Ruling — Etherfields

← Etherfields

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Etherfieldsbg-280794-en-1e

### Setup

1. Place the game board down.[1]

2. Place all owner Note cards and Items in storage.[1]

3. Place the 2 Setup Slumber Map tiles in the Dreamscape Board space (if not your first game).[1]

4. Each Dreamer places their chosen Dreamer Board, Influence Cards, Miniature, and Basic Action Card in front of them.[1]

5. Each player chooses one Dreamer archetype to play.[2]

6. The chosen player takes the corresponding Influence Deck of 2 and shuffles it, along with an additional Basic Action card, miniature, and Dreamer Board.[2]

### Playing the Game

**Turn Structure and Actions**

1. Players can take actions simultaneously without worrying about player order, unless a specific situation calls for it.[3]

2. Alternatively, for a structured turn order, the First Player begins and moves clockwise.[4]

3. In a structured turn, each Dreamer performs a round involving one Dream action (Map Action, Dream or Entity tile interaction) and as many other actions (e.g., Movement, Basic actions, actions from Influence/Item cards) and activities (placing Progress cards, gaining Shining Gems, etc.) as they want.[4]

4. Players may pass the current round and act again in another round if they wish.[4]

5. A player's turn ends when they pass, and a new turn begins when the First Player Marker passes clockwise to the next player.[5]

6. Each Dreamer can perform as many rounds as they wish until everyone runs out of cards to play or passes in a row.[5]

**Playing Cards**

1. Unless specified otherwise, Influence cards can only be played during the Dreamers Phase.[6]

2. Influence cards may be played for their Intent or for their action/effect.[6]

3. Cards with the RAPID icon are an exception and can be played at any time during your action, other Dreamers' rounds, or during the Dreamscape Phase, provided costs are paid.[6]

4. Some cards may have additional requirements (such as being on a specific Terrain symbol) before their actions/effects can be used.[6]

**Dreamscape Phase**

1. Proceed to the Dreamscape Phase after all players agree there is nothing more they wish to do in the Dreamers Phase.[3]

2. The current Turn card determines which effects of the Dream are resolved and in what order.[3]

3. During the Entity Movement step of the Dreamscape Phase, roll the Entity Movement die; the Entity moves by the number of spaces indicated by its movement value.[7]

**Ending the Game**

1. The game continues until everyone runs out of cards to play or passes in a row.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.4 · STARTING THE CAMPAIGN CHOOSING YOUR DREAMER

[3] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.8

[4] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.16 · STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME

[5] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.16

[6] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.9

[7] RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook · p.12

🔧 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 69 ms · ask 6297 ms · total 6367 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6367 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.046964, "snippet": "Each game of Etherfields is self-contained enough to allow you to play each session with a different number of Dreamers. If the last session was played with fewer than four Dreamers and a new player wants to join the game, all they have to do is pick an unused Dreamer archetype and join the adventur", "headingPath": "ADDING A NEW DREAMER · VARIANTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.042591, "snippet": "'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.' - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland If this is the first time you are playing the game, only carry out the highlighted sections of the Game Setup. Otherwise, complete the entire Setup for each su", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.04257, "snippet": "He may tate to go as far as sacrificing himself. He may look grim, but he’s rather cool and composed, look grim, but he’s rather cool and composed, until something unleashes his fury.until something unleashes his fury. The Free SpiritThe Free Spirit likes to bend the rules. likes to bend the rules. ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.042509, "snippet": "You’ll be introduced to Slumbers and the Dreamworld Map later.be introduced to Slumbers and the Dreamworld Map later. ! Throughout the rest of the rulebook, these Throughout the rest of the rulebook, these highlighted sectionshighlighted sections are designed to provide a small are designed to provi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.040012, "snippet": "Alternatively if you would like a more structured turn order, you may start with the First Player and go clockwise with each Dreamer performing a round involving one Dream action (Map Action, Dream or Entity tile interaction) and as many other actions (e.g.: Movement, Basic actions, actions from Inf", "headingPath": "STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "SECRET SCRIPTS Etherfields uses a Etherfields uses a Book of Secret ScriptsBook of Secret Scripts to reveal its sto- to reveal its sto- ries and game events. Whenever you see a reference to \"s. ####\" ries and game events. Whenever you see a reference to \"s. ####\" turn to the relevant number in the B", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "While in Dreams or Slumbers, the game takes place on the Dreamscape, which consists of Map tiles that represent what the Dreamers experience within the Dream or Slumber. Miniatures are used to represent the Dreamers and the Entities they encounter. Each map tile is divided into 4 spaces. When a map ", "headingPath": "- Dead Can Dance, In the Wake of Adversity · DREAMER'S ENTRANCE · MAP ACTIONS · WALLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A BRIEF STRATEGY GUIDE Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you think you Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you think you cannot do anything, see if using any of the following might be cannot do anything, see if using any of the following might be a way out:a way out: –– car", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "STARTING THE CAMPAIGN CHOOSING YOUR DREAMER", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 618}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 618 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 618 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 0.91054 of 2068 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 05:08

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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	ADDING A NEW DREAMER · VARIANTS	p.16	0.046964 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	GAME SETUP	p.4	0.042591 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.4	0.04257 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.5	0.042509 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME	p.16	0.040012 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	- Dead Can Dance, In the Wake of Adversity · DREAMER'S ENTRANCE · MAP ACTIONS · WALLS	p.6	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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.18	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))	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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	GAME SETUP	p.4	#2	0.042591 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.9	#9	0.030282 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.16	#16	0.024625 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	STARTING THE CAMPAIGN CHOOSING YOUR DREAMER	p.4	#10	0.027212 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.8	#13	0.025463 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.12	#38	0.013333 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME	p.16	#5	0.040012 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	ADDING A NEW DREAMER · VARIANTS	p.16	#1	0.046964 (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 Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	GAME SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	STARTING THE CAMPAIGN CHOOSING YOUR DREAMER	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)	STRUCTURED ROUNDS · SAVING YOUR GAME	p.16	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.16	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.9	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Etherfields — Rulebook (corpus doc 618)		p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 69 ms · first delta 3455 ms · total 6367 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 69 ms · ask 6297 ms · gateway work 6367 ms · total 6367 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3769
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 587
tok/sec: 204.9 tok/sec — 587 output tokens in 2.865 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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 550), 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.