RuleSage cited table rulings
← Time's Up!

You asked

How do I set up Time's Up!?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Time's Up!bg-1353-en-1e

To set up Time's Up!, follow these steps:
1. Divide into teams with members sitting across from each other.[1] (Note: The game works best in teams of two players each.[1] )
2. Choose a player to keep score.[1]
3. Decide whether you will use the ORANGE or BLUE names, ensuring everyone knows which color is being used and not mixing colors within the same game.[1]
4. Build the Deck from 40 randomly chosen name cards.[2]
5. Deal 40 cards evenly among all players (or more for a longer game).[1]
6. Deal two additional cards to each player.[1]
7. Put the unused portion of the deck back in the box.[1]
8. Each player may look at their cards and discard two of them without revealing them to others.[1]
9. Shuffle all remaining cards together and stack them face down in the center of the table to create the "Deck of Fame".[1]
10. Choose a starting team to take the Deck.[1]
11. The next team clockwise from the starting team takes the timer and will use it to time the other team's turn.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook · p.2
[2] RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook · p.1
🔧 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 9722 ms · total 9973 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9973 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 3, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "54 If the Cluegiver gives an illegal clue, their turn ends immediately and the card they goofed on is returned to the Deck. When time expires, the Cluegiver shuffles the card they were currently working on back into the Deck. Each card that was guessed correctly is put into a score pile near them. P", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "Developed by: Peter Sarrett Edited by: Frank DiLorenzo, Eric ‘Rico’ Misener & Wei-Hwa Huang Graphics: Jennifer V DiFranco, Brandon Lewis Rules for odd number of players and Advanced Play are courtesy of REPOS Production For information about other R&R Games products and expansion sets, visit us onli", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "If the Cluegiver accidentally uses more than one word they must set the card aside face down, draw a new one from the Deck and continue with the new name. Each team may make only 1 guess per card. If the guess is incorrect, the Cluegiver must set that card aside face-down, draw a new one and continu", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "32 Divide into teams with team members sitting across from each other. Time’s Up! works best when played in teams of two players each. (See end of rules for larger groups and odd numbers of players.) Choose a player to keep score. Decide whether you’ll be using the ORANGE or the BLUE names. Make sur", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "76 Advanced Play: Advanced Play: Freeze Round! Freeze Round! We’ve added an optional 4th round for even more hilarious fun! Play the same way as Round 3, except the Guesser starts with their eyes closed. The Cluegiver looks at a card and must then freeze in a pose. Once frozen they shout OPEN! and t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "1 21st ANNIVERSARY EDITION 60 MINUTES 12+ AGES 3+ PLAYERS Quick Play: Players can always use sound effects and pantomime, but speech becomes more restricted as the game progresses: Each round ends when all names in the Deck of Fame have been guessed. All names are put back into the Deck for the next", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "T hen think about how to do it while you wait for your next turn. T hat way you’ll be prepared if you draw it again. Round 3 is the most fun, but it can also be the most difficult . Hard names can be made much easier if gestures are incorporated into 1st and 2nd round clues. If you hold your hands l", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Sit so that each person is between players of the other team(s). For example, Diagram 3 shows three teams made of three players each. Diagram 4 shows two teams made of four players each. The deck will be passed around clockwise and when a player has the deck, he gives clues and all of his teammates ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 673}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 673 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 673 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 8, 2026 00:36

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 Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.3 0.047619 (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 Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.13 0.047163 (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 Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.3 0.045037 (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 Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.2 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
#5 RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) 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
#6 RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.1 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
#7 RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) 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
#8 RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.4 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

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
[1] RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Time's Up! — Rulebook (corpus doc 673) p.1 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 241 ms · first delta 8027 ms · total 9973 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 9722 ms · gateway work 9973 ms · total 9973 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3607
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
259
tok/sec
135.9 tok/sec — 259 output tokens in 1.906 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 56s 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
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched
SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question)
set up

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 606), 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.