Ruling — Scythe

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Scythebg-169786-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Place 1 encounter token on each territory marked with an encounter symbol on the board (11 total tokens).[1]

2. Place resource tokens (wood, oil, food, and metal), coins, and multiplier tokens in a supply area next to the board.[1]

3. Shuffle the encounter cards and put them on the board.[1]

4. Shuffle the objective cards and put them on the board.[1]

5. Randomly select one structure bonus tile and place it face-up at the bottom of the Popularity Track.[1]

6. Randomly shuffle the Faction Mats and Player Mats, then deal 1 of each to each player.[1]

7. Players should sit near their faction's home base with their Faction Mat and Player Mat in front of them in the following clockwise order: Nordic, Rusviet, Crimea, Saxony, Polania.[1] (Note: The combination of Rusviet/Industrial and Crimea/Patriotic is banned; if drawn, discard the player mat and randomly gain another).[1]

8. Shuffle the combat cards and put them on the board.[1]

9. Shuffle the Factory cards and randomly select X cards face-down, where X is the number of players plus 1; place these on the board and return the rest to the box.[1]

10. On your Player Mat, put 6 technology cubes on the green boxes that have a black square in the bottom right corner.[2]

11. Place your 4 structure tokens (Armory, Monument, Mine, and Mill) on top of their corresponding boxes on your Player Mat.[2]

12. Place your action token next to your Player Mat.[2]

13. Place your remaining 6 workers (meepless) on the rectangles above the Produce action on your Player Mat.[2]

14. Each player starts with 2 secret objective cards.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.6 · TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:

[2] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.8 · PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:

[3] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.26 · FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 99 ms · ask 5020 ms · total 5121 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5121 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 18, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "You can build structures (structure tokens) to enhance your actions, control territories, and get end-game bonuses. The resource used to build structures is wood. To build a structure, pay the cost, pick up any structure from your Player Mat, and place it on a territory you control with at least one", "headingPath": "BUILD", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Both the Faction Mat and Player Mat indicate your starting cards and track positions in the boxes on the far right of each mat. POWER TOKEN: Place your power token ( ) on the indicated level of the Power Track (on the game board). Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARDS: Draw t", "headingPath": "STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Your Player Mat is where you'll be choosing actions during the game. TECHNOLOGY CUBES: Put 6 technology cubes on your Player Mat on the green boxes that have a black square in the bottom right corner. EXAMPLE The player with the lowest number in the label on their Player Mat will go first. Play proc", "headingPath": "PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "6 ENCOUNTER TOKENS (GREEN COMPASS): Place 1 encounter token on each territory marked with an encounter symbol on the board (11 total tokens). RESOURCES AND COINS: Place the resource tokens (wood, oil, food, and metal), coins, and multiplier tokens in a supply area next to the board. Shuffle the enco", "headingPath": "TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "RESOURCES: All units-characters, mechs, & workers-can carry around resources (any number). TURNS AND PLAYER MATS: On your turn, you must choose a different section of your Player Mat than you did the previous turn. Take either the top-row action, the bottom-row action, or both (starting with the top", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Simultaneously and secretly select a number on your Power Dial (align the number with the icon at the top right). That is the amount of power you will spend, so you cannot choose a number higher than the amount of power you currently have on the Power Track. The track goes up to 16 but you can only ", "headingPath": "SELECT POWER", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "28 The game immediately ends when a player places their 6th star token, even if they have other things they could do that turn or other things would happen afterwards. If the 6th star comes from taking a bottom-row action, gain the primary benefit, the coins, and the Recruit Ongoing Benefit before p", "headingPath": "PLACING STARS · GAME END AND SCORING · EDGE CASES · SAMPLE SCORING ROUND · END-GAME SCORING", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "As your character treks across Eastern Europa, they will encounter a number of local people and situations. Each encounter will present you with three options to determine how you want to interact with the people. The choice you make will often impact the peoples' view of you, represented in the gam", "headingPath": "ENCOUNTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 114 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 114 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.89696 of 1349 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	BUILD	p.18	0.045541 (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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS	p.7	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
#3	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:	p.8	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:	p.6	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	SELECT POWER	p.22	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	PLACING STARS · GAME END AND SCORING · EDGE CASES · SAMPLE SCORING ROUND · END-GAME SCORING	p.28	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	ENCOUNTERS	p.24	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 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 43 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:	p.6	#4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:	p.8	#3	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES	p.26	#20	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
#4	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	ENCOUNTERS	p.24	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	THE FACTORY	p.25	#13	0.014085 (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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS	p.10	#30	0.011111 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	BUILD	p.18	#1	0.045541 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	PLAYER MAT · STARTING PLAYER:	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES	p.26	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 99 ms · first delta 2293 ms · total 5121 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 99 ms · ask 5020 ms · gateway work 5121 ms · total 5121 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3333
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 418
tok/sec: 150.1 tok/sec — 418 output tokens in 2.785 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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: SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 2), 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.