Ruling — Colt Express

← Colt Express

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Colt Expressbg-158899-en-1e

The game consists of 5 rounds, each containing two phases:

**Phase 1: Schemin'!**

1. At the beginning of a round, each player draws 6 cards to form their hand.[1]

2. The First Player draws the top card of the Round deck and places it on the table.[1]

3. Starting with the First Player and proceeding clockwise, players take turns.[1]

4. On a turn, a player must do one of the following:

* Play an Action card face-up (unless otherwise specified) from their hand to the top of a pile.[1]

* Draw 3 cards from their deck and add them to their hand.[1]

5. The Schemin'! phase ends when the number of turns indicated on the Round card has been completed.[1]

6. Each player places any unplayed cards from their hand on top of their deck.[1]

**Phase 2: Stealin'!**

1. The First Player takes the pile of Action cards created during the Schemin'! phase and turns it over without changing the order.[2]

2. The bandits' Actions are resolved one-by-one, starting with the top card (the order they were played).[2]

3. All Actions played during the Schemin'! phase are mandatory.[2]

4. During this phase, each player must resolve each of their actions if possible.[2]

5. Once all Actions have been resolved, the cards are returned to the players to whom they belong.[2]

**Ending the Game**

1. The game ends at the end of the fifth round.[2]

2. Each player adds up the value of the loot tokens on their character sheet.[2]

3. The Gunslinger prize ($1000) is awarded to the player(s) who shot the most bullets (the fewest Bullet cards of their character's color remaining).[2]

4. The richest player wins the game.[2]

5. In the event of a tie for the winner, the player with the fewest Bullet cards wins; if a tie persists, the tied players share the victory.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook · p.3 · objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!

[2] RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook · p.3 · types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM

🔧 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 95 ms · ask 3968 ms · total 4069 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4069 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Players play Action cards face-up. Standard Turn - Players play Action cards face-down. Tunnel - Players take 2 turns in a row (players can choose to either play or draw cards on each turn). Speeding-Up - Note - These cards can also show a round's effect (see \"Advanced Rules,\" page 9). Players take ", "headingPath": "types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "To win, you must become the richest bandit in the Wild West. To reach this goal, you will try to get more loot than your opponents... without being hit by too many bullets! The best shooter will receive the title of Gunslinger, worth $1000. There are 5 Rounds in a game. Each Round has 2 phases: Phas", "headingPath": "objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "A player with Ghost on his team can play his first card face- down even if it is not Ghost’s Action card. He may choose not to play the card face down if, for example, he would like to play an additional Action card using the Cover rule. A player with Doc on his team draws 7 cards in addition to the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "You cannot look at the values of his purse tokens. Then, move the chosen bandit to the same floor of an adjacent car. Pu nc h Caution! When a bandit enters the Marshal’s space or the Marshal enters a bandit’s space, the bandit escapes to the roof of the car (even if he just changed floors). A bandit", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045335, "snippet": "Take the bandit figures corresponding to the chosen characters and randomly choose 1. The player who has chosen this character is the First Player for the first round. Starting with the First Player and proceeding clockwise, players alternate placing their bandit figures in the caboose and the car a", "headingPath": "lAcInG THe B AndITs", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "C U L E Ludonaute 20 boulevard Dethez 13800 Istres - France contact@ludonaute.fr www.ludonaute.fr E E E Each player adds up the value of his bandits' loot tokens. The Gunslinger prize is awarded to the player whose bandits shot the highest total bullets. C C A player with Ghost on his team can play ", "headingPath": "Hostage Conductor · ND OF TH G AM · HARA TER C LARIFI ATIONS · expert variant · Credits", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030415, "snippet": "1110 spe Cial rUles : 2 bandits per player Each player takes 1 copy of each different Action card from each of his bandits’ decks, then sets aside 1 Marshal card and all remaining action cards. He will have 11 cards remaining (see the diagram to the right). Use the Round cards for 2 to 4 players. Fo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "1 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 76 Move between cars: If you are inside a car, move to the inside of an adjacent car. If you are on the roof of a car, move to the roof of a car 1 to 3 cars away. Mov e Bandits can be inside a car or on the roof of a car . At the start of the game, no bandit can be on a roof. The loc", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM", "sharpsignalDocId": 546}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 546 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 546 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 0.88665 of 1438 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 06:54

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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM	p.3	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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!	p.3	0.048652 (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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.4	0.045475 (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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	lAcInG THe B AndITs	p.2	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
#6	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	Hostage Conductor · ND OF TH G AM · HARA TER C LARIFI ATIONS · expert variant · Credits	p.6	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
#7	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.6	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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.4	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 14 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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	set Up	p.2	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	lAcInG THe B AndITs	p.2	#5	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.6	#7	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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!	p.3	#2	0.048652 (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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.4	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.6	#3	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
#7	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM	p.3	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)		p.5	#11	0.029236 (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 Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	objeCt of the Game · P HASE 1: S CHEMIN '!	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Colt Express — Rulebook (corpus doc 546)	types of tUrns · P HASE 2: S TEALIN '! · ND OF TH G AM	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 95 ms · first delta 1720 ms · total 4069 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 95 ms · ask 3968 ms · gateway work 4069 ms · total 4069 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4346
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 459
tok/sec: 200.8 tok/sec — 459 output tokens in 2.286 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s 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 478), 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.