Ruling — Spirit Island

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Spirit Island has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.

How do I play? →

Answered Aug 17, 2026 gemma4:26b read Spirit Island

I looked through Spirit Island'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 Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.13 · ENERGY AND CARD PLAYS

Spirits affect things on the Island by playing Power Cards from their hand. A Spirit can play whichever cards they like each Spirit Phase, limited by two things: They can only play as many cards as they have Card Plays available, which is the highest revealed number on the Card Plays Presence Track.

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.20 · STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY

As you play Power Cards, put the required Energy on top of them. This will help you remember to pay for them. When you resolve a Power Card, you can push it forward or turn it sideways to note that it has been used. Don't discard it until end of turn, because you may be making use of its Elements fo

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.17 · DO AS MUCH AS YOU CAN

You do not have to be able to use every part of a Power Card's effect to be able to play it. For example, even if a Power Card reads: you don't have to target it on a land with Dahan! If you did, the target bar would say so, looking something like this:

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER SETUP

Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page

RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.3 · TABLE OF CONTENTS

Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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 88 ms · ask 2902 ms · total 13074 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 10082 ms · generation 2992 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 13, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "Spirits affect things on the Island by playing Power Cards from their hand. A Spirit can play whichever cards they like each Spirit Phase, limited by two things: They can only play as many cards as they have Card Plays available, which is the highest revealed number on the Card Plays Presence Track.", "headingPath": "ENERGY AND CARD PLAYS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.045245, "snippet": "As you play Power Cards, put the required Energy on top of them. This will help you remember to pay for them. When you resolve a Power Card, you can push it forward or turn it sideways to note that it has been used. Don't discard it until end of turn, because you may be making use of its Elements fo", "headingPath": "STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.043298, "snippet": "You do not have to be able to use every part of a Power Card's effect to be able to play it. For example, even if a Power Card reads: you don't have to target it on a land with Dahan! If you did, the target bar would say so, looking something like this:", "headingPath": "DO AS MUCH AS YOU CAN", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.043204, "snippet": "Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.042384, "snippet": "Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.040612, "snippet": "You suddenly realize that for the past 4 turns you've been using a Power Card on lands it can't actually target. What to do? The answer is: don't sweat it. Especially on your first play or two, you'll likely make minor mistakes here and there. They're unlikely to break anything: the game will just b", "headingPath": "WHOOPS!", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "BASIC STRATEGY Feel under no obligation to read or use these - refer to them if you're feeling lost in your first games.", "headingPath": "STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029877, "snippet": "PLAYER'S HAND PLAYER'S HAND 4-PLAYER GAME SETUP (Not including an Adversary or Scenario.) DISCARD PLAYER'S DISCARD PLAYER'S AREA PLAY AREA PLAY FEAR DECK VICTORY WHEN REVEALED EARNED FEAR CARDS FEAR DISCARD SPIRIT PHASE Growth Gain Energy Choose Powers DISCARD DESTROYING A PER PLAYER GENERATES 1 DES", "headingPath": "INVADERS' STARTING ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]

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 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 58 boosted

answered-before recall

past answered rulings were found and offered

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

ruling 4388 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0

debug row retained until

Nov 13, 2026 13:18

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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	ENERGY AND CARD PLAYS	p.13	0.045805 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY	p.20	0.045245 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	DO AS MUCH AS YOU CAN	p.17	0.043298 (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))	253
#4	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	0.043204 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	0.042384 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	WHOOPS!	p.20	0.040612 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY	p.21	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))	120
#8	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	INVADERS' STARTING ACTION	p.7	0.029877 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	DO AS MUCH AS YOU CAN	p.17	#3	0.043298 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	WHOOPS!	p.20	#6	0.040612 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	#5	0.042384 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	SPIRIT PHASE	p.8	#10	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
#5	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PRESENCE TRACK	p.32	#14	0.026121 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	BOARDS AND LANDS	p.13	#12	0.028624 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	#4	0.043204 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY	p.20	#2	0.045245 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 88 ms · first delta 2902 ms · total 13074 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 10082 ms · retrieval 88 ms · ask 2902 ms · gateway work 2992 ms · total 13074 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1747
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 34s 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: 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

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 7), 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.