You asked
How do we decide who starts?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e
I looked through Spirit Island'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.
When the game calls for a decision (where Blight cascades to, which Invaders to do Damage to, etc) and it's not specified who makes it, what do you do? If the decision springs from a Power, the Spirit using the Power makes the decision. For other situations, players should try come to a consensus.
Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page
For decisions about/within a land: Each Spirit makes choices regarding the lands on their starting board. For other cases: The game owner/organizer makes the call.
To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action. Reveal the top card of the Invader Deck. The Invaders Explore in that land type (see Explore, page 10). Then place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space.
Each turn has the following phases: Spirit Phase Fast Power Phase Invader Phase Slow Power Phase Time Passes Players play simultaneously within each phase, conferring as they wish. Table talk is not just allowed, it's likely necessary for victory!
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 74 ms · ask 2650 ms · total 2725 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 2725 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "When the game calls for a decision (where Blight cascades to, which Invaders to do Damage to, etc) and it's not specified who makes it, what do you do? If the decision springs from a Power, the Spirit using the Power makes the decision. For other situations, players should try come to a consensus.", "headingPath": "WHO DECIDES?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "For decisions about/within a land: Each Spirit makes choices regarding the lands on their starting board. For other cases: The game owner/organizer makes the call.", "headingPath": "But in the rare event that agreement is not possible:", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action. Reveal the top card of the Invader Deck. The Invaders Explore in that land type (see Explore, page 10). Then place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space.", "headingPath": "INVADERS' STARTING ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each turn has the following phases: Spirit Phase Fast Power Phase Invader Phase Slow Power Phase Time Passes Players play simultaneously within each phase, conferring as they wish. Table talk is not just allowed, it's likely necessary for victory!", "headingPath": "INVADERS' STARTING ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If it makes a difference in what order you resolve the lands for a given Action, the players choose.", "headingPath": "LAND ORDER?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Some Spirits are inclined to take a long time choosing Power Cards: perhaps several centuries in the case of slow-moving earth Spirits. But the threat of the Invaders forbids the luxury of infinite time. Any player may place a limit on the time available to complete the Spirit Phase. This can be don", "headingPath": "THE URGENCY OF WAR", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
- 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 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 58 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 12, 2026 06:57
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. 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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | WHO DECIDES? | p.8 | 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)) | 298 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | PLAYER SETUP | p.6 | 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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | But in the rare event that agreement is not possible: | p.8 | 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)) | 163 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS' STARTING ACTION | 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)) | 221 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS' STARTING ACTION | p.8 | 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)) | 247 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | LAND ORDER? | p.9 | 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)) | 100 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | TABLE OF CONTENTS | 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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THE URGENCY OF WAR | 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.
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 — not 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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | WHO DECIDES? | p.8 | #1 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | PLAYER SETUP | p.6 | #2 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS' STARTING ACTION | p.6 | #4 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS' STARTING ACTION | p.8 | #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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | SPIRIT PHASE | p.8 | #18 | 0.012821 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | GLOSSARY/INDEX | p.30 | #76 | 0.007353 (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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THE URGENCY OF WAR | p.8 | #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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | But in the rare event that agreement is not possible: | p.8 | #3 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 74 ms · first delta 2631 ms · total 2725 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 74 ms · ask 2650 ms · gateway work 2725 ms · total 2725 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 1618
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 142.9 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.063 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 49s 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
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 7), 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.