Ruling — Evolution

← Evolution

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Evolutionbg-155703-en-1e

### Set-up

1. Place the Watering Hole on the table.[1][2]

2. Place the Food Tokens aside to create the Food Bank.[1][2]

3. Give each player 1 Food Screen.[1][2]

4. Shuffle the deck of Trait Cards and place it facedown on the table to create the Draw Deck.[1][2]

5. Randomly determine the first player and give them the First Player Marker.[1][2]

6. For the first round, place a Species Board in front of any player who does not have one.[3]

7. Put a green Wooden Marker on the '1' space of the Population track and a brown Wooden Marker on the '1' space of the Body Size track on the Species Board.[3]

8. Deal each player 3 cards from the Draw Deck, plus 1 card for each Species Board they have in front of them.[3]

### Gameplay

**Phase 1: Deal Cards**

1. Deal cards to players.[3]

2. If the Draw Deck runs out (or if it ran to an end due to a species going extinct on the previous round), this is the final round of the game.[3]

3. If the Draw Deck ran out during this phase, the game ends.[4]

**Phase 2: Select Food**

1. Each player secretly chooses 1 Trait Card from their hand and puts it facedown on the Watering Hole; these are the 'Food Cards' that determine how much Plant Food is available for the round.[3]

**Phase 3: Play Cards**

1. Starting with the First Player and moving clockwise, players may play as many or as few Trait Cards as they want.[5]

2. Players may perform any of the following three actions with each Trait Card in any order and multiple times:

* Place a Trait Card facedown above one of their species (a species may not have duplicate cards or more than 3 cards).[5]

* Discard a Trait Card faceup into the Discard Pile to create a new species, placing a new Species Board with markers on the '1' space of the Population and Body Size tracks to the left or right of existing species.[5]

* Discard a Trait Card faceup into the Discard Pile to increase the Body Size or Population of any one species by 1 (markers cannot exceed 6, unless a trait allows otherwise).[5]

3. A player may remove a Trait Card from any species during their turn and place it faceup in the Discard Pile.[5]

4. When everyone has had a chance to play, flip all newly played Trait Cards faceup.[5]

*Note: In a 6-player game, all players play their cards at the same time without looking at opponents' actions.[6] *

**Feeding Phase**

1. (The sources mention the existence of a Feeding Phase and the "End of Feeding" but do not list the specific steps for the start of the phase).[3][7]

2. Feeding ends when all species are unable to eat, or when species with certain traits (Fat Tissue or Intelligence) choose not to eat.[7]

3. If a species did not eat Food equal to its Population, all hungry Population from that species are lost, and the Population marker is moved down to the number of Population that received Food.[7]

4. If all Population on a species are hungry, it goes extinct.[7]

5. Players remove Food from their Species Boards and place it behind their Food Screen.[7]

6. Any Plant Food remaining on the Watering Hole stays there for the next round.[7]

**End of Round**

1. If the game did not end, pass the First Player Marker to the left and begin a new round starting with Phase 1.[7]

### End of Game and Scoring

1. The game ends if the Draw Deck ran out during Phase 1 of the current round or if the Draw Deck had to be shuffled due to a species going extinct on the previous round.[7][4]

2. Scoring is calculated as follows:

* Each Food behind a player's Food Screen is worth 1 point.[4]

* Each surviving species is worth points equal to its Population.[4]

* Each Trait Card on a surviving species is worth 1 point.[4]

3. The winner is the player with the most points. In the event of a tie, the player with the most Trait Card points wins. If still tied, the player with the most Population points wins.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.3

[2] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.3 · SET-UP

[3] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.4 · GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD

[4] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.8 · EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:

[5] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.5 · PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population

[6] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.9 · 2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …

[7] RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook · p.7 · End of Feeding

That settles it — whose turn was it?

🔧 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 93 ms · ask 6357 ms · total 11449 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 4997 ms · generation 6452 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Starting with the First Player and moving clockwise around the table, a player may play as many or as few Trait Cards as they want. There is no limit to the number of cards a player can save in their hand for a later time. Play will go one time around the table which means every player will only get", "headingPath": "PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "The 2-player game is played with the same rules as the normal game with these exceptions: Remove 40 random Trait Cards from the deck before playing. A species can have a maximum of 2 traits instead of 3. The 6-player game is played using the Quick Play Variant rules. During Phase 3: Play Cards all p", "headingPath": "2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "The goal of Evolution is to thrive in the midst of an ever-changing ecosystem where food is scarce and predators lurk. You will get points for feeding your species, increasing their population, and evolving them to best ensure their survival. At the end of the game, players get points for: The Food ", "headingPath": "GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "Check around the table for any Trait Cards that have this icon on the top left corner. These cards have effects that might trigger before the Food Cards are revealed. If a player has more than 1 of these cards in play, they choose the order in which their traits activate. The First Player reveals th", "headingPath": "PHASE 4: REVEAL FOOD · PHASE 5: FEEDING · Several words in this section are defined terms: take , attack and hungry . See the Glossary on Page 9 for definitions. · Feeding Non-Carnivores", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "Don't like reading rules? Watch the How to Play video instead! www.northstargames.com Our planet is teeming with life! There are over eight million unique animal species on Earth. Darwin suggests this incredible biodiversity shares a common ancestry.", "headingPath": "THE RULES OF", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Place the Watering Hole on the table. Place the Food Tokens aside. This is the Food Bank. Give each player 1 Food Screen. Shuffle the deck of Trait Cards and place it facedown on the table. This is the Draw Deck. Randomly determine the first player. Give the First Player Marker to that player.", "headingPath": "SET-UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "3 • Place the Watering Hole on the table. • Place the Food Tokens aside. This is the Food Bank. • Give each player 1 Food Screen. • Shuffle the deck of Trait Cards and place it facedown on the table. This is the Draw Deck. • Randomly determine the first player. Give the First Player Marker to that p", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029877, "snippet": "If the Population of any species is reduced to 0, it goes extinct and the owner does the following: Discards the Trait Card(s) on that species and draws 1 card from the Draw Deck for each discarded card. If the Draw Deck runs out of cards, shuffle the Discard Pile into a new Draw Deck. The next roun", "headingPath": "EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET-UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "End of Feeding", "sharpsignalDocId": 692}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 692 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 692 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 0.90340 of 3116 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 24, 2026 12:12 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 Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population	p.5	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
#2	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …	p.9	0.047163 (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 Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD	p.4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	PHASE 4: REVEAL FOOD · PHASE 5: FEEDING · Several words in this section are defined terms: take , attack and hungry . See the Glossary on Page 9 for definitions. · Feeding Non-Carnivores	p.6	0.046176 (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 Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	THE RULES OF	p.1	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))	250
#6	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	SET-UP	p.3	0.032787 (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))	294
#7	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)		p.3	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
#8	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:	p.8	0.029877 (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 20 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 Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …	p.9	#2	0.047163 (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 Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD	p.4	#3	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
#3	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)		p.3	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	THE RULES OF	p.1	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	End of Feeding	p.7	#12	0.014085 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:	p.8	#8	0.029877 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	SET-UP	p.3	#6	0.032787 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population	p.5	#1	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	SET-UP	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	GOAL · PLAYING THE GAME · PHASE 1: DEAL CARDS · PHASE 2: SELECT FOOD	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	EXTINCTION · END OF GAME SCORING · Scoring:	p.8	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	PHASE 3: PLAY CARDS · 1) Play a Trait · 2) Create a New Species · 3) Increase Body Size or Population	p.5	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	2-PLAYER RULES · 6-PLAYER RULES · QUICK PLAY VARIANT · TABLE SPACE ISSUES · Attack · Defensive Traits · …	p.9	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Evolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 692)	End of Feeding	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 93 ms · first delta 1498 ms · total 11449 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 4997 ms · retrieval 93 ms · ask 6357 ms · gateway work 6452 ms · total 11449 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2240
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 994
tok/sec: 203.0 tok/sec — 994 output tokens in 4.896 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 22s 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 0s 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 625), 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.