Ruling — TZAAR — RuleSage

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: TZAARbg-31999-en-1e

**Setup**

1. Place the board between the players so that the long side runs from one player to the other.[1]

2. Put all the pieces randomly on the board.[1] (Alternatively, pieces can be placed according to a fixed diagram,[2] or in a tournament version, players take turns putting their pieces on the board until all spaces are occupied [2]).

**The Game**

1. Draw lots for your color; White begins.[1]

2. White makes one move to start the game, which must be a capture.[1]

3. For the first move of any turn, you must perform a "forced capture".[3] You can capture by moving a piece to an adjacent space with an opponent's piece,[1] or by moving in a straight line over any number of vacant spaces to the first space occupied by an opponent's piece.[3] The opponent's piece is removed from the game.[1][3]

4. A piece can capture any other piece as long as it is at least equally strong as the piece it wants to capture.[3] Strength is determined by the height of the piece or stack.[3]

5. After the initial move by White, players always have two moves per turn.[1]

6. For the second move, you must choose one of three possibilities:

* Make a second capture.[3]

* Make one of your pieces (or stacks) stronger by jumping with it on top of another piece (or stack) of your color.[4] This can be done by jumping to an adjacent space or in a straight line over vacant spaces.[4]

* Pass.[4] You are not obligated to use your second move, but you must tell your opponent it is their turn again.[4]

7. Rules for movement and pieces:

* A piece or stack cannot be moved to an empty space.[4]

* A piece or stack cannot jump over other pieces or stacks; it can only move over vacant spaces.[4]

* Pieces may not be moved across the center of the board.[4]

* Stacks can only consist of pieces of the same color.[4]

* A stack is considered one entity and must be moved and captured as a whole.[4]

**Winning the Game**

You win the game when:

1. You succeed in capturing the last piece of one of the three types of your opponent's pieces (Tzaars, Tzarras, or Totts).[5][6]

2. You put your opponent in a position where they cannot use their first move to make a forced capture.[5][6]

[1] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.3 · B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N

[2] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.4 · G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION

[3] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.3 · THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture

[4] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.3 · b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y

[5] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.3 · G END OF THE GAME

[6] RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook · p.2 · Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E

Now you know — make it count.

🔧 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 149 ms · ask 4525 ms · total 4676 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4676 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Z 1/ Place the board between the players so that the long side runs from one player to the other. 2/ Put all the pieces randomly on the board. The intersections constitute the play area and are henceforth referred to as spaces. When all 60 pieces are on the board, all spaces will be occupied. 3/ Dra", "headingPath": "B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Z If you do not like random start positions, put the pieces on the board according to the following diagram: A1 B1 C1 D1 E1 F1 G1 H1 Diagram 4: fi xed start position. When playing the tournament version, the game begins with an empty board. The players take turns putting one of their pieces after an", "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "1/ T o make a piece (or stack) stronger, you just have to jump with it on top of another piece (or stack) of your color. You may jump on one of your pieces (or stacks) in an adjacent space or in a space that you can reach by moving in a straight line over any number of vacant spaces. So to make a pi", "headingPath": "b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "1/ The first move is always a 'forced capture' . Y ou must capture! You can capture a piece in an adjacent space, but during the course of the game more and more spaces will become vacant. You may also capture by moving a piece in a straight line over any number of vacant spaces, to the first space ", "headingPath": "THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "You win the game when you succeed in capturing the last piece of one of the three types of your opponent's pieces, or when you put your opponent in a position where the opponent cannot use their first move to make the forced capture. Reminder: only single pieces and the pieces on top of stacks count", "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "T Z A A R I G P F I G P F N N O V D Z R T Z È Y I N S H T N Ü P C T Z A A R Kris Burm Contents ..................................................3 Aim of the game .....................................3 Preparation .............................................4 The start: one move ...................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Z The second game of the GIPF project . For 2 players. 'Shall I make myself stronger or my opponent weaker?' This is the tricky question you'll have to ask yourself on each of your turns. -1 game board -30 white pieces: 6 Tzaars, 9 Tzarras and 15 Totts - 30 black pieces: 6 Tzaars, 9 Tzarras and 15 T", "headingPath": "Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "© 2016 Rio Grande Games © 2016 HUCH! & friends Author: Kris Burm 3D: Andreas Resch Design: Kris Burm, HUCH! & friends Distributor: Rio Grande Games PO Box 1033 Placitas, NM 87043, USA www.riograndegames.com Information about the GIPF project : games, potentials, digital versions and more. Editor: Si", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E", "sharpsignalDocId": 628}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 628 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 628 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 0.89881 of 1769 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 24, 2026 21:37 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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N	p.3	0.048916 (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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION	p.4	0.048131 (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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y	p.3	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
#4	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture	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
#5	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)		p.1	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
#7	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E	p.2	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
#8	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)		p.1	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))	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 9 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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N	p.3	#1	0.048916 (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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	#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
#3	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture	p.3	#4	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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)		p.1	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)		p.1	#8	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
#6	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y	p.3	#3	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
#7	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E	p.2	#7	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
#8	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION	p.4	#2	0.048131 (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 TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	B A I M O F T H E G A M E · C PREPARATION · D THE START: 1 M O V E · E THE GAME: 2 M O V E S P E R T U R N	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME · H STARTING POSITION · I TOURNAMENT VERSION	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	THE FIRST MOVE OF A TURN · THE SECOND MOVE OF A TURN · a) A second capture	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	b) Making a piece stronger · c) Pass · F F O R T H E S A K E O F C L A R I T Y	p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK TZAAR — Rulebook (corpus doc 628)	Tzaars, Tzarras or Totts: Protect your trio! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 149 ms · first delta 1853 ms · total 4676 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 149 ms · ask 4525 ms · gateway work 4676 ms · total 4676 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2872
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 564
tok/sec: 202.7 tok/sec — 564 output tokens in 2.782 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 56s 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: 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 561), 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.