Ruling — Steampunk Rally

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Steampunk Rallybg-162007-en-1e

Steampunk Rally is played over a series of rounds, and each phase of a round is resolved by all players simultaneously; there are no "turns" in the game.[1][2]

The sequence of play is as follows:

1. **Draft Phase**:

* Each player draws one card from each deck to create a hand of 4 cards.[2]

* All players simultaneously perform the following steps:

* Select a card from your hand and place it face down in front of you.[2]

* Perform one of the following actions using the selected card:

* Reveal the Machine Part and attach it to your Invention.[2]

* Discard the card to Generate Power (take dice from the supply matching the amount and color displayed in the upper-right corner and add them to your Dice Pool).[2]

* Discard the card to Gain Cogs (take Cogs from the supply matching the amount displayed in the upper-right corner).[2]

* If it is a Boost card, discard it face down under your Damage Gauge to be played later.[2]

* Pass the remaining cards in your hand to the player sitting next to you in the direction indicated by the Play Direction token.[2]

* This process repeats until you have no cards left to pass.[2]

2. **Vent Phase** (Note: This phase is skipped during the first round):[1]

* You may spend any number of Cogs to reduce the pip values of dice currently occupying Die Slots on your Invention.[1][3]

* Each discarded Cog allows you to reduce the value of your dice by a total of up to 2 pips.[3]

* Discard any die you reduce to less than 1 pip.[3]

* Players may play Boost cards during this phase; if multiple players wish to play Boost cards, they are resolved in the order determined by the Play Direction token, starting with the player closest to the token.[3]

3. **Race Phase**:

* Roll all dice in your Dice Pool, as well as any dice stored in a diagonally shaped Storage Die Slot.[3]

* Use these dice to activate Machine Parts in your Invention and gain their associated Race Effects.[3]

* At any time during this phase, you may spend a Cog to re-roll a die or to increase the value of a die by 1 pip (up to a maximum of 6 pips).[3]

4. **Damage Phase**:

* If your Damage Gauge is below 0, discard Machine Parts.[1]

5. **End of Round**:

* After the Damage Phase, perform these tasks before the next round begins:

* Flip your Light Bulb token to the 'On' side.[4]

* If any Machine Parts have Storage Die Slots, you may place a die from your Dice Pool into each slot.[4]

* Return all remaining unused or unstored dice in your Dice Pool to the supply (Cogs may be kept in your Player Area).[4]

* Flip the Play Direction token to the opposite side.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook · p.4 · Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …

[2] RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook · p.4 · Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!

[3] RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook · p.5 · Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs

[4] RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook · p.7 · End of Round · Building Your Invention

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 109 ms · ask 5105 ms · total 5215 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5215 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "2 1 Select which Racetrack you' d like to play ( Swiss Alps or Hoverdrome ) and ensure that all the Track tiles are flipped to the selected side. 2 Select three of the five available Middle Track tiles and build a continuous Racetrack of any shape. 3 Place the Start tile at one end of your newly cre", "headingPath": "Finish Line · Game Setup · Optional Setup: Challenge Tiles · Your First Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Guglielmo Marconi, Thomas Edison and Marie Curie are playing the first round of a three-player game. For the Draft Phase , they each draw four cards, one of each border color. From his first hand, Marconi selects the Ion Thrusters Machine Part and places it face down on the table. When he sees that ", "headingPath": "Example Round · Draft Phase · Vent Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046452, "snippet": "At the beginning of the Draft Phase each player draws one card from each deck to create a hand of 4 cards. Then all players perform each of the following steps simultaneously. Do not proceed to the next step until all players have finished performing the current one. Select a card from your hand and", "headingPath": "Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "(Skipped during first round) During the Vent Phase , you may spend any number of Cogs to reduce the pip values of dice that currently occupy Die Slots on your Invention . Each Cog you discard allows you to reduce the value of your dice by a total of up to 2 pips (e.g. one die by 2 pips, or two dice ", "headingPath": "Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "4 Steampunk Rally is played over a series of rounds. Each round consists of four Phases: Draft : add Machine Parts to your Invention ; gain dice, Cogs , and Boost cards . Vent: spend Cogs to subtract pips from dice currently occupying Die Slots on your Machine Parts . The Vent Phase is skipped durin", "headingPath": "Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.044192, "snippet": "After all players complete the Damage Phase , the round is over. Before beginning a new round, perform the following tasks: 1 Flip your Light Bulb token to the 'On' side. 2 If any of your Machine Parts feature Storage Die Slots A , you may place a die in each one of these Die Slots from your Dice Po", "headingPath": "End of Round · Building Your Invention", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "6 Select an Inventor . Take the associated Inventor Cockpit , Inventor Machine Part , and Inventor Pawn . We recommend that players who didn't fare as well in a previous game be allowed to select first. B Place your Inventor Pawn on the Racetrack Start space . C Construct your Invention by placing y", "headingPath": "Your First Setup · Player Area Setup · Valve Connections", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "2 1 Add Machine Parts to your Invention / gain dice / gain Cogs / Stash Boost cards. Construct : Attach a Machine Part to your Invention . Generate Power : Gain the dice shown in the upper-right corner of the card. Gain Cogs: take Cogs from the supply according to the amount displayed in the upper-r", "headingPath": "Guglielmo Marconi · Draft Phase · Vent Phase · Race Phase · Damage · End of Round · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "End of Round · Building Your Invention", "sharpsignalDocId": 840}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 840 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 840 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 0.90952 of 2100 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 24, 2026 16:42 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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Finish Line · Game Setup · Optional Setup: Challenge Tiles · Your First Setup	p.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))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Example Round · Draft Phase · Vent Phase	p.10	0.047643 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!	p.4	0.046452 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs	p.5	0.045724 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …	p.4	0.044337 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	End of Round · Building Your Invention	p.7	0.044192 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Your First Setup · Player Area Setup · Valve Connections	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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Guglielmo Marconi · Draft Phase · Vent Phase · Race Phase · Damage · End of Round · …	p.12	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

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 27 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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Finish Line · Game Setup · Optional Setup: Challenge Tiles · Your First Setup	p.2	#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
#2	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …	p.4	#5	0.044337 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Example Round · Draft Phase · Vent Phase	p.10	#2	0.047643 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs	p.5	#4	0.045724 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Glaciers · Jumps · Crowds	p.12	#17	0.014493 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Your First Setup · Player Area Setup · Valve Connections	p.3	#7	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
#7	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!	p.4	#3	0.046452 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	End of Round · Building Your Invention	p.7	#6	0.044192 (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 Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Valve Connections · Playing the Game · Boost Cards · Machine Part Cards · Silver border · Ada Lovelace · …	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Draft Phase - continued · Construct · Generate Power · Gain Cogs · Stash Boost · Important!	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	Vent Phase · Vent Phase Boost Cards · Cogs	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Steampunk Rally — Rulebook (corpus doc 840)	End of Round · Building Your Invention	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 109 ms · first delta 1846 ms · total 5215 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 109 ms · ask 5105 ms · gateway work 5215 ms · total 5215 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3195
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 670
tok/sec: 201.6 tok/sec — 670 output tokens in 3.323 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s 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 7s 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 775), 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.