Ruling — Earthborne Rangers

← Earthborne Rangers

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Earthborne Rangersbg-342900-en-1e

To play Earthborne Rangers, follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. Place your aspect card, role card, and common test reference card in your player area.[1]

2. Shuffle your Ranger deck and place it in your player area.[1]

3. Place a number of energy tokens equal to their corresponding aspect values onto your aspect card.[1]

4. Draw six cards from your Ranger deck; you may perform a mulligan by setting aside any number of cards and drawing an equivalent number of new cards, then shuffling the set-aside cards back into your Ranger deck.[1]

5. Together, choose a Ranger to be the lead Ranger.[1]

6. Shuffle the challenge deck and place it above the surroundings.[1]

7. Place your current location in the surroundings.[1]

**Game Structure**

Each session represents one day of a campaign and is played in rounds with no limit to the number of rounds in a day.[2] Each round consists of four phases:

1. Phase 1: Path Cards [2]

2. Phase 2: Ranger Turns [2]

3. Phase 3: Travel [2]

4. Phase 4: Refresh [2]

**Phase 1: Path Cards**

1. Starting with the lead Ranger, each Ranger draws one path card.[2]

2. If a card is marked with a number underneath a book icon, find the corresponding entry in the campaign guide and read it aloud.[2]

3. Resolve the effects of each card before fully drawing and resolving the next.[2]

4. If the path deck is empty, shuffle the path discard to create a new path deck.[2]

5. Place cards with an upward-pointing arrow "along the way" and cards with a downward-pointing arrow "within reach" of the Ranger who drew it.[2]

**Phase 2: Ranger Turns**

1. Rangers take separate turns in an order decided by the group.[2]

2. A different Ranger must go after you finish your turn, unless you are the only Ranger still taking turns.[2]

3. You can take a second turn in a row by exhausting your role card.[2]

4. On your turn, you can choose to perform one of the following: perform a test, play a card, or rest.[2]

5. When playing a card, spend the amount of energy matching the card's cost (the number and type of energy shown in the upper left-hand corner).[3]

* Moment cards: Resolve all instructions on the card and discard it.[3]

* Attachment cards: Place them in play attached to a card specified in the card's text (placing the attachment under or to the side of the target card).[3]

* Gear cards: Play them into your player area; they stay there until discarded, but you must discard cards if you have more than five squares worth of cards in your player area.[3]

* Features or Beings: Place them within reach of you and treat them like a path card.[3]

6. When performing a test, you can choose one test to perform on any card in play, except for the Four Common Tests cards in other Rangers' player areas.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.10 · GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5

[2] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.12 · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS

[3] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.13 · PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES

[4] RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook · p.12 · PERFORM A TEST

🔧 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 92 ms · ask 10590 ms · total 10684 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 10684 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "The play area is broken up into four distinct areas: The Surroundings: The surroundings set the stage for the game. They contain the cards representing the current location, the weather, and any missions the Rangers are trying to accomplish. Along the Way: When path cards are drawn, they are either ", "headingPath": "THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "PLAYING A CAMPAIGN The story of Earthborne Rangers unfolds over a campaign across multiple play sessions, with each session representing one day. What you do each day is up to you. You can complete missions to progress the story, or you can head out and explore to uncover emergent moments and object", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "To play a card from your hand, spend an amount of energy matching the card's cost : the number and type of energy shown in the upper left-hand corner of the card. The card then has an effect based on its card type: Moments: Moment cards describe the specific circumstances under which they can be pla", "headingPath": "PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.045335, "snippet": "hey reproduce, The story of Earthborne Rangers unfolds over a campaign across multiple play sessions, with each session representing one day. What you do each day is up to you. You can complete missions to progress the story, or you can head out and explore to uncover emergent moments and objectives", "headingPath": "PLAYING A CAMPAIGN", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "Each session of Earthborne Rangers represents one day of your campaign and is played in rounds. There is no limit to the number of rounds in a day. Each round is divided into four phases: \u0010 Phase 1: Path Cards \u0010 Phase 2: Ranger Turns \u0010 Phase 3: Travel \u0010 Phase 4: Refresh Each round, the Rangers spend", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.043364, "snippet": "Tests are shown on cards as narrative equations. They tell you what you can attempt in the world of the game, how to do it, and what will happen if you succeed or fail. You'll find tests on the gear you equip, some on beings, features, and locations in the environment, and four common tests found on", "headingPath": "TESTS · A NOTE ON STYLE · THE GOLDEN RULE · THE DELIGHTFUL RULE", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.040648, "snippet": "These rules walk you through how you will be playing the game, but they don't get into the specifics of what you will be trying to accomplish. Because of the nature of Earthborne Rangers' open world, your goal for a given day can change from session to session based on your current mission or some o", "headingPath": "BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "To set up the game, perform the following steps in order. If you are starting a brand new campaign, go to the Getting Started section on page 9 and choose one of the options listed there. Place your aspect card, role card, and common test reference card in your player area. Shuffle your Ranger deck ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PERFORM A TEST", "sharpsignalDocId": 511}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 511 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 511 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 0.90205 of 2246 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 05:31

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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED	p.9	0.04866 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)		p.28	0.048387 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES	p.13	0.048139 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAYING A CAMPAIGN	p.28	0.045335 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS	p.12	0.045009 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	TESTS · A NOTE ON STYLE · THE GOLDEN RULE · THE DELIGHTFUL RULE	p.8	0.043364 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER	p.21	0.040648 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES	p.13	#3	0.048139 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PERFORM A TEST	p.12	#9	0.02971 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	OBSTACLE · PERSISTENT · SETUP · UNIQUE	p.27	#10	0.027652 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS	p.12	#5	0.045009 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PERSONALITY	p.46	#30	0.022078 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER	p.21	#7	0.040648 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	THE PLAY AREA · GETTING STARTED	p.9	#1	0.04866 (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 Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	GAME SETUP · SET UP PLAYER AREAS 1 · DRAW STARTING HAND · ELECT THE LEAD RANGER 3 · SHUFFLE THE CHALLENGE DECK 4 · SET UP THE STARTING LOCATION 5	p.10	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: PATH CARDS · PHASE 2: RANGER TURNS	p.12	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PLAY A CARD · RESPONSES	p.13	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Earthborne Rangers — Rulebook (corpus doc 511)	PERFORM A TEST	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 92 ms · first delta 5466 ms · total 10684 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 92 ms · ask 10590 ms · gateway work 10684 ms · total 10684 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2944
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 692
tok/sec: 133.8 tok/sec — 692 output tokens in 5.172 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s 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 440), 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.