Ruling — Potion Explosion

← Potion Explosion

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Potion Explosionbg-180974-en-1e

### Setup

1. Each player receives a Desk board and places it in front of themselves.[1]

2. The player who most recently prepared a drink is the first player and takes the First Player token.[1]

3. Remove 2 of the 8 different kinds of Potions from the Potion tiles and put them back into the box.[1]

4. Take 2 random starter Potion tiles per player and lay them in the middle of the table with the Recipe side facing up.[1]

5. Starting with the First Player and proceeding clockwise, each player takes one Starter Potion tile.[1]

6. Starting with the last player and proceeding counterclockwise, each player takes a second starter Potion tile.[1]

7. Each player places their 2 starter Potion tiles, Recipe side up, on the two Bunsen burners of their Desk.[1]

8. Shuffle the remaining Potion tiles and divide them into 5 stacks with the Recipe side facing up.[1]

9. Put all Ingredient marbles in the 'tank' of the Dispenser, ensuring they roll down to fill the 5 tracks of the slide.[1]

10. Place all Little Help tokens and Skill tokens near the Dispenser.[1]

11. Place a specific number of Skill tokens in a 'countdown' stack based on the number of players: 4 tokens for 2 players, 5 tokens for 3 players, or 6 tokens for 4 players.[1]

### Gameplay

1. Players take turns in clockwise order.[1][2]

2. During a turn, a player MUST choose and take 1 Ingredient marble from the Dispenser, which may trigger one or more Explosions.[2]

3. A player can freely choose any visible marble on the Dispenser, except for the 9th marble on each slide track.[2]

4. At any point during a turn, a player MAY drink one or more completed Potions AND/OR ask for a Little Help from the professor.[2]

5. A Potion is completed when all holes in a Potion tile have been filled with Ingredients.[3]

6. When a Potion is completed, the player puts all marbles from the Potion back into the Dispenser, flips the tile to the Completed side, and moves it to the area below their Desk.[3]

7. A player can drink completed Potions to activate one-time magical effects, which involves rotating the tile upside-down.[4]

8. At the end of a turn, the player must follow these steps in order:

* If they have marbles in hand and their Ingredient Pool is full, they must discard them back into the Dispenser tank.[5]

* If they have fewer than 2 Potion tiles in their Brewing area, they must choose and draw new Potions from the top of any of the five stacks and place them on their Bunsen burners.[5]

* Check to see if they earned any Skill tokens.[5]

* Check to see if the game end has been triggered.[5]

### End of the Game

1. The game is triggered to end if the last Skill token from the 'countdown' stack is taken, or if there are no more Potion tiles available at the end of a player's round.[6]

2. The game continues until the player to the right of the First Player completes their next turn, ensuring all players have played the same number of turns.[6][7]

3. Players calculate scores by adding points from completed Potion tiles and collected Skill tokens, then subtracting 2 points for each Little Help token held.[7]

4. The player with the most points wins; in a tie, tied players (starting with the First Player) take one marble from the Dispenser to trigger an Explosion, and the one who collects the most marbles wins.[7]

[1] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.4 · 80 Ingredient marbles

[2] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.5 · 80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS

[3] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.6 · COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus)

[4] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.7 · COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS

[5] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.7 · END OF TURN

[6] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.9 · END OF TURN

[7] RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook · p.9 · END OF TURN

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 8603 ms · total 18675 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 9975 ms · generation 8700 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The game continues, in clockwise order, until the player to the right of the First Player completes their next turn (so that all players will have played the same number of turns during the game). Even if the required number of Skill tokens have already been awarded, players can still earn more from", "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Each player receives a Desk board and places it in front of themselves, leaving some space both above and below it. The player that most recently prepared a drink is the first player and takes the First Player token . This is just a reminder: It won't change during the game. Players play in turns, i", "headingPath": "80 Ingredient marbles", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "| Number of players | 'Countdown' stack | | 2 | 4 Skill tokens | | 3 | 5 Skill tokens | | 4 | 6 Skill tokens | We suggest these numbers of Skill tokens so that your games last a reasonable amount of time (not too short,not too long). But, if you have particularly slow or overthinking players at the ", "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "(Professorum helpus capiendum est) At any point during your turn (and only once per turn), before or after your regular pick , you MAY ask for a Little Help from the professor -i.e. take a Little Help token and 1 Ingredient marble of your choice from the Dispenser. When you take an Ingredient marble", "headingPath": "WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THE PROFESSOR", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "(Endius turnum) After you have taken your regular pick for the turn, you asked for the Little Help from the professor if you wanted to, and you have drunk all the Potions you intended to, your turn ends; follow these steps, in order: If you still have marbles in your hand and your Ingredient Pool is", "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "You can also drink Potions as soon as you complete them, if you wish. This exam aims to prove your worth as witches and wizards, not to merely test your theoretical knowledge of potions. Being able to make good use of the fruit of your labor and turn it to your advantage is a critical skill! You wil", "headingPath": "COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030366, "snippet": "Hi, I am the professor. I talk a lot. What I say is generally useful though, so maybe read it , okay? The red marble is taken and starts a chain reaction. The three yellow marbles collide (and explode). They are all taken. Next, the two black marbles collide and explode. They are also taken. No more", "headingPath": "80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "· Take one Ingredient of your choice from the Dispenser. No Explosions are triggered. Nothing's out of reach if you think it through. Take 2 adjacent Ingredients of different colors from the same slide track of the Dispenser. No Explosions are triggered. I don't think this is what they mean when the", "headingPath": "· HOW TO TIDILY FIT EVERYTHING INTO THE GAME BOX · · POTION OF WISDOM · POTION OF MAGNETICAL ATTRACTION · ABYSSAL DRAFT · BALM OF UTTERMOST STICKINESS · ELIXIR OF BLIND LOVE · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "80 Ingredient marbles", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus)", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "END OF TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 580}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 580 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 580 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 0.91682 of 2705 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 23, 2026 17:00 UTC

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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	0.048412 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles	p.4	0.048387 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	0.046696 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THE PROFESSOR	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
#5	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS	p.7	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
#7	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS	p.5	0.030366 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	· HOW TO TIDILY FIT EVERYTHING INTO THE GAME BOX · · POTION OF WISDOM · POTION OF MAGNETICAL ATTRACTION · ABYSSAL DRAFT · BALM OF UTTERMOST STICKINESS · ELIXIR OF BLIND LOVE · …	p.12	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

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 15 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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles	p.4	#2	0.048387 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS	p.5	#7	0.030366 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus)	p.6	#9	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
#4	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	· HOW TO TIDILY FIT EVERYTHING INTO THE GAME BOX · · POTION OF WISDOM · POTION OF MAGNETICAL ATTRACTION · ABYSSAL DRAFT · BALM OF UTTERMOST STICKINESS · ELIXIR OF BLIND LOVE · …	p.12	#8	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
#5	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS	p.7	#6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.7	#5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	#3	0.046696 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	#1	0.048412 (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 Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	80 Ingredient marbles · TAKING INGREDIENTS	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus)	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	COMPLETING A POTION (Completius potionibus) · DRINKING POTIONS	p.7	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.7	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Potion Explosion — Rulebook (corpus doc 580)	END OF TURN	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 95 ms · first delta 2386 ms · total 18675 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 9975 ms · retrieval 95 ms · ask 8603 ms · gateway work 8700 ms · total 18675 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3095
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 820
tok/sec: 131.5 tok/sec — 820 output tokens in 6.235 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 58s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 60h, checked 4s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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 512), 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.