Ruling — Churchill

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Churchillbg-132018-en-1e

The play of a conference follows this sequence:

1. Set the agenda by randomly assigning seven of your 21 staff to assist you.[1][2]

2. The high value card selects one available issue and places it on his track in the space that corresponds to the difference between the winning card value and the lowest card value played by the other players.[3]

3. Each player in turn, starting with the player to the left of the player who won the Agenda Segment and proceeding clockwise, picks two issues and places them in the center of the conference table display.[3]

4. During the Meeting Segment, beginning with the player to the left of the one who won the Agenda Segment, each player plays one staff card and advances an issue toward their position.[3]

5. To advance an issue, the player selects any one un-captured issue on the table and moves it a number of spaces equal to the staff card's value, modified according to the card's attributes.[4]

6. If the selected issue is in the center space or on the active player's track, move the issue toward his leader's conference chair.[4]

7. If the selected issue is on another player's track, the player must move it towards the center space before moving it along his own track.[4]

8. When an issue is advanced, other players have the option to debate that issue.[5][3] The player to the left has the first option to debate.[3]

9. A debating player follows the same procedure: playing a staff card and moving the issue a number of spaces equal to the staff card's value, including special abilities/penalties, toward their chair.[3]

10. If neither player debates the issue, play proceeds clockwise to the next player.[3][6]

11. A player who debated another player's issue since their last opportunity to advance an issue may decide to pass during their next opportunity to advance an issue.[6]

12. The Meeting Segment continues until all staff cards have been played [5][4] or until all players have used all of their seven staff cards.[3][6]

13. At the conclusion of the Meeting Segment, each player counts the number of issues they have won (an issue is won if it resides on the player's chair or on his national track).[6]

14. The player who won the most issues wins the conference and receives a conference victory marker.[6]

15. The Decision Segment follows, consisting of seven activities performed in this order: Directed Offensive Placement, Conditional Issues Determination, Production, Production Allocation, Theater, Leadership, and A-Bomb Research, Global Issue.[6]

16. For each activity, play proceeds starting with the player to the left of the player who won the conference.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.26 · Illustrated Example of Play

[2] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.26 · Illustrated Example of Play

[3] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.5 · 4.2 Conference Phase

[4] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.9 · 5.22 Advancing an Issue

[5] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.9 · 5.21 Overview

[6] RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook · p.5 · 4.2 Conference Phase

🔧 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 96 ms · ask 7164 ms · total 7263 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7263 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 23, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Churchill can be played by zero to three players. When you are playing with fewer than three humans use the artificial decision aids to play the non-human opponents, hereafter called, 'Bots. 2-Player: Decide either randomly or by choice which side is the 'Bot (short for robot à la Heinlein). Solitai", "headingPath": "11.0 Solitaire Rules · 11.1 General Procedure: · 11.2 Common Sense", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "Churchill Narrative Rules and Illustrated Example of Play DESIGN NOTE: Churchill is an easy game to grasp with simple mechanics, but we all learn differently. Some prefer detailed explanations that tend to be dry, longer than it would seem necessary, yet hopefully answer all questions on game play. ", "headingPath": "Illustrated Example of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.046147, "snippet": "My expectation is over time variants of these 'Bots will be published to reflect different styles of play. Treat the 'Bots for what they are: play aids to enable solo and two-player situations. If you have questions feel free to ask them, but you should feel empowered to use human logic and a die ro", "headingPath": "11.9 Expectations", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "(Keep in mind the USSR national characteristic, which adds one to the value of any staff card used in a debate.) If neither player debates the issue, play proceeds clockwise to the next player. Play continues in this manner until all players have used all of their seven staff cards. Important: When ", "headingPath": "4.2 Conference Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.042499, "snippet": "Each player in turn, starting with the player to the left of the player who won the Agenda Segment and proceeding clockwise, plays a staff card to advance an issue toward their side of the table. The other two players then have the option to debate that issue in order to move the issue back toward t", "headingPath": "5.21 Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.04072, "snippet": "Here is how it is done… for your first game I suggest that you play the Training Scenario by setting up the pieces as shown here. The Conference card has five sections that we implement immediately. Green band: ' Churchill/ Mountbatten in Cairo: Must use 1 Production to place an Offensive in the CBI", "headingPath": "Illustrated Example of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.040385, "snippet": "If the score of the player in first place exceeds , not equals, the combined score of the other two players, the player with the highest score wins. If the first place score does not exceed this combined score the player with the second highest score wins. In case of a tie for fewest points, the fin", "headingPath": "4.4 Winning the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.040204, "snippet": "The map is divided into two separate displays: the conference display and the military display. 3.21 The conference display is where most of the player interactions occur and represents a circular conference table. The middle of this display is the 'center of the table' or the 'zero space'. Radiatin", "headingPath": "3.2 Map", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Illustrated Example of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Illustrated Example of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4.2 Conference Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5.22 Advancing an Issue", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5.21 Overview", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4.2 Conference Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 727}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 727 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 727 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 0.92483 of 2195 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 14, 2026 11:16

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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	11.0 Solitaire Rules · 11.1 General Procedure: · 11.2 Common Sense	p.23	0.048916 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.25	0.046402 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	11.9 Expectations	p.23	0.046147 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.2 Conference Phase	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	5.21 Overview	p.9	0.042499 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.26	0.04072 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.4 Winning the Game	p.7	0.040385 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	3.2 Map	p.2	0.040204 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	11.0 Solitaire Rules · 11.1 General Procedure: · 11.2 Common Sense	p.23	#1	0.048916 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	5.21 Overview	p.9	#5	0.042499 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.26	#26	0.02304 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	5.22 Advancing an Issue	p.9	#9	0.030159 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.2 Conference Phase	p.5	#10	0.028442 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.2 Conference Phase	p.5	#4	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
#7	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Channeling the history	p.34	#14	0.026743 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.26	#6	0.04072 (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 Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.26	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	Illustrated Example of Play	p.26	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.2 Conference Phase	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	5.22 Advancing an Issue	p.9	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	5.21 Overview	p.9	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Churchill — Rulebook (corpus doc 727)	4.2 Conference Phase	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 96 ms · first delta 4245 ms · total 7263 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 96 ms · ask 7164 ms · gateway work 7263 ms · total 7263 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3406
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 601
tok/sec: 202.8 tok/sec — 601 output tokens in 2.963 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 20s 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 661), 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.