Ruling — Wingspan

← Wingspan

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Wingspanbg-266192-en-1e · Wingspan Asiabg-366161-en-1e

**Bird Cards**

1. Shuffle the bird cards into a deck.[1][2][3]

2. Place the deck next to the bird tray.[1][2]

3. Populate the tray with 3 face-up bird cards.[1][2][3]

**Supply**

1. Place all food and egg tokens in the supply.[1][2][3] (Note: In Duet mode, place both food tokens and egg miniatures in the supply).[2] These are accessible to all players.[1][2]

**Birdfeeder**

1. Toss the food dice into the birdfeeder dice tower [1][3] (or roll them onto the birdfeeder board for Duet mode).[2]

**Goal Board**

1. Choose which type of goals you will play with and place the goal board on the table with that side facing up.[1]

2. Green is the default side, featuring 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place for each goal.[1][4]

3. Blue is an option for less direct competition, awarding 1 point for each targeted item.[1][4]

**Goal Tiles**

1. Shuffle the goal tiles without looking at them (they are double-sided).[1][2][5]

2. Place 1 goal tile (random side up) on each of the four blank spaces on the goal board.[1][2][3][5] (Note: For Duet mode, use the Duet map and Duet end-of-round goal tiles, choosing 4 at random to put in the 4 slots below the map).[2]

3. Return extra goal tiles to the box.[1][2][5]

**Bonus Cards**

1. Shuffle the bonus cards into a deck and place it on the table.[1][2][3] (Note: For certain modes, shuffle all available bonus cards—except the Historian—into a single deck for both groups to share).[5]

**Player Setup**

1. Give each player a player mat.[1][6][2]

2. Give each player 8 action cubes of one color.[1][6][2]

3. Give each player 2 random bonus cards.[1][6][2]

4. Give each player 5 random bird cards.[1][6][2]

5. Give each player 5 food tokens (1 of each type).[1][6][2]

6. Each player must discard 1 food token for each bird card they wish to keep.[1][6][2]

7. Discard the remaining bird cards.[1][6][2]

8. Choose 1 bonus card to keep and discard the other.[1][6][2]

9. Choose a first player and give them the first-player token.[6][2] (Note: For Flock mode, rotate the turn-order dial so the star points to the player with the first-player token).[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.2 · Player Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.2 · Player Setup · Duet Mode (2 Players)

[3] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix · p.2 · GLOBAL SETUP

[4] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.15

[5] RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.3

[6] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix · p.2 · PLAYER SETUP

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 263 ms · ask 13047 ms · total 13321 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13321 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "This is a detailed rulebook, but you can learn the entire game by using the Swift-Start cards and guides. We recommend using these guides for your first game. 6/15/21 7:35 AM TIP: When selecting bird cards, think about how they will help you get more cards or food early in the game. Brown powers can", "headingPath": "Player Setup · 6/9/21 4:20 PM Swift-Start Guides and Cards:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046343, "snippet": "1 . Bird cards. Shuffle the bird cards into a deck. Place it next to the bird tray, then populate the tray with 3 face-up bird cards. Supply. Place all food and egg tokens in the supply. These are tokens accessible to all players. Birdfeeder. Toss the food dice into the birdfeeder dice tower. Goal b", "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.044249, "snippet": "82cm + WS_EE_BirdSwiftStart_r4.indd 3WS_EE_BirdSwiftStart_r4.indd 3 6/9/21 4:20 PM6/9/21 4:20 PM Vaux’s Swift Chaetura vauxi William Sansom Vaux was a wealthy mineralogist and naturalist. 2 WHEN ACTIVATED: Tuck 1 from your hand behind this bird. If you do, gain 1 from the supply. 31cm WS_EE_BirdSwif", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044182, "snippet": "This method uses the side of the goal board that has spaces labeled 5-4-3-2-1-0 next to the space for each goal. For example, when using the goal that scores 5, 2, or 1 points, if two players tie for 1st place, each gets 3 points (5 + 2 divided by 2 players, rounded down). Do not award 2nd place to ", "headingPath": "Blue: One point per targeted item", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.04207, "snippet": "/ BirdCards_r20.indd 125BirdCards_r20.indd 125 6/15/21 7:29 AM6/15/21 7:29 AM Broad-Winged Hawk Buteo platypterus This hawk is seen more during migration than while it’s in the forest interior. 4 WHEN ACTIVATED: Roll all dice not in birdfeeder. If any are , cache 1 from the supply on this bird. 85cm", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "15 bonus cards As described in Setup, each player starts the game with 1 bonus card (selected from 2 random cards). There are also several birds in the deck that allow you to gain additional bonus cards. The Photographer, Cartographer, and Anatomist bonus cards are also available in the core Wingspa", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 281}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Shuffle all available bonus cards (except the Historian; see page 1 6) into a single deck and place it on the table for both groups to share. 6. Goal tiles. Use one set of goal tiles for the entire table (use standard goal tiles, not the Duet goal tiles with red corners). Shuffle the goal tiles with", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 281}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "Food is primarily used to play bird cards. Your options for which food to gain are shown on the dice in the birdfeeder, which will repeatedly get depleted and refilled throughout the game. Place an action cube in the leftmost exposed slot in the 'gain food' row on your player mat and gain the amount", "headingPath": "OPTION 2. Gain Food and Activate Forest Bird Powers · When you choose to gain food, do the following: · Managing the birdfeeder", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup · Duet Mode (2 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 281}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GLOBAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 281}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 281}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 198 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 198 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 9, 2026 20:56

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. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup · 6/9/21 4:20 PM Swift-Start Guides and Cards:	p.3	0.048172 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	0.046343 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)		p.3	0.044249 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Blue: One point per targeted item	p.11	0.044182 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)		p.1	0.04207 (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 Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.15	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
#7	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	OPTION 2. Gain Food and Activate Forest Bird Powers · When you choose to gain food, do the following: · Managing the birdfeeder	p.7	0.029762 (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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 80 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	#2	0.046343 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	PLAYER SETUP	p.2	#16	0.015873 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.15	#6	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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)	Player Setup · Duet Mode (2 Players)	p.2	#9	0.029274 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	GLOBAL SETUP	p.2	#17	0.015625 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.5	#11	0.028577 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup · 6/9/21 4:20 PM Swift-Start Guides and Cards:	p.3	#1	0.048172 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.3	#7	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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)	Player Setup · Duet Mode (2 Players)	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	GLOBAL SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.15	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 281)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	PLAYER SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 263 ms · first delta 8743 ms · total 13321 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 263 ms · ask 13047 ms · gateway work 13321 ms · total 13321 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3376
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 679
tok/sec: 150.8 tok/sec — 679 output tokens in 4.502 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.

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: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

6 errata cards registered for edition 3 — these are what the gate above had to match against

anatomist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.2
belted kingfisher · HAND_PINNED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bird Cards) · corpus doc 65 · p.17
ecologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.5
oologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.1
photographer · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.3
rodentologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.4

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.