RuleSage cited table rulings
← Betrayal at House on the Hill

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Betrayal at House on the Hillbg-10547-en-1e

1. Shuffle the omen cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]
2. Shuffle the item cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]
3. Shuffle the event cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them.[1]
4. Find the Basement Landing, Entrance Hall/ Foyer/Grand Staircase, and Upper Landing room tiles and place them from left to right reasonably far apart.[1]
5. Mix all the rest of the room tiles together and put them face down in a stack.[1]
6. Each player puts his or her explorer's plastic figure in the Entrance Hall.[1]
7. Put the dice in a pile within easy reach.[1]
8. Set aside the Traitor's Tome and Secrets of Survival haunt books.[2]
9. Each player chooses a character card, picking one explorer from the two available on each card.[2]
10. Attach 4 plastic clips to your explorer card, pointing each to one of the explorer's starting values for Might, Speed, Knowledge, and Sanity.[2]
11. See who goes first; the explorer who has the next birthday goes first (refer to the explorer's character card for their birthday).[1]
12. Players take turns clockwise following the first explorer.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE 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 432 ms · ask 9095 ms · total 9536 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9536 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 4, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "| Shuffle the omen cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them. Do the same with the item cards and the event cards. Find the Basement Landing , Entrance Hall/ Foyer/Grand Staircase , and Upper Landing room tiles. Place them from left to right reasonably far apart. Mix all ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "In Betrayal at House on the Hill, each player chooses an explorer to investigate a creepy old house. As you explore the house, you discover new rooms. Each time you enter a new room, you might find something . . . or something might find you . Explorers change over the course of the game (for better", "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Do the following at the start of the haunt. The traitor takes the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room . He or she reads only the haunt that is starting now. That player also needs to know the rules described in 'The Traitor's New Powers' (page 1 7) and 'How Monsters Work' (page 18). If the player doe", "headingPath": "Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once the haunt begins, the game changes dramatically. Now it's a desperate struggle to win before your opponent does! Before the haunt starts, you must roll 6 dice at the end of your turn each time you draw an omen card. This is called a haunt roll . If you roll less than the total number of omen ca", "headingPath": "THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "| . . . you can do as many of the following actions as you want, in any order: Move. Discover a new room. Use item and omen cards. Attempt a die roll . Make an attack (once during your turn after the haunt starts). Before the haunt starts, you must make a haunt roll at the end of your turn if you dr", "headingPath": "Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Starting with the first player and going to the left, each player takes a turn exploring the house. A Note on Terminology: For simplicity's sake, these rules use 'you' to refer to the character taking the action or affected by the card or tile, whether an explorer (which includes heroes and the trai", "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY · Traits", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "TablE Of CONTENTS Game Overview 3 Game Components 3 Object of the Game 3 Setup 3 How to Play 5 Move 6 Discover a New Room 6 Drawing Event, Item, and Omen Cards 10 Use Item and Omen Cards 1 1 Attempt a Die Roll 12 Make an Attack 13 The Haunt 15 Making a Haunt Roll 15 Revealing the Haunt 15 Haunt Setu", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "turn: Before the haunt starts, each player takes a turn in order, starting with the player whose explorer has the next birthday and going to the left from there, During a turn, you can move, discover rooms, use items, and attempt die rolls. After the haunt starts, you can also make an attack once pe", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 715 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 715 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 01:44

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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) SETUP p.4 0.04866 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP p.3 0.046244 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets p.16 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
#4 RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll 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
#5 RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors p.6 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
#6 RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) HOW TO PLAY · Traits p.5 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
#7 RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) p.2 0.030415 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That? p.23 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

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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) SETUP p.4 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715) GAME OVERVIEW · GAME COMPONENTS · OBJECT OF THE GAME · SETUP p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 432 ms · first delta 7493 ms · total 9536 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 432 ms · ask 9095 ms · gateway work 9536 ms · total 9536 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3540
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
294
tok/sec
147.8 tok/sec — 294 output tokens in 1.989 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
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)
setup

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 649), 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.