Ruling — Betrayal at House on the Hill

← Betrayal at House on the Hill

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Betrayal at House on the Hillbg-10547-en-1e

**Before the haunt starts:**

1. The player whose explorer has the next birthday goes first.[1]

2. Each player takes a turn in order, starting with that player and going to the left.[2][3]

3. During a turn, you can move, discover rooms, use items, and attempt die rolls.[3]

4. All explorers can use items (and many omens) once at any point during your turn.[3]

5. At the end of your turn, each time you draw an omen card, you must roll 6 dice (a haunt roll).[4]

6. If the haunt roll result is less than the total number of omen cards all players have drawn this game, the haunt starts.[4]

**At the start of the haunt:**

1. The traitor takes the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room to read the starting haunt.[5]

2. The remaining players become heroes and read the haunt together from *Secrets of Survival*.[5]

3. The traitor returns to the room.[5]

4. The heroes and the traitor perform any actions required by the haunt's "Right Now" section.[5]

5. The first turn of the haunt starts with the player to the traitor's left and proceeds clockwise.[3][6]

6. Each hero takes a hero turn.[3][6]

7. After each hero has taken a turn, the traitor takes a traitor turn.[3][6]

8. After the traitor's turn, any monsters controlled by the traitor get a monster turn.[3][6]

**During the haunt:**

1. Players can make one attack per turn against an opponent in the same room.[7]

2. To attack, roll a number of dice equal to your Might (or another specified trait).[7]

3. The opponent rolls the same number of dice; the higher result wins and inflicts damage equal to the difference between the rolls.[7]

4. Physical damage can be divided between Might and Speed as chosen, while mental damage (from attacks against Sanity or Knowledge) can be divided between Sanity and Knowledge as chosen.[2][7]

5. If any explorer's trait drops to the skull symbol, that explorer dies.[2][6]

6. If you discover a room with an omen symbol, you draw and keep an omen card, but you do not make a haunt roll.[4]

7. The traitor must tell the heroes what they are doing each turn, but not why; the same applies to the heroes.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.5 · HOW TO PLAY · Traits

[3] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.23 · GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?

[4] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.15 · THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll

[5] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.16 · Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets

[6] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.16 · Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt

[7] RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook · p.13 · Make an Attack

🔧 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 79 ms · ask 5278 ms · total 5360 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5360 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04728, "snippet": "Starting with the first player and going to the left, each player takes a turn exploring the house. A Note on Terminology: For simplicity's sake, these rules use 'you' to refer to the character taking the action or affected by the card or tile, whether an explorer (which includes heroes and the trai", "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY · Traits", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.046964, "snippet": "turn: Before the haunt starts, each player takes a turn in order, starting with the player whose explorer has the next birthday and going to the left from there, During a turn, you can move, discover rooms, use items, and attempt die rolls. After the haunt starts, you can also make an attack once pe", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "| . . . you can do as many of the following actions as you want, in any order: Move. Discover a new room. Use item and omen cards. Attempt a die roll . Make an attack (once during your turn after the haunt starts). Before the haunt starts, you must make a haunt roll at the end of your turn if you dr", "headingPath": "Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "| Shuffle the omen cards and put them face down in a stack where everyone can reach them. Do the same with the item cards and the event cards. Find the Basement Landing , Entrance Hall/ Foyer/Grand Staircase , and Upper Landing room tiles. Place them from left to right reasonably far apart. Mix all ", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "You can't attack anyone until after the haunt starts. Once during your turn, you can attack an opponent in the same room. (An opponent is an explorer or monster that wants to stop your movement or interfere with you.) When you make an attack, roll a number of dice equal to your Might. Your opponent ", "headingPath": "Make an Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "| line of sight: If you can draw a path to an opponent that leads through an uninterrupted straight line of doors, you have line of sight to that opponent. move: Each turn, explorers and monsters can move through the house. A character can move as many spaces (rooms) as his or her current Speed. Mon", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "| This optional rule lets you avoid repeating haunts you've already played. If you consult the chart and get a haunt that you've revealed already and you don't want to do again, look for the next room with an omen symbol closest to the haunt revealer. Match that room to the original omen on the char", "headingPath": "Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029907, "snippet": "When a player makes a haunt roll and starts the haunt, that player (the haunt revealer) looks at the haunt chart on the first two pages of the Traitor's Tome booklet. The chart shows which haunt has been revealed-and who is the traitor. Dining Room 24 3 27 5 16 Furnace Room 4 33 32 38 30 In this exa", "headingPath": "Revealing the Haunt", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HOW TO PLAY · Traits", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Make an Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 715}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 715 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 715 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 0.88502 of 1722 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 12:08

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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	HOW TO PLAY · Traits	p.5	0.04728 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?	p.23	0.046964 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Traits · ON YOUR TURN . . . · Move · Possible floors	p.6	0.031746 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	0.03125 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Make an Attack	p.13	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
#6	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY	p.22	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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt	p.16	0.030214 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Revealing the Haunt	p.15	0.029907 (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 36 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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	HOW TO PLAY · Traits	p.5	#1	0.04728 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?	p.23	#2	0.046964 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunts with a Hidden Traitor	p.17	#12	0.028446 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll	p.15	#11	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets	p.16	#10	0.029418 (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 Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Make an Attack	p.13	#5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt	p.16	#7	0.030214 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	#4	0.03125 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	HOW TO PLAY · Traits	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	GLOSSARY · What If There Isn't a Rule for That?	p.23	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	THE HAUNT · Making a Haunt Roll	p.15	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Haunt Setup · Heroes and Secrets	p.16	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Revealing the Haunt · Optional Rule: Selecting the Haunt · Playing the Haunt	p.16	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Betrayal at House on the Hill — Rulebook (corpus doc 715)	Make an Attack	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 79 ms · first delta 2631 ms · total 5360 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 79 ms · ask 5278 ms · gateway work 5360 ms · total 5360 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2792
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 551
tok/sec: 204.9 tok/sec — 551 output tokens in 2.689 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s 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 649), 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.