Ruling — Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legendsbg-146278-en-1e

I looked through Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends'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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.10 · PLAYERS · Game Play

Each player chooses a school and takes the cards, pieces, and score board in that color. Take one heroic piece from each other player and place it on the zero space of your score board. Be sure these pieces are heroic side up. This will be important later. (During play, you will score points in your

RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.9 · PLAYERS · Game Play

Teammates should sit opposite each other. Each player chooses a different deck, but use only two colors of pieces, one complete set for each team. (We recommend that the two Imperial decks be on different teams.) After you shuffle your deck, turn the six bottom cards sideways. (The end of the game i

RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.7 · RULES FOR A FULL GAME · Player Decks and Pieces · Legends · LEGEND CARDS BONE CATAPULT · SUMMONING A LEGENDARY BEING

So far, we have presented a special version of the rules designed to introduce new players to the game. Even experienced players should consider using those rules when teaching the game to a new player. In this section, we will explain the differences between the new-player rules and the full versio

RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.3 · SCORE BOARDS · The Arena

And now that we have come to the end of our tour of Tash-Kalar, show me what you can do. There, in that central square, create a common piece of kalarite. ... Hm. Not bad. You have talent, my young mage-ling. Of course, that kalarite isn't stable enough to endure an entire match, but you show very g

RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.4 · GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces

Players take turns. The STARTING PLAYER can take only 1 ACTION on his or her FIRST TURN. But for the remainder of the game, each player takes 2 ACTIONS PER TURN. An action can be either putting a common piece on the board or using pieces already on the board to summon a being. Players start with no

🔧 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 77 ms · ask 2174 ms · total 5600 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 3347 ms · generation 2253 ms

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

[{"page": 10, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "Each player chooses a school and takes the cards, pieces, and score board in that color. Take one heroic piece from each other player and place it on the zero space of your score board. Be sure these pieces are heroic side up. This will be important later. (During play, you will score points in your", "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.04526, "snippet": "Teammates should sit opposite each other. Each player chooses a different deck, but use only two colors of pieces, one complete set for each team. (We recommend that the two Imperial decks be on different teams.) After you shuffle your deck, turn the six bottom cards sideways. (The end of the game i", "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045139, "snippet": "So far, we have presented a special version of the rules designed to introduce new players to the game. Even experienced players should consider using those rules when teaching the game to a new player. In this section, we will explain the differences between the new-player rules and the full versio", "headingPath": "RULES FOR A FULL GAME · Player Decks and Pieces · Legends · LEGEND CARDS BONE CATAPULT · SUMMONING A LEGENDARY BEING", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "And now that we have come to the end of our tour of Tash-Kalar, show me what you can do. There, in that central square, create a common piece of kalarite. ... Hm. Not bad. You have talent, my young mage-ling. Of course, that kalarite isn't stable enough to endure an entire match, but you show very g", "headingPath": "SCORE BOARDS · The Arena", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044604, "snippet": "Players take turns. The STARTING PLAYER can take only 1 ACTION on his or her FIRST TURN. But for the remainder of the game, each player takes 2 ACTIONS PER TURN. An action can be either putting a common piece on the board or using pieces already on the board to summon a being. Players start with no ", "headingPath": "GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.044103, "snippet": "(Some cards in the Sylvan deck allow you to draw extra cards at this time. If it is an extra card from your deck, you draw it. If it is an extra legend, your teammate draws it.) At the end of your turn, play passes to the opponent on your left, even if you passed control to your teammate during your", "headingPath": "FINISHING YOUR TURN · Ending the Game · Sideways Cards · Communication · Take Backs", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.042671, "snippet": "You meet the upper criterion of this flare. You begin your turn by invoking it. Because you have no way to summon a being this turn, not even after the standard leap, you pass control to your teammate. Your teammate decides how to use the possible standard leap and then uses your two actions to plac", "headingPath": "Example: · FINISHING YOUR TURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "(But you might be able to claim another one next turn.) To claim a task, take the card and keep it in front of you, next to your deck. The number in the lower right corner tells you how many points you earned. Take the top task from the deck and put it in the empty space. It becomes one of the curre", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}]

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

base rulebook doc 766 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 16:35 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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.10	0.047938 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.9	0.04526 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	RULES FOR A FULL GAME · Player Decks and Pieces · Legends · LEGEND CARDS BONE CATAPULT · SUMMONING A LEGENDARY BEING	p.7	0.045139 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	SCORE BOARDS · The Arena	p.3	0.045037 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces	p.4	0.044604 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	FINISHING YOUR TURN · Ending the Game · Sideways Cards · Communication · Take Backs	p.10	0.044103 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Example: · FINISHING YOUR TURN	p.9	0.042671 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)		p.6	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

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 42 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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.10	#1	0.047938 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.9	#2	0.04526 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)		p.6	#19	0.025189 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	FINISHING YOUR TURN · Ending the Game · Sideways Cards · Communication · Take Backs	p.10	#6	0.044103 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)		p.6	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck	p.3	#13	0.027242 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	DEATHMATCH MELEE (3 OR 4 PLAYERS) · GAME BOARDS	p.10	#17	0.026398 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces	p.4	#5	0.044604 (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 77 ms · first delta 2150 ms · total 5600 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 3347 ms · retrieval 77 ms · ask 2174 ms · gateway work 2253 ms · total 5600 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3680
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 191.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.047 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 24s 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 2s 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 700), 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.