RuleSage cited table rulings
← Everdell

You asked

How does hand limit work? Can I go above 8 then discard down?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

I looked through Everdell's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.11 · ORAWING CAROS
Always draw cards from the deck, unless specifically told to draw them from the Meadow cards. There is a strict hand limit of 8 cards. You cannot ever have more than 8 cards in your hand. If you get to draw cards, you can only draw up to 8, no more. If you are required to give cards to an opponent,
RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.14 · ENO GAME
When you have reached the end of autumn and cannot perform any more actions (or do not wish to), you have finished the game and must pass. If a player has passed, they cannot be given any cards or resources. If cards or resources have to be given to a player and all other players have passed, discar
RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.9 · HAVEN
The Haven location is a shared space. There is no limit to the amount of workers that may be placed on it, even of the same color. By going here, you may discard any number of cards from your hand, and gain 1 of any resource for every 2 cards you discard. Note: The discard pile is facedown.
RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.9 · JOURNEY
In autumn only, you may send a worker on a Journey. You must discard cards equal to the listed points of the Journey location you choose. The 5-point, 4-point, and 3-point locations are exclusive, and the 2-point location is shared. The deployed worker is worth the listed points at the end of the ga
RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.17 · YEAR 2: "RUGWORT THE ROTTEN"
Same rules as Year One with these additional rules: Place his worker on the 4-point Journey space instead of the 3. Rugwort gains 6 points for every special Event that you did not achieve, instead of 3.

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 280 ms · ask 6236 ms · total 6526 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 6526 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 11, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Always draw cards from the deck, unless specifically told to draw them from the Meadow cards. There is a strict hand limit of 8 cards. You cannot ever have more than 8 cards in your hand. If you get to draw cards, you can only draw up to 8, no more. If you are required to give cards to an opponent, ", "headingPath": "ORAWING CAROS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "When you have reached the end of autumn and cannot perform any more actions (or do not wish to), you have finished the game and must pass. If a player has passed, they cannot be given any cards or resources. If cards or resources have to be given to a player and all other players have passed, discar", "headingPath": "ENO GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "The Haven location is a shared space. There is no limit to the amount of workers that may be placed on it, even of the same color. By going here, you may discard any number of cards from your hand, and gain 1 of any resource for every 2 cards you discard. Note: The discard pile is facedown.", "headingPath": "HAVEN", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "In autumn only, you may send a worker on a Journey. You must discard cards equal to the listed points of the Journey location you choose. The 5-point, 4-point, and 3-point locations are exclusive, and the 2-point location is shared. The deployed worker is worth the listed points at the end of the ga", "headingPath": "JOURNEY", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Same rules as Year One with these additional rules: Place his worker on the 4-point Journey space instead of the 3. Rugwort gains 6 points for every special Event that you did not achieve, instead of 3.", "headingPath": "YEAR 2: \"RUGWORT THE ROTTEN\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Architect: At game end, worth 1 point for each of your leftover resin and pebbles, up to 6 points total. Bard: Discard up to 5 cards from your hand, to gain 1 point token for each card. Barge Toad: When played and during Production, gain 2 twigs for each Farm in your city. Chip Sweep: When played an", "headingPath": "CRITTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Same rules as Year Two with these additional rules: Place his worker on the 5-point Journey space instead of the 4. During Rugwort's autumn Prepare for Season action, he kidnaps one of your workers! Do not move his worker to the 1 berry and 1 card space-instead remove his worker and one of your work", "headingPath": "YEAR 3: \"RUGWORT THE RAPSCALLION\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Your city has a maximum of 15 spaces to play cards into. Each card takes up 1 space. Recommended layout is 3 rows with 5 cards in each. Event cards do not count against this 15 card limit. Suggested City Layout", "headingPath": "CITY", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until
Oct 26, 2026 19:25

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) ORAWING CAROS p.11 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) ENO GAME p.14 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) HAVEN p.9 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 291
#4 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) JOURNEY p.9 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) YEAR 2: "RUGWORT THE ROTTEN" p.17 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 202
#6 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CRITTERS p.18 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) YEAR 3: "RUGWORT THE RAPSCALLION" p.17 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) CITY p.11 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 210

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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 280 ms · first delta n/a · total 6526 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 280 ms · ask 6236 ms · gateway work 6526 ms · total 6526 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 10), 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.