Ruling — The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Crew: The Quest for Planet Ninebg-284083-en-1e

The Crew is a cooperative, mission-based trick-taking game.[1] To play, follow these steps:

**Mission Preparation**

1. Shuffle the 40 large playing cards and distribute them face down and equally to all crew members (if playing with three, one person receives one more card).[2]

2. Each person puts a radio communication token with the green side up in front of themselves.[2]

3. Put a reminder card for everyone at the ready.[2]

4. Place the distress signal token face down.[2]

5. Shuffle the 36 small task cards and place them as a concealed pile.[2]

6. Take the specified number of task cards from the task card deck and place them face up in the center of the table.[2]

7. Identify the commander, which is the crew member who has the four rocket.[2]

8. The commander chooses a task card from the center and places it face up in front of themselves, then everyone else takes a task card.[2]

**Gameplay**

1. In each round, each crew member plays a card in a clockwise order.[3]

2. The initial card played in a trick sets the suit that must be followed (pink, blue, green, yellow, or rocket).[1][4]

3. Players must "follow suit" by playing a card of the same type as the first card played; if a player cannot follow suit, they may play a card of a different suit.[1][4]

4. Rocket cards are trump cards and win any trick regardless of other cards in play.[4]

5. During a color-suited trick, a rocket may only be played if a card of the required color cannot be played.[4]

6. The player who places the card with the highest value of the designated suit wins the trick (unless a rocket is played).[1][4]

7. If multiple rockets are played, the rocket with the highest value wins.[4]

8. Won tricks are set aside face down; players may only look at the cards from the most recently won trick.[4]

9. Players are not required to win a trick and may play a low card even if they could have won with a higher one.[4]

**Communication**

1. To communicate, a player may take one of their color cards and place it face up in front of them.[5]

2. The player then places their radio communication token with the green side up on that card to indicate if it is their highest, lowest, or only card of that color.[5]

3. Rocket cards can never be communicated.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.3 · GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game

[2] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.8 · MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE

[3] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.11 · MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!

[4] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.4 · Trick-taking game

[5] RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook · p.6 · Communication:

🔧 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 80 ms · ask 4774 ms · total 4856 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4856 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "In each round, each crew member plays a card in a clockwise order. These cards make up the trick. The highest card played wins the trick. The initial card played sets the suit that must be played for each trick. This is applicable for both color cards and rocket cards. If a suit cannot be followed, ", "headingPath": "Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "As commander, Tom starts the game. He opens the first trick with his pink 9 and hopes to win the pink 1 . Julia plays a pink 5 in the trick. Daniel does not have any pink cards in his hand and therefore plays a card of his choice: the yellow 2 . Caro has a pink 1 and plays it in the trick. Tom has t", "headingPath": "MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "When playing with two players, the commander role is also carried out by the player with the four rocket. The tasks of the commander remain unchanged (starts the task selection, starts the first trick, and, if necessary, follows any special rules of the missions). Additionally, your commander takes ", "headingPath": "PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "The Crew is a cooperative, mission-based trick-taking game. What does this mean? You win together, or you lose together - only if each of you is successful, and you help each other, will you be able to complete the missions and win the game. Your journey spans 50 different missions, each with a uniq", "headingPath": "GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "Each task specifies a playing card that must be won. A task is fulfilled when its owner wins the corresponding playing card in a trick. When all the tasks of the respective mission are fulfilled, you have completed the mission. If a task is fulfilled by a crew member who does not possess the appropr", "headingPath": "MISSION SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "actually receives the assignment and reveals the task cards. The mission is fulfilled when the crew member has completed all the tasks. Your commander may not choose himself or herself. If a mission displays this symbol, your commander takes over the distribution of the task cards. Prepare the missi", "headingPath": "Commander's decision · Commander's distribution · PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "After handing over the task card, one crew member has one more task and one member has one less than before. The total number of tasks does not change, so you may not place a task back on the stack. You do not have to increase the number of attempts in the logbook by one when you use this additional", "headingPath": "PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "In The Crew, it's always about the right players winning the right tricks. You're really going to need to coordinate to accomplish the mission. An important rule in this game is that you cannot talk about the cards in your hand. You are not allowed to show, say or suggest to other crew members which", "headingPath": "Trick-taking game · Communication", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Trick-taking game", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Communication:", "sharpsignalDocId": 283}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 283 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 283 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 0.90277 of 1841 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 07:39

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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!	p.11	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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.20	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
#4	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game	p.3	0.047379 (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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE	p.10	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
#6	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Commander's decision · Commander's distribution · PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS	p.18	0.044796 (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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.19	0.044563 (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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game · Communication	p.5	0.044557 (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 28 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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY · HELP MECHANIC: DISTRESS SIGNALS	p.12	#9	0.030118 (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
#2	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.20	#3	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
#3	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game	p.3	#4	0.047379 (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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE	p.8	#11	0.027778 (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 Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Communication:	p.6	#17	0.025658 (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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!	p.11	#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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game	p.4	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	PLAYING WITH FIVE PLAYERS · PLAYING WITH TWO PLAYERS	p.19	#7	0.044563 (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 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	GAME MATERIALS · Cooperative · Mission-based · Trick-taking game	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION PREPARATION · MISSION SEQUENCE	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	MISSION SEQUENCE · LET'S GO!	p.11	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Trick-taking game	p.4	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine — Rulebook (corpus doc 283)	Communication:	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 80 ms · first delta 2056 ms · total 4856 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 80 ms · ask 4774 ms · gateway work 4856 ms · total 4856 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2874
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 563
tok/sec: 204.5 tok/sec — 563 output tokens in 2.753 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 212), 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.