Ruling — Primal: The Awakening

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Primal: The Awakeningbg-303731-en-1e

I looked through Primal: The Awakening'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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.113

Rise A player rises when they come back into the fight after being KO'd. When you rise, perform the following steps: 1. Discard your KO token. 2. Draw up to your hand size limit. 3. Stand your miniature up on the board to show that you are no longer KO'd. 4. Play passes to the next player. Note: Whe

RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.22

ACTION PHASE During the Action phase, you may perform any of the following actions, in any order. Each action (apart from Revive) may be performed as many times as you wish. • Play an action card from your hand. • Activate an ability that begins with the keyword Action. • Revive (only once per turn)

RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.38

CAMPAIGN RULES To successfully complete the campaign, players must complete all 11 chapters of the story. A chapter is complete, and players move on to the next chapter, when they successfully complete a quest from those available for that chapter. Note: If you play with the Hunter’s Trial variant r

RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.59

During the Quest Board phase, players collectively choose a quest from the ones currently available on the quest board (for more details on the quest board, see page 54). Place the selected quest card in front of you on the table: This quest is now the active quest for the current chapter and determ

RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook · p.56

Each time you start a new campaign, you begin with the Prologue scenario (page 3). After successfully completing the Prologue, follow the steps below to set up the campaign: 55 1. Place the quest board in the center of the table. 2. Assemble the quest deck by putting together all the quest cards fro

🔧 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,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 82 ms · ask 4856 ms · total 9428 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 4488 ms · generation 4940 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 113, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Rise A player rises when they come back into the fight after being KO'd. When you rise, perform the following steps: 1. Discard your KO token. 2. Draw up to your hand size limit. 3. Stand your miniature up on the board to show that you are no longer KO'd. 4. Play passes to the next player. Note: Whe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "ACTION PHASE During the Action phase, you may perform any of the following actions, in any order. Each action (apart from Revive) may be performed as many times as you wish. • Play an action card from your hand. • Activate an ability that begins with the keyword Action. • Revive (only once per turn)", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.044904, "snippet": "CAMPAIGN RULES To successfully complete the campaign, players must complete all 11 chapters of the story. A chapter is complete, and players move on to the next chapter, when they successfully complete a quest from those available for that chapter. Note: If you play with the Hunter’s Trial variant r", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 59, "score": 0.044343, "snippet": "During the Quest Board phase, players collectively choose a quest from the ones currently available on the quest board (for more details on the quest board, see page 54). Place the selected quest card in front of you on the table: This quest is now the active quest for the current chapter and determ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 56, "score": 0.044163, "snippet": "Each time you start a new campaign, you begin with the Prologue scenario (page 3). After successfully completing the Prologue, follow the steps below to set up the campaign: 55 1. Place the quest board in the center of the table. 2. Assemble the quest deck by putting together all the quest cards fro", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.042397, "snippet": "ROUND STRUCTURE PLAYER COUNT ICON A scenario consists of 10 rounds, in which players win by reducing the monster’s health to 0 (success and failure conditions are explained in detail on page 35). This section provides a detailed explanation of the rules for playing a scenario. It begins by presentin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.041261, "snippet": "55 77 8. Each player performs the following steps: 8.1 Place your hunter board in front of you on the table. 8.2 Place your starting equipment and potion cards on your hunter board in the spaces that correspond to their icons. 8.3 Shuffle your action deck and place it to the left of your hunter boar", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}, {"page": 111, "score": 0.039737, "snippet": "The monster turns to the aggro player. While you are KO'd, you cannot be the target of any card ability or game effect (apart from the Revive action). When it would normally be your turn but you are KO'd, simply flip your KO token to its black side. Play then passes to the next player. If your KO to", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 785}]

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 doc 785 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 785 boosted

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

Nov 24, 2026 08:51 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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.113	0.046875 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.22	0.045541 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.38	0.044904 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.59	0.044343 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.56	0.044163 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.18	0.042397 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.17	0.041261 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.111	0.039737 (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 80 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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.113	#1	0.046875 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.18	#6	0.042397 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.111	#8	0.039737 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.62	#48	0.018182 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.28	#55	0.017206 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.22	#2	0.045541 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.90	#9	0.029211 (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 Primal: The Awakening — Rulebook (corpus doc 785)	p.17	#7	0.041261 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 82 ms · first delta 4760 ms · total 9428 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 4488 ms · retrieval 82 ms · ask 4856 ms · gateway work 4940 ms · total 9428 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3216
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 123.3 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.073 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 54s 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 1s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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 720), 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.