Ruling — Innovation

← Innovation

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Innovationbg-63888-en-1e

### Setup

1. Split the cards into ten supply piles, arranged like a clock.[1][2]

2. Randomly and without looking, set aside one card each from ages 1-9 in the center as normal Achievements.[1][2]

3. Place the five Special Achievements nearby.[1][2]

4. Deal two age 1 cards to each player.[1][2][3]

5. All players simultaneously choose one card to be the first card on their board, while the other card becomes their initial hand.[1][2]

### Starting Play

1. The player with the card in play closest to A alphabetically goes first.[1][2]

2. The first player (or the first two in a four-player game) takes only one action instead of two on their initial turn; subsequent turns are normal.[1][2]

### Your Turn

1. On each turn, you must take two actions.[1][2]

2. Your two actions can be any combination in any order of the four available actions, including repeating the same action twice.[1][2]

3. The four types of actions are:

* **Draw**: Add a card to your hand from the supply piles.[1][2] You take a card of value equal to your highest top card from the supply piles; if that pile is empty, draw from the next available higher pile.[4]

* **Meld**: Take a card from your hand and put it onto your board.[1][2] You play the card onto a stack of matching color on your board, continuing any splay if present.[4]

* **Dogma**: Pick a top card on your board and execute each of its effects in order.[4]

* **I Demand effects**: These are attacks. Read the effect out loud; each opponent with fewer of the featured icon than you must follow the instructions, starting with the player to your left and going clockwise.[5][4]

* **Non-demand effects**: Opponents execute these before you if they have at least as many or more of the featured icon, going clockwise.[5][4]

* **Sharing**: If any opponent shares a non-demand effect, you take one free Draw action after the Dogma action is completed, provided the shared effect caused a change in the game (such as cards being drawn, revealed, melded, tucked, splayed, scored, exchanged, or moved).[5][4]

* **Achieve**: Claim an achievement if you have enough points and a top card of the achievement's value or higher.[1][2][6][4] To claim, you must have a score of at least 5x the age number in points.[4]

### Winning and Ending the Game

1. To win, you must claim a specific number of achievements based on the player count: 6 achievements for a two-player or team game, 5 for three players, and 4 for four players.[6]

2. Special Achievements can be claimed immediately if you meet their specific conditions.[2][6]

3. The game ends immediately if a card higher than age 10 must be drawn.[6]

4. If the game ends via the age 10 limit, the player with the highest current score wins (if tied, the player with the most achievements wins; if still tied, it is a draw).[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.4 · Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn

[2] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.11 · Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …

[4] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.3

[5] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.6

[6] RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook · p.9 · Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players

🔧 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 83 ms · ask 5394 ms · total 5478 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5478 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Split the cards into their ten supply piles, arranged like a clock as shown below. Randomly and without looking, set aside one card each from ages 1-9 in the center as normal Achievements. The five Special Achievements are placed nearby. Special Achievements Each player draws two age 1 cards, and al", "headingPath": "Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "6 7 @AsmadiGames facebook.com/AsmadiGamesasmadigames.com Split the cards into their ten supply piles, arranged like a clock as shown below. Randomly and without looking, set aside one card each from ages 1-9 in the center as normal Achievements. The five Special Achievements are placed nearby. Suppl", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.046544, "snippet": "Teaching the game to new players can be daunting! What do you explain? When do you explain it? Here's the path that we use when we demo and explain Innovation: Set up the piles, achievements, and create boards for two players with some age 1 cards. Good cards to use include Writing, The Wheel, and A", "headingPath": "Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "Over the course of the game, you will accumulate cards in your score pile through dogma effects. Each card in your score pile is worth points equal to its value (the age number). When you slide them under your reference card, the number will be visible in the top left. Y our score is the total value", "headingPath": "Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "4 5 @AsmadiGames facebook.com/AsmadiGamesasmadigames.com Y our Civilization As you play, you will accumulate cards of five different colors in an area in front of you called your board. Y our most important cards are the top cards of each color, as they can be activated for their effects through the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "1 If no cards were transferred due to this demand, draw a .1 PHILOSOPHY 2 You may splay left any one color of your cards. You may score a card from your hand. ATOMIC THEORY 6 You may splay your blue cards right. Draw and meld a .7 MATHEMATICS 2 You may return a card from your hand. If you do, draw a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "There are lots of pieces of information in Innovation flying around, and theoretically you could try and keep track of every last one of them. We don't usually do this because we don't find it very fun! Here are some hard rules about information: You may never look at the identity of normal achievem", "headingPath": "Information · Credits · 100% FREE, 110% ACTION PACKED, 200% TRIANGLE.", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "8 9 @AsmadiGames facebook.com/AsmadiGamesasmadigames.com Draw Meld Y ou must satisfy two conditions to take an Achieve action and claim a normal achievement. First, your score (the total value of all the cards in your score pile) must be at least five times the Achieve To take a Draw action, find th", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players", "sharpsignalDocId": 411}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 411 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 411 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 0.87672 of 2320 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 06:29

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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn	p.4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.4	0.047131 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …	p.11	0.046544 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players	p.9	0.045743 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.3	0.045724 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.3	0.045695 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Information · Credits · 100% FREE, 110% ACTION PACKED, 200% TRIANGLE.	p.12	0.030415 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.5	0.030303 (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 23 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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn	p.4	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Strategy	p.10	#10	0.029644 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.4	#2	0.047131 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …	p.11	#3	0.046544 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.6	#20	0.0125 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players	p.9	#4	0.045743 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.3	#5	0.045724 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.3	#6	0.045695 (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 Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Supply Pile Setup · Starting Play · Your Turn	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Teaching Innovation · STAGING · OVERVIEW · GAMEPLAY · KEYWORDS · DURING THE GAME · …	p.11	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Innovation — Rulebook (corpus doc 411)	Score, Achievements, and Special Achievements · Winning and Game End · Team Rules for Four Players	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 83 ms · first delta 1773 ms · total 5478 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 83 ms · ask 5394 ms · gateway work 5478 ms · total 5478 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4418
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 742
tok/sec: 203.2 tok/sec — 742 output tokens in 3.651 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 38s 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 340), 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.