Ruling — SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

← SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligencebg-418059-en-1e

The game is played in 5 rounds.[1][2] The player with the starting player marker takes the first turn of the round, and players take turns in clockwise order, skipping any players that have already passed for the round.[1][2]

**On your turn:**

1. You take only 1 main action.[1][2] Main actions include: playing a card for its effect,[3][2] launching a probe, orbiting a planet, landing on a planet or moon, scanning nearby stars, analyzing data, researching a tech, or passing for the round.[2]

2. You may perform free actions at any time during your turn—before, after, or even during your main action.[1][2]

3. Once you have taken your main action and any free actions, your turn ends.[1][2]

4. You then need to resolve any milestones or discovered species.[1][2]

5. After these steps, it is the next player's turn.[1]

**Passing and Round End:**

1. If a player passes, that player is done for the round, but others continue taking turns.[1] Passing is a main action.[4]

2. Once all players have passed, the round is finished.[1]

3. When the round ends, players collect income.[1]

4. The starting player marker moves to the next player who starts the next round.[1][4]

**Winning the Game:**

At the end of round 5, the final score is calculated and the player with the most points wins.[1][2]

[1] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.7 · GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW

[2] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.7

[3] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.15 · PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions

[4] RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook · p.19 · MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row

🔧 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 78 ms · ask 4842 ms · total 25367 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 20446 ms · generation 4921 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "GAME OVERVIEW CARD OVERVIEW The game is played in 5 rounds. The player with the starting player marker takes the first turn of the round. Players take turns in clockwise order, skipping any players that have already passed for the round. At the end of round 5, the final score is calculated and the p", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The game is played in 5 rounds. The player with the starting player marker takes the first turn of the round. Players take turns in clockwise order, skipping any players that have already passed for the round. At the end of round 5, the final score is calculated and the player with the most points w", "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "As your main action, you can play a card for its effect (the white part of the card). The cost is printed on the card. If the card's effect includes other actions (launching a probe, scanning nearby stars, etc.) you perform the action without paying its standard cost. After resolving the effect, pla", "headingPath": "PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045536, "snippet": "Discard down to 4 cards if you have more than 4. Note: There's no limit in number of cards you can have in your hand during the round. Check whether you rotate the solar system. If you are the first player to pass this round, take the rotation reminder token and set it beside the stack, then rotate ", "headingPath": "MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.044283, "snippet": "PLAYER SETUP Each player selects a color and takes the corresponding pieces. Keep them near your player board. The player who last saw a UFO will be the starting player – give them the starting player marker. Your score starts at 1 if you're the first player, 2 if you're the second player, 3 if you'", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.044192, "snippet": "In the solo game, you will compete against a rival research institution. Your goal is to outscore your rival at the end of the game. Set up the game as you normally would for two players. Choose a difficulty and give the rival the corresponding player board. (The 1-star and 2-star difficulties both ", "headingPath": "SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.042745, "snippet": "During play, you may have several opportunities to 'mark a signal in a sector'. Often, these come from Scan actions, but they can also come from card effects. You may never choose to skip placing a signal, it is a mandatory effect. To 'mark a signal in a sector', take the leftmost data token from th", "headingPath": "Marking Signals · Completing a Sector", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each player selects a color and takes the corresponding pieces. Keep them near your player board. Take the starting income card in your color. Your starting resources are shown on the back of the card - 4 publicity, 4 credits, 3 energy, and 5 cards. To track publicity, place your publicity counter o", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 251 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 251 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 0.86710 of 1076 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 13:19

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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.7	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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW	p.7	0.048412 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions	p.15	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
#4	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row	p.19	0.045536 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.6	0.044283 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.	p.22	0.044192 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	Marking Signals · Completing a Sector	p.13	0.042745 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAYER SETUP · STARTING RESOURCES · Increasing Income	p.6	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 41 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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions	p.15	#3	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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW	p.7	#2	0.048412 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.1	#15	0.025942 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row	p.19	#4	0.045536 (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
#5	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	SOLO GAME · SETUP · Rival Action Deck · Objectives come in 3 levels: I, II, and III.	p.22	#6	0.044192 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	Marking Signals · Completing a Sector	p.13	#7	0.042745 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.6	#5	0.044283 (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 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.7	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	GAME OVERVIEW · TURN STRUCTURE · FREE ACTIONS · ROUND STRUCTURE · CARD OVERVIEW	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)		p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	PLAY A CARD · MISSIONS CARDS · Conditional Missions	p.15	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251)	MILESTONES · PASS · BETWEEN ROUNDS · Other Ways to Get Cards · Refilling the Card Row	p.19	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 78 ms · first delta 2413 ms · total 25367 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 20446 ms · retrieval 78 ms · ask 4842 ms · gateway work 4921 ms · total 25367 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3369
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 345
tok/sec: 139.8 tok/sec — 345 output tokens in 2.467 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 30s 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 177), 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.