Ruling — The Gang

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Gangbg-411567-en-1e

To play The Gang, follow these steps:

**Setup**

1. Lay the three alarm cards and the three vault cards with the gray sides up at the edge of the playing area.[1][2]

2. Each player should receive one “Gameplay” overview card and one “Hand Ranking” overview card; place the remaining overview cards in the box.[1][2]

3. Sort out any chips with a higher star value than the number of players in the gang and place them back in the box.[1][2]

4. Place the remaining chips sorted by color on the edge of the playing surface with the light side facing up.[1][2]

**Heist Process**

A full game consists of three to five heists, and each heist consists of four rounds.[1][2] There is no turn order, and all players play at the same time.[3]

**Round 1 (“Pre-Flop”)**

1. Shuffle the 52 playing cards and deal two cards face down to each player; these are the "pocket cards".[3]

2. Place the rest of the deck face down in the center of the table, leaving enough space for five cards.[3]

3. Lay out the white chips in the center of the table.[3]

4. Players communicate their estimation of their hand strength relative to others by taking chips from the center of the table or from in front of another player.[3] Taking the chip with the most stars signals you believe you have the strongest hand, while the 1-star chip signals you believe you have the weakest.[3]

5. You may take any chip from the current round at any time and place it in front of you, but you may never have more than one chip of the same color in front of you.[3]

6. You may put a chip from the current round that is in front of you back in the center of the table, but you may never place a chip in front of another player.[3]

**Round 2 (“Flop”)**

1. Flip over 1 community card.[1]

2. Lay out and take the orange chips.[1]

**Round 3 (“Turn”)**

1. Flip over 1 community card.[1]

2. Lay out and take the red chips.[1]

**Round 4 (“River”)**

1. Flip over 3 community cards.[1]

2. Lay out and take the yellow chips.[1]

3. One player draws three cards from the deck and places them face-up in the center of the table as community cards.[4]

4. Each player takes one of the yellow chips.[4]

5. Players should place chips from previous rounds neatly in a row in front of them so others can see how evaluations have changed.[4]

**Winning and Losing**

* You win the game if three heists are successful.[1][2]

* You lose the game if you fail three times (tripping the alarm three times).[5][1][2][6]

* A heist is successful if the vault card is turned to the gold side.[7]

* A heist is a failure if the alarm card is turned to the red side.[7]

[1] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.4

[2] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW

[3] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.5 · Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips

[4] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.6 · a) Reveal three community cards · b) Lay out and take the yellow chips

[5] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.1

[6] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.1

[7] RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook · p.14 · ADVANCED MODE · Successful heist? · Failed heist?

🔧 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 89 ms · ask 5783 ms · total 5874 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5874 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "Each heist consists of four rounds, which proceed in the following manner: Shuffle the 52 playing cards and deal two cards face down to each player. These are the 'pocket cards.' You can look at your own pocket cards at any time. Place the rest of the deck face down in the center of the table. Leave", "headingPath": "Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "The Gang is based on poker - more specifically on the poker variant Texas Hold 'em . If you already know the rules for Texas Hold 'em , it will be easier for you to learn and play The Gang . However, in our many playtests, we have found that even absolute poker beginners can easily pick up The Gang ", "headingPath": "Poker · Cooperative · Communicative", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "1 You are THE GANG — a group of professional thieves ready to commit a series of heists! The success of these heists hangs on The Gang’s perfect coordination. To win the game, you’ll have to work together to crack three vaults without tripping the alarm three times. And how exactly will you do it? Y", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "4 1 Lay the three alarm cards and the three vault cards with the gray sides up at the edge of the playing area. 2 Each of you should receive one 'Gameplay' overview card and one 'Hand Ranking' overview card. Place the remaining overview cards in the box. 3 Next, sort out any chips with a higher star", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "4 1 Lay the three alarm cards and the three vault cards with the gray sides up at the edge of the playing area. 2 Each of you should receive one “Gameplay” overview card and one “Hand Ranking” overview card. Place the remaining overview cards in the box. 3 Next, sort out any chips with a higher star", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "One of you draws one card from the deck and lays it face up next to the four other community cards. Lay out the red chips in center of the table. Each of you takes a chip as usual. After Round 4 , proceed to the showdown. Now we come to the moment of truth. The only chips that matter now are the red", "headingPath": "a) Reveal one community card · b) Lay out and take the red chips · The Showdown", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "(((( Gameplay (Each game has 3 to 5 heists) Heist Process a) Deal two cards per player b) Lay out and take the white chips a) Flip over 1 community card b) Lay out and take the orange chips a) Flip over 1 community card b) Lay out and take the red chips a) Flip over 3 community cards b) Lay out and ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "18 1) Informant Decide which of you will secretly show exactly one of their pocket cards to one other player. Of course, this player may not tell the others which card they have seen. 1 One of you shows one other player one of your pocket cards. Informant 2) Getaway Driver Decide which of you will s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "a) Reveal three community cards · b) Lay out and take the yellow chips", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ADVANCED MODE · Successful heist? · Failed heist?", "sharpsignalDocId": 423}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 423 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 423 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 0.88258 of 2112 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 06:51

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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips	p.5	0.047938 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	Poker · Cooperative · Communicative	p.2	0.047643 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.1	0.047643 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW	p.4	0.047619 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.4	0.046898 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	a) Reveal one community card · b) Lay out and take the red chips · The Showdown	p.8	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
#7	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.4	0.029851 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.18	0.029412 (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 33 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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.1	#3	0.047643 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.4	#5	0.046898 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW	p.4	#4	0.047619 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	ADVANCED MODE · Successful heist? · Failed heist?	p.14	#12	0.027912 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	a) Reveal three community cards · b) Lay out and take the yellow chips	p.6	#17	0.014493 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.17	#9	0.028783 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips	p.5	#1	0.047938 (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 The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.1	#13	0.026121 (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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	GAME SETUP · GAME OVERVIEW	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	Heist process · a) Deal two cards to each player · b) Lay out and take the white chips	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	a) Reveal three community cards · b) Lay out and take the yellow chips	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.1	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)		p.1	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK The Gang — Rulebook (corpus doc 423)	ADVANCED MODE · Successful heist? · Failed heist?	p.14	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 2405 ms · total 5874 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 89 ms · ask 5783 ms · gateway work 5874 ms · total 5874 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2326
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 696
tok/sec: 202.9 tok/sec — 696 output tokens in 3.430 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 18s 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 352), 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.