Ruling — Finspan

← Finspan

You asked

How do I play

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Finspanbg-436126-en-1e

To play, follow these steps:

**Setup**

1. Place an ocean mat in front of you.[1]

2. Choose a player color and gain the 6 divers of that color.[1]

3. Place 1 egg token on each of the 2 starting egg spaces (printed on forage fish) in your ocean.[1]

4. Place 1 young token on the starting young space.[1]

5. Gain 2 random starter fish cards and place them face up in a vertical line beside your ocean mat to form your hand; return any unused starter fish cards to the box.[1]

6. Draw 3 fish cards from the deck and add them face up to your hand.[1]

7. Randomly select the first player and give them the first-player token.[1]

8. Place all egg/young and school tokens in a general supply.[2]

9. Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply.[2]

10. Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards and place it face down next to the starter fish cards.[2]

11. Place the achievement board near the general supply.[2]

**Gameplay**

Each turn, you will either play a fish or dive into your ocean.[3] You take 6 turns during each of the 4 weeks.[3]

To play a fish card:

1. Place an available diver in the gray box at the upper left of your ocean.[4]

2. Choose a fish card from your hand and pay the cost noted on the upper left corner of the card.[4] Costs may include discarding 1 or more additional cards from your hand (placed face up in your personal discard pile), paying eggs or young from anywhere in your ocean, or consuming a fish in your ocean.[4] If consuming a fish, the played fish must have a longer length than the fish it consumes.[5]

3. Choose an empty or occupied slot in your ocean and place the fish there.[4] You must follow these placement rules:

* Each fish has 1 or more zones (Sunlight, Twilight, and/or Midnight) where it may be placed as indicated on the card.[4]

* Fish with blue, purple, or green color bands may only be placed in their matching dive sites (columns).[4] Other fish without these bands may be placed in any dive site.[4]

* If a fish is placed on top of egg, young, or school tokens, transfer those tokens to the newly played fish.[4]

* If playing a fish that consumes another, any tokens (egg, young, or school) on the consumed fish transfer to the played fish, and any fish cards under the consumed fish also remain.[5]

4. Resolve "WHEN PLAYED" abilities: If the fish has a "WHEN PLAYED" ability, you may gain the benefit after all other "play a fish" steps.[5][6] If there is more than one benefit, you may choose the order in which you gain them.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.2 · PLAYER SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.2 · SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS

[3] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.4 · GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW

[4] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAY A FISH CARD

[5] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.5 · PLAY A FISH CARD

[6] RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook · p.9 · FISH ABILITIES

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 6621 ms · total 6689 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6689 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Each turn, you will either play a fish or dive into your ocean. You will take 6 turns during each of the 4 weeks (a total of 24 turns per player during the entire game). You will typically spend the beginning of the game playing low-cost fish cards and laying eggs, the middle of the game playing hig", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "Playing a fish involves choosing a fish card from your hand, paying its cost, and placing it on your ocean mat. Thematically, this represents you discovering this fish in an area of your ocean. Follow these steps to play a fish card: PLACE A DIVER. Place an available diver in the gray box at the upp", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.047493, "snippet": "Go to stonemaiergames.com/games/finspan/rules-faq", "headingPath": "WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO OR READ THE FAQ?", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "CONSUMING FISH: You may place the fish on top of a shorter fish (card or forage) already in your ocean either by choice or to satisfy a cost. The played fish must have a longer length (shown at the bottom left) than the fish it consumes. Any tokens (egg, young, or school) on the consumed fish transf", "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "The vertical area on the right side of fish cards shows the fish's ability. Benefits from fish abilities are optional for each affected player. Gaining all or part of a benefit is allowed. WHEN PLAYED: Gain this benefit when you play a fish (after all other 'play a fish' steps). IF ACTIVATED: Gain t", "headingPath": "FISH ABILITIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Post it on the Finspan Facebook group, on BoardGameGeek, or in the Finspan channel of the Stonemaier Games Discord server: stonemaiergames.com/discord", "headingPath": "HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE?", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "1 Place all egg/young and school tokens within reach of all players to form the general supply. 2 Shuffle the 10 starter fish cards and place them face down near the general supply. These 10 cards have dark gray corners and a different back than other fish cards. 3 Shuffle the deck of 125 fish cards", "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A Place an ocean mat (your 'ocean') in front of you. B Choose a player color and gain the 6 divers of that color. C Place 1 egg token on each of the 2 starting egg spaces (printed on forage fish) in your ocean. Forage fish are the three fish printed on your ocean mat. D Place 1 young token on the st", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY A FISH CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FISH ABILITIES", "sharpsignalDocId": 54}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 54 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 54 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 0.90039 of 2048 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 00:28

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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW	p.4	0.048131 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.4	0.047875 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO OR READ THE FAQ?	p.12	0.047493 (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))	49
#4	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.5	0.047163 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	FISH ABILITIES	p.9	0.045037 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE?	p.12	0.044796 (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))	150
#7	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS	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
#8	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAYER SETUP	p.2	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 32 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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.4	#2	0.047875 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.5	#4	0.047163 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	ABILITY ICONOGRAPHY	p.12	#9	0.029274 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PERSONAL DISCARD PILES	p.9	#12	0.027444 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	FISH ABILITIES	p.9	#5	0.045037 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAYER SETUP	p.2	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS	p.2	#7	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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW	p.4	#1	0.048131 (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 Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAYER SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	SETUP GLOBAL COMPONENTS	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.4	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	PLAY A FISH CARD	p.5	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Finspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 54)	FISH ABILITIES	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 66 ms · first delta 2305 ms · total 6689 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 6621 ms · gateway work 6689 ms · total 6689 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2392
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 654
tok/sec: 150.8 tok/sec — 654 output tokens in 4.336 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 33s 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 5), 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.