Ruling — Wingspan

You asked

How do I play

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Wingspanbg-266192-en-1e

To play Wingspan, follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. Shuffle bird cards into a deck and place it next to the bird tray, then populate the tray with 3 face-up bird cards.[1]

2. Place all food and egg tokens in the supply.[1]

3. Toss the food dice into the birdfeeder dice tower.[1]

4. Choose a goal type (Green for direct competition or Blue for less competition) and place the goal board on the table.[1]

5. Shuffle goal tiles without looking, place 1 random-side up tile on each of the four blank spaces on the goal board, and return extras to the box.[1]

6. Shuffle bonus cards into a deck and place them on the table.[1]

7. Each player receives 1 player mat, 8 action cubes of one color, 2 random bonus cards, 5 random bird cards, and 5 food tokens (one of each type).[1]

8. Keep up to 5 bird cards in your hand and discard the others, discarding 1 food token for each bird card kept.[1]

9. Choose 1 bonus card to keep and discard the other.[1]

**Turn Structure**

1. Players take turns proceeding clockwise until everyone has used all available action cubes.[2]

2. On your turn, you take 1 of 4 actions: Play a bird from your hand, Gain food and activate forest bird powers, Lay eggs and activate grassland bird powers, or Draw bird cards and activate wetland bird powers.[2]

3. For the Gain Food, Lay Eggs, and Draw Bird Cards actions, follow these steps:

a. Choose a habitat on your player mat and place an action cube on the leftmost exposed slot in that row.[2]

b. Gain the benefit of that slot.[2]

c. Move your action cube from right to left, activating any birds with a brown 'WHEN ACTIVATED' power in that row (each power is optional).[2]

d. Leave the action cube at the far left once reached.[2]

4. To Play a Bird from your hand:

a. Place an action cube on the "Play a Bird" spot above where you will play the bird.[2]

b. Select a bird card in hand to play.[3][4]

c. Pay the corresponding egg cost by discarding eggs from any birds on your player mat (to play in column 2 or 3, discard 1 egg to the supply; in columns 4 or 5, discard 2 eggs).[4]

d. Pay the bird's food cost by discarding food tokens to the supply.[4]

e. Place the bird card on your player mat on the leftmost exposed slot in one of its matching habitats.[3][2]

f. Activate the bird's white 'when played' power, if any.[3][2]

5. Your turn is over after completing an action.[2]

**End of the Round**

1. Remove all action cubes from your player mat.[5]

2. Place 1 action cube on the end-of-round goal to mark your score.[5]

3. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and replenish them from the deck.[5]

4. Rotate the first player token clockwise.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.2 · Player Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.4 · OVERVIEW · Turn Structure

[3] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix · p.2 · 1. PLAY ONE BIRD

[4] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.6 · THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:

[5] RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix · p.2 · End of the Round

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 66 ms · ask 8554 ms · total 8623 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8623 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.047674, "snippet": "Each turn, you will take 1 action. This section describes each action in more detail. Before choosing to play a bird from your hand, consider its habitat, food requirements, and egg cost. Each bird has habitat and food requirements, shown in the upper left-hand corner of the card. Additionally, ther", "headingPath": "THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045517, "snippet": "Wingspan is played over 4 rounds. During each round, players take turns-proceeding clockwise-until each player has used all of their available action cubes. On your turn, you will take 1 of 4 actions, as shown on the left side of your player mat: Play a bird from your hand Gain food and activate for", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · Turn Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.042178, "snippet": "1 . Bird cards. Shuffle the bird cards into a deck. Place it next to the bird tray, then populate the tray with 3 face-up bird cards. Supply. Place all food and egg tokens in the supply. These are tokens accessible to all players. Birdfeeder. Toss the food dice into the birdfeeder dice tower. Goal b", "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "This is a detailed rulebook, but you can learn the entire game by using the Swift-Start cards and guides. We recommend using these guides for your first game. 6/15/21 7:35 AM TIP: When selecting bird cards, think about how they will help you get more cards or food early in the game. Brown powers can", "headingPath": "Player Setup · 6/9/21 4:20 PM Swift-Start Guides and Cards:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03009, "snippet": "When all players have placed all of their action cubes, the round is over. Follow these steps in order: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and restock the bird tray with cards fro", "headingPath": "Round Structure · Game End and Scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029514, "snippet": "Select 1 bird card from your hand to play. Discard the number of eggs from bird cards equal to the number of shown in the column where you want to/will place the bird. Discard the shown food tokens (if , then there is no food cost). Wild ( ) means you may use any food. You may spend any 2 food token", "headingPath": "1. PLAY ONE BIRD", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029236, "snippet": "When players have placed all their available action cubes (1 cube per turn), the round is over. At round end: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and replenish them. Rotate the fir", "headingPath": "END OF THE ROUND · Scoring End-of-Round Goals · Green: Majority of the targeted item", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.028814, "snippet": "This method uses the side of the goal board that has spaces labeled 5-4-3-2-1-0 next to the space for each goal. For example, when using the goal that scores 5, 2, or 1 points, if two players tie for 1st place, each gets 3 points (5 + 2 divided by 2 players, rounded down). Do not award 2nd place to ", "headingPath": "Blue: One point per targeted item", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · Turn Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. PLAY ONE BIRD", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 198}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "End of the Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 198 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 198 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 0.89039 of 2153 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 00:15

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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	0.047674 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	OVERVIEW · Turn Structure	p.4	0.045517 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	0.042178 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup · 6/9/21 4:20 PM Swift-Start Guides and Cards:	p.3	0.032002 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Round Structure · Game End and Scoring	p.5	0.03009 (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 Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	1. PLAY ONE BIRD	p.2	0.029514 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	END OF THE ROUND · Scoring End-of-Round Goals · Green: Majority of the targeted item	p.11	0.029236 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Blue: One point per targeted item	p.11	0.028814 (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 Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	1. PLAY ONE BIRD	p.2	#6	0.029514 (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 re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	Card-Drawing Powers	p.9	#11	0.02773 (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 re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	End of the Round	p.2	#12	0.027313 (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 re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	OTHER POWERS	p.12	#13	0.027206 (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 re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	Card-Drawing Powers	p.9	#15	0.025158 (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 re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	#3	0.042178 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	#1	0.047674 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	OVERVIEW · Turn Structure	p.4	#2	0.045517 (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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	Player Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	OVERVIEW · Turn Structure	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	1. PLAY ONE BIRD	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 198)	THE FOUR ACTIONS · OPTION 1. Play a Bird From Your Hand · When you choose to play a bird, do the following:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46)	End of the Round	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 66 ms · first delta 3774 ms · total 8623 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 66 ms · ask 8554 ms · gateway work 8623 ms · total 8623 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2657
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 724
tok/sec: 150.5 tok/sec — 724 output tokens in 4.811 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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

6 errata cards registered for edition 3 — these are what the gate above had to match against

anatomist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.2
belted kingfisher · HAND_PINNED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bird Cards) · corpus doc 65 · p.17
ecologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.5
oologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.1
photographer · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.3
rodentologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.4

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.