RuleSage cited table rulings
← Scythe

You asked

How do I set up Scythe for 5 players?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Scythebg-169786-en-1e

I looked through Scythe'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.

RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.7 · STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS
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
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.22 · SELECT POWER
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
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.1 · BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL
The ashes from the first Great W ar still darken the snow in 1920s Europa. The capitalistic city-state known simply as 'The Factory, ' which fueled the war with heavily armored mechs, has closed its doors, drawing the attention of several nearby countries. With characters from five factions convergi
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.2 · GOAL · 80 resource tokens · 42 combat cards (yellow) · 28 encounter cards (green) · 5 quick-start cards
2 | TABLE OF CONTENTS COMPONENTS IMPORTANT CONCEPTS | 2 -3 4 5 6 - 9 | | TYPES OF UNITS | | | SETUP | | | GAMEPLAY | 10 | | TOP-ROW ACTIONS | 11 - 13 | | BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS | 14 - 20 | | FACTION ABILITIES | 21 | | COMBAT | 22 - 23 | | ENCOUNTERS | 24 | | THE FACTORY | 25 | | OBJECTIVES | 26 | | ALLI
RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.10 · RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS
10 Scythe uses an ongoing action-selection mechanism (no rounds or phases). Players take turns one after another until a player places their 6th star on the board, immediately ending the game. On your turn, do the following in sequential order: Place your action token on a different section of your
🔧 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 76 ms · ask 2260 ms · total 2338 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2338 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"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": 22, "score": 0.032258, "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": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The ashes from the first Great W ar still darken the snow in 1920s Europa. The capitalistic city-state known simply as 'The Factory, ' which fueled the war with heavily armored mechs, has closed its doors, drawing the attention of several nearby countries. With characters from five factions convergi", "headingPath": "BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "2 | TABLE OF CONTENTS COMPONENTS IMPORTANT CONCEPTS | 2 -3 4 5 6 - 9 | | TYPES OF UNITS | | | SETUP | | | GAMEPLAY | 10 | | TOP-ROW ACTIONS | 11 - 13 | | BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS | 14 - 20 | | FACTION ABILITIES | 21 | | COMBAT | 22 - 23 | | ENCOUNTERS | 24 | | THE FACTORY | 25 | | OBJECTIVES | 26 | | ALLI", "headingPath": "GOAL · 80 resource tokens · 42 combat cards (yellow) · 28 encounter cards (green) · 5 quick-start cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "10 Scythe uses an ongoing action-selection mechanism (no rounds or phases). Players take turns one after another until a player places their 6th star on the board, immediately ending the game. On your turn, do the following in sequential order: Place your action token on a different section of your ", "headingPath": "RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS", "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": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Your Faction Mat is where you keep your mechs, stars, and coins. Each Faction Mat also shows a special ability in the upper right corner. STARS: Place your 6 star tokens at the upper left near the faction emblem. Do not put tokens on top of the Recruit One-Time Bonuses (bottom left corner)-you'll ga", "headingPath": "FACTION MAT · QUICK-START CARD · RIVERWALK CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The Factory is the centerpiece of the Scythe board. It is a place of technological innovation and untapped power. Unlike most other territories, the Factory does not produce any resources. At the end of the game, the Factory is worth a total of 3 territories (instead of just 1) to the player who con", "headingPath": "THE FACTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
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 114 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 114 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 06:58

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 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
#2 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) SELECT POWER p.22 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL p.1 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
#4 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) GOAL · 80 resource tokens · 42 combat cards (yellow) · 28 encounter cards (green) · 5 quick-start cards p.2 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
#5 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS p.10 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
#6 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
#7 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) FACTION MAT · QUICK-START CARD · RIVERWALK CARD p.9 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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) THE FACTORY p.25 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 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) RIVERWALK CARD · GAMEPLAY · TOP-ROW ACTIONS p.10 #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
#2 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) THE FACTORY p.25 #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
#3 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) GOAL · 80 resource tokens · 42 combat cards (yellow) · 28 encounter cards (green) · 5 quick-start cards p.2 #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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) STARTING CARDS AND TRACK POSITIONS: · PLAYER MAT · CHARACTER · WORKERS p.7 #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
#5 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO? · WANT THE RULES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE? · HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING? · NEED A REPLACEMENT PART? · WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH? · WANT A BIGGER BOARD? · … p.32 #10 0.014286 (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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) BACKSTORY · OBJECT OF THE GAME · GOAL p.1 #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
#7 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) FACTION MAT · QUICK-START CARD · RIVERWALK CARD p.9 #7 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
#8 RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114) SELECT POWER p.22 #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

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
timing split
retrieval 76 ms · first delta 2236 ms · total 2338 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 76 ms · ask 2260 ms · gateway work 2338 ms · total 2338 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2866
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
152.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.059 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 28s 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
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
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)
set up

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.