You asked
How do I play?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilizationbg-182028-en-1e
I looked through Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization'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.
An aggression is a brown military card. It has the word "Aggression:" in its name. To play one, do the following: Reveal the card. Pay the military action cost depicted next to the crown symbol. Declare which player you are attacking. That player is your rival . -You cannot attack a player if the tw
You may use your political action to resign. Your civilization immediately leaves play. You have lost. Discard your hand and remove all cards in your play area from play. If you are party to any pact in someone else's play area, remove that pact from play. If there are any wars declared against you,
If you have no war in play, skip this step. But if you have a war card in your play area, you must resolve the war at this time. Compare your strength with the strength of the opponent on whom you declared war. -If a card in play gives you a bonus when you attack this opponent, include that bonus. I
These are general rules that apply to drawing, playing, and discarding cards. Basic functions of certain types of cards are explained on the following pages. The level of the card is a numerical value that corresponds to the age of the card: Age A = 0, Age I = 1, Age II = 2, and Age III = 3. The lev
For every available military action you have left, draw one military card from the current age military deck. -Limitation: You may draw at most 3 cards this way. -In Age IV, there is no military deck and you draw no cards. -Note: On the first round, players have no available military actions and thu
🔧 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 68 ms · ask 2421 ms · total 18905 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 16415 ms · generation 2490 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "An aggression is a brown military card. It has the word \"Aggression:\" in its name. To play one, do the following: Reveal the card. Pay the military action cost depicted next to the crown symbol. Declare which player you are attacking. That player is your rival . -You cannot attack a player if the tw", "headingPath": "pLay an aGGression · deCLare a war", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046751, "snippet": "You may use your political action to resign. Your civilization immediately leaves play. You have lost. Discard your hand and remove all cards in your play area from play. If you are party to any pact in someone else's play area, remove that pact from play. If there are any wars declared against you,", "headingPath": "resiGn", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "If you have no war in play, skip this step. But if you have a war card in your play area, you must resolve the war at this time. Compare your strength with the strength of the opponent on whom you declared war. -If a card in play gives you a bonus when you attack this opponent, include that bonus. I", "headingPath": "resoLve a war · make taCtiCs avaiLaBLe", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "These are general rules that apply to drawing, playing, and discarding cards. Basic functions of certain types of cards are explained on the following pages. The level of the card is a numerical value that corresponds to the age of the card: Age A = 0, Age I = 1, Age II = 2, and Age III = 3. The lev", "headingPath": "Your Cards · LeveL of a Card · your hand · CiviL Cards · miLitary Cards · Cards in pLay", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.043009, "snippet": "For every available military action you have left, draw one military card from the current age military deck. -Limitation: You may draw at most 3 cards this way. -In Age IV, there is no military deck and you draw no cards. -Note: On the first round, players have no available military actions and thu", "headingPath": "draw miLitary Cards · reset your aCtions · disBand a miLitary unit · pLay a taCtiC · Copy a taCtiC", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.040775, "snippet": "Your turn consists of these phases and steps: Start-of-Turn Sequence: -Replenish the card row. -Resolve a war, if necessary. -Make exclusive tactics available, if necessary. Politics Phase Action Phase End-of-Turn Sequence: -Discard excess military cards. -Production Phase. (Skip during an uprising.", "headingPath": "Course of the turn · first turn · repLenish the Card row", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "This rulebook presents all the rules for Through the Ages in a point-by-point format. It is especially useful for players who need to find a rule quickly. Players who are learning the game should not start with this rulebook. Instead, they should learn from the Handbook , which provides thematic bac", "headingPath": "Code of Laws", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Place the game boards in the center of the table, in any suitable configuration. Ages A, I, II, and III each have their own civil and military decks. So there are 8 separate decks, each with a different back. military decks In a 2- or 3-player game, you must remove certain cards. These cards will no", "headingPath": "Game Boards · deCk setup · in the Box · preparinG the event deCk · startinG pLayer · initiaL aCtions · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 242}]
- 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 242 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 242 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 13, 2026 20:53
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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | pLay an aGGression · deCLare a war | p.4 | 0.046875 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | resiGn | p.4 | 0.046751 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | resoLve a war · make taCtiCs avaiLaBLe | p.3 | 0.046696 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | Your Cards · LeveL of a Card · your hand · CiviL Cards · miLitary Cards · Cards in pLay | p.8 | 0.045475 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | draw miLitary Cards · reset your aCtions · disBand a miLitary unit · pLay a taCtiC · Copy a taCtiC | p.6 | 0.043009 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | Course of the turn · first turn · repLenish the Card row | p.3 | 0.040775 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | Code of Laws | p.1 | 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 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | Game Boards · deCk setup · in the Box · preparinG the event deCk · startinG pLayer · initiaL aCtions · … | p.2 | 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 |
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 37 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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | pLay an aGGression · deCLare a war | p.4 | #1 | 0.046875 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | resiGn | p.4 | #2 | 0.046751 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | resoLve a war · make taCtiCs avaiLaBLe | p.3 | #3 | 0.046696 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | aCtion phase · BuiLd a farm, mine, or urBan BuiLdinG · upGrade a farm, mine, or urBan BuiLdinG · destroy a farm, mine, or urBan BuiLdinG · pLay a Leader | p.5 | #19 | 0.025418 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | draw miLitary Cards · reset your aCtions · disBand a miLitary unit · pLay a taCtiC · Copy a taCtiC | p.6 | #5 | 0.043009 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | make taCtiCs avaiLaBLe · prepare an event | p.4 | #21 | 0.024706 (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 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | deCLare a revoLution · pLay an aCtion Card · ... your turn · BuiLd a miLitary unit · upGrade a miLitary unit | p.6 | #13 | 0.02837 (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 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization — Rulebook (corpus doc 242) | BLue and yeLLow tokens | p.10 | #22 | 0.024351 (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 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 68 ms · first delta 2365 ms · total 18905 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 16415 ms · retrieval 68 ms · ask 2421 ms · gateway work 2490 ms · total 18905 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4962
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 204.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.044 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 14s 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 168), 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.