Ruling — Scythe

You asked

How does the Factory card work?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Scythebg-169786-en-1e

A Factory card works as follows:

* **Acquisition**: Only characters may claim a Factory card, and players are limited to one per game.[1][2][3] To obtain one, if your character is on the Factory for the first time this game after a Move action is completely finished, you look through the face-down Factory cards on the board and must choose one.[2][4] The first player to visit sees a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one; each subsequent player sees one fewer card.[4] Once selected, your choice is permanent and cannot be switched for another card if your character ends a future Move action on the Factory.[1]

* **Placement and Usage**: The card is placed next to your Player Mat and acts as a fifth section of that mat.[1] On your turn, you may place an action token on the Factory card to take one or both actions (starting with the top-row action if taking both).[1]

* **Actions**:

* **Top-Row Action**: The specific action varies by card; for example, one card allows you to pay 1 popularity to Enlist a recruit OR perform an Upgrade (or skip the action).[1]

* **Bottom-Row Move Action**: All Factory cards include a bottom-row Move action that allows you to move one unit up to two times within the same action.[1] If you have a Mine, you may move through it with this action.[1] If you have unlocked the Speed mech ability, a character or mech may move up to 3 territories with this action.[1] Standard movement rules still apply, such as the action ending if a unit moves onto a territory with an encounter token or an opponent's unit.[1]

* **Independence**: Actions taken on Factory cards are completely independent of other actions on your Player Mat; even if they are similar, you do not receive Recruit Ongoing Bonuses, Structure bonuses, or coins from similar actions on your Player Mat.[1][3] Additionally, the Rusviet faction's ability to choose the same section of their player mat as the previous turn does not apply to Factory cards.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.25 · FACTORY CARDS

[2] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.5 · TYPES OF UNITS

[3] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.31 · HIGHLIGHTED RULES

[4] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.25 · THE FACTORY

[5] RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook · p.21 · F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S

🔧 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 89 ms · ask 5298 ms · total 5390 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5390 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 26, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "26 Each player starts the game with 2 objective cards that are kept secret from the other players. You may reveal a completed objective card during your own turn before or after you complete a top- or bottom-row action. If you do, place 1 star token on the objective space of the Triumph Track and di", "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each Factory card is the equivalent of a fifth section of your Player Mat (place it next to your Player Mat). USING FACTORY ACTIONS: The Factory card is treated as any other section on your Player Mat. On your turn, you may place your action token on the Factory card and take one or both actions (st", "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.031746, "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}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "All resources, units, or structures gained from an encounter card go on the territory where the encounter occurred. Benefits gained from encounters do not trigger Recruit Ongoing Bonuses. FACTORY: Only characters may claim Factory cards (1 per player). Actions taken on Factory cards do not trigger R", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "BOTTOM-ROW ACTIONS: You may continue to pay to take a bottom-row action for the coin(s) even after you've achieved a star for the action. This will continue to trigger Recruit Ongoing Bonuses. UPGRADE: Pick up a technology cube from any green box on your Player Mat and place it on any red bracketed ", "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.030303, "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": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "12 Pay the cost ($1) and gain one of the following: POWER: Increase your power by 2 on the Power Track. Power is the commodity you will spend in combat. COMBAT CARD(S): Draw 1 combat card. Combat cards are used to augment the power you spend in combat (you may spend up to 1 combat card per character", "headingPath": "CONTROLLED BY CHARACTER AND/OR MECHS · BOLSTER · TRADE", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Pay the cost (depending on what is shown on all exposed red rectangles before taking the Produce action), choose up to 2 different territories you control, and all workers on those territories may produce. On the territories you selected for production, each worker may produce 1 token. The resource ", "headingPath": "PRODUCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 25, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FACTORY CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TYPES OF UNITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 31, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HIGHLIGHTED RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 25, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE FACTORY", "sharpsignalDocId": 114}, {"page": 21, "quote": null, "headingPath": "F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S", "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 0.92054 of 1636 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 12, 2026 12:05

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)	FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES	p.26	0.048652 (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)	FACTORY CARDS	p.25	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)	THE FACTORY	p.25	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)	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
#5	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	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)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	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)	CONTROLLED BY CHARACTER AND/OR MECHS · BOLSTER · TRADE	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	PRODUCE	p.13	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 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)	FACTORY CARDS	p.25	#2	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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	FACTORY CARDS · O B J E C T I V E S · ALLIANCES AND BRIBES	p.26	#1	0.048652 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS	p.5	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S	p.21	#26	0.011628 (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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS · BOARD SETUP · SETUP · ENCOUNTER CARDS (GREEN) : · FACTION SELECTION:	p.6	#15	0.013333 (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)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	THE FACTORY	p.25	#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 Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	FACTORY CARDS	p.25	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	TYPES OF UNITS	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	HIGHLIGHTED RULES	p.31	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	THE FACTORY	p.25	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Scythe — Rulebook (corpus doc 114)	F A C T I O N A B I L I T I E S	p.21	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 2240 ms · total 5390 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 89 ms · ask 5298 ms · gateway work 5390 ms · total 5390 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3364
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 460
tok/sec: 148.8 tok/sec — 460 output tokens in 3.092 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s 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 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.