Ruling — Lost Ruins of Arnak

You asked

How does the research track work?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Lost Ruins of Arnakbg-312484-en-1e

The research track works as follows:

1. **Setup**: Research tokens are placed on starting spaces below the research track.[1] A stack of face-down research bonus tiles is placed at the top of the track for the solo variant.[2] During setup, some rows may be dealt 2 or 3 bonus tiles.[3] Most spaces on the track receive one bonus tile, while specific spaces receive tiles only in three- or four-player games.[2]

2. **Moving Tokens**: A research action moves one of your research tokens to the next row.[4] You can move either token if your notebook is below your magnifying glass, but you cannot move your notebook to a row above your magnifying glass.[4] You must move into a space that is connected to your current space.[4]

3. **Paying Costs**: To move into a new space, you must pay the cost printed on the bridge connecting your old space to the new space.[4] In certain versions (the Snake Temple side), advancing a token across a specific bridge requires paying 1 idol from your supply crates.[5] Costs must be paid before any rewards are gained.[4]

4. **Resolving Effects**: Every row of the research track has an effect, which is resolved regardless of whether you take a bonus tile.[6] The effect depends on whether you moved your magnifying glass or your notebook:[4]

* Moving the notebook to certain rows allows you to choose one available assistant from the supply board and set it on your player board (silver side up).[7]

* Moving the notebook to a row with a specific symbol allows you to upgrade an assistant to the gold level.[7]

5. **Bonus Tiles**: If a space has a face-up research bonus tile, the first player to reach that space may immediately gain the depicted bonus and remove the tile from the game.[4] When moving to a row with a magnifying glass effect, you may choose one of the tiles available in that row.[3]

6. **Ending/Reaching the Top**: When the magnifying glass reaches the top row, you discover the Lost Temple.[4] You place your magnifying glass on the remaining empty space worth the most points and take a bonus tile from the face-down stack.[4] It is not possible to move a notebook token to the Lost Temple row.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.6 · Player Setup · Player Board · Your Starting Deck · Play Order · Starting Resources · RECOMMENDED TABLE LAYOUT · …

[2] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.5 · Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board

[3] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.19 · Dreadful Tales!

[4] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.14 · Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple

[5] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.19 · The Snake Temple Side · Different board · Assistant Rescue

[6] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.23 · Don't Forget!

[7] RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook · p.16 · Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:

🔧 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 80 ms · ask 5684 ms · total 5765 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5765 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "10 12 Temple Tiles. Make stacks of temple tiles on the temple. Each stack has as many tiles as there are players. As shown, 11-point tiles have one stack at the top, 6-point tiles have two stacks in the middle, 2-point tiles have three stacks at the bottom. Return unused tiles to the box. 9 Research", "headingPath": "Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "◊ You can always pay to buy a . ◊ You can't advance your token above your token. ◊ Every row of the research track has an effect. You resolve the effect regardless of whether you take a bonus tile. ◊ When you upgrade your assistant, you also refresh it. ◊ When you use the effect, you can exile a car", "headingPath": "Don't Forget!", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "A research action moves one of your research tokens up to the next row of the research track: 1 Decide which research token to move. If your notebook is below your magnifying glass , you may move either token. However, your notebook must never move to a row above your magnifying glass . (This is eas", "headingPath": "Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Blue and Red each have their magnifying glasses on different spaces in the first row. Blue's space is connected to both spaces in the next row, so Blue could move up to either one. Red's space, however, is connected to only one space in the next row. All other tokens are on the starting spaces. Toke", "headingPath": "Where Can You Move? · Research Action · Gaining an Assistant", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At first, we dismissed his stories as haucinations resulting from the traumatic experience of being stranded for so long, but as we uncovered more secrets of Arnak … This magnifying glass effect means you gain a Fear card ! Place it face up in your play area, ignoring its travel value. During setup", "headingPath": "Dreadful Tales!", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Your rival wants to keep you from getting the depicted resource. Look for a site offering that resource and put a rival archaeologist on the space there. (If all such spaces are occupied, your rival does nothing.) If there are multiple such spaces, your rival chooses one with the following prioritie", "headingPath": "Dig at a Site · THE DECISION ARROW", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "At the end of your turn, if the card row is missing a card, refill the row with a card of the same type: Note: When you buy an artifact, you get to resolve its effect. That effect might be another action, like sending an archaeologist to dig at a site. All this is considered to be part of your main ", "headingPath": "REFILLING THE CARD ROW", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Assistants are people who have come to join your expedition. Each assistant has two levels - silver and gold. The gold side has the stronger effect. The research track will give you silver assistants when you move your notebook token to certain rows. When you move your notebook to a row with this sy", "headingPath": "Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup · Player Board · Your Starting Deck · Play Order · Starting Resources · RECOMMENDED TABLE LAYOUT · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Dreadful Tales!", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Snake Temple Side · Different board · Assistant Rescue", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Don't Forget!", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 212}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 212 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 212 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 0.91980 of 1783 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 12, 2026 06:59

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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board	p.5	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Don't Forget!	p.23	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple	p.14	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Where Can You Move? · Research Action · Gaining an Assistant	p.15	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Dreadful Tales!	p.19	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Dig at a Site · THE DECISION ARROW	p.20	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	REFILLING THE CARD ROW	p.12	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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:	p.16	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 39 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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:	p.16	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Don't Forget!	p.23	#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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Dreadful Tales!	p.19	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Player Setup · Player Board · Your Starting Deck · Play Order · Starting Resources · RECOMMENDED TABLE LAYOUT · …	p.6	#11	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
#5	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Where Can You Move? · Research Action · Gaining an Assistant	p.15	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	The Snake Temple Side · Different board · Assistant Rescue	p.19	#16	0.013158 (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 Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board	p.5	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple	p.14	#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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Player Setup · Player Board · Your Starting Deck · Play Order · Starting Resources · RECOMMENDED TABLE LAYOUT · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Research Track · One-Player Game · Supply Board	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Dreadful Tales!	p.19	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Day 14 - A shattered spear. Some lines of text. Each lends meaning to the other. I take the time to contemplate these clues to Arnak's past. · The Lost Temple	p.14	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	The Snake Temple Side · Different board · Assistant Rescue	p.19	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Don't Forget!	p.23	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Lost Ruins of Arnak — Rulebook (corpus doc 212)	Gaining an Assistant · Recruiting Assistants · Using Assistants · Upgrading Assistants · ASSISTANTS HAVE A VARIETY OF EFFECTS:	p.16	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 80 ms · first delta 2379 ms · total 5765 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 80 ms · ask 5684 ms · gateway work 5765 ms · total 5765 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3311
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 497
tok/sec: 148.9 tok/sec — 497 output tokens in 3.337 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s 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: 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 137), 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.