Take Actions, REST 1 (required) (pg 14-16)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 34, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "→ Any effects that occur 'at the start' of your turn may be interrupted and jumped-in-front-of by free actions. Resolve 'start of turn' effects in whatever order you wish, each as a unique effect. We see that expression on your face and feel not the least bit sympathetic - you were told not to read ", "headingPath": "Advanced Directives - Index", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "→ Any effects that occur 'at the start' of a turn must be resolved before any regular actions (focus action, MOVE, LUNA, etc.) are performed by the active explorer. → If there are multiple effects, resolve them in the order you wish, each as a standalone effect. → You MAY use free actions prior to r", "headingPath": "At the Start (of a turn / of your turn) · Avatar (pg 16) · Awareness (pg 14) · Black Marker", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 35, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A highly contextual term. Use the language on the card to understand. → Generally speaking, 'must be present' means that the thing in question must be on the node that the action indicates it needs to be on. → Often this means that something must be present on the node where the action is taking pla", "headingPath": "Must Be Present · Mystery Cards (pg 8)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 40, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If you have a timing question that the universal rules cannot answer, check the index entry for the specific thing (survival task, opportunity, movement, breakthrough) to see if there's an entry about timing. The 'Interrupts' entry is particularly useful to timing discussions. We encourage you to ta", "headingPath": "Timing · Trait (pg 17, 25) · Travelogue (pg 8) · TRAVERSE (pg 16, 21) · Trigger Tokens (pg 25)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 37, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "'when entering' effects. Some planets (such a Strannos) go out of their way to specifically emphasize 'revealed or unrevealed' because the ability to place yourself on unrevealed nodes is especially important on that planet. Do not let the absence of the words 'revealed or unrevealed' on other plane", "headingPath": "Place (vs. Move) (pg 21) · Planet Boxes · Planet-Specific Cards (pg 8)", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "8 Planet-Specific Setup Travelogue Once you’ve performed the standard setup, it’s time to get decidedly non-standard by reviewing your chosen planet’s travelogue! → Read aloud the narrative introduction from the front cover. → Perform the planet’s unique setup. → Review the overview of the planet’s ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 520}]

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 520 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 520 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 06:03

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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Unpacking Everything · Rulebook Layout	p.3	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Basic Turn Overview · Set 2 Focus to Take Actions, REST 1 (required) (pg 14-16)	p.12	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Advanced Directives - Index	p.34	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	At the Start (of a turn / of your turn) · Avatar (pg 16) · Awareness (pg 14) · Black Marker	p.29	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Must Be Present · Mystery Cards (pg 8)	p.35	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Timing · Trait (pg 17, 25) · Travelogue (pg 8) · TRAVERSE (pg 16, 21) · Trigger Tokens (pg 25)	p.40	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)	Place (vs. Move) (pg 21) · Planet Boxes · Planet-Specific Cards (pg 8)	p.37	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 Unsettled — Rulebook (corpus doc 520)		p.8	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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 297 ms · first delta 14759 ms · total 15922 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1020 ms · retrieval 297 ms · ask 14588 ms · gateway work 14902 ms · total 15922 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3704
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 136.4 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.066 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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: 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

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 451), 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.