Ruling — Living Forest

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Living Forestbg-328479-en-1e

In Living Forest, you play as a Spirit of Nature attempting to save the Forest and its sacred Tree by either planting 12 different Protective Trees, collecting 12 Sacred Flowers to awaken Sanki, or extinguishing 12 Fires.[1]

Each game turn includes three phases:

1. **Guardian Animals phase**: All Spirits of Nature play at the same time.[1]

* You draw and turn face up, one after the other, Guardian Animal cards from your personal draw stack to form the Guardian Animal Help Line.[1]

* You can stop drawing cards whenever you want, but if you reveal a card showing a third solitary symbol Z, you must stop drawing as this closes your Help Line.[2]

* A gregarious symbol Y cancels a solitary symbol Z.[2]

* You can discard a Fragment tile to destroy a Fire Varan card you just drew (placing it back in its stack) or to discard a drawn Guardian Animal card into your personal discard stack.[3]

* Once all Spirits have finished drawing, this phase ends.[3]

2. **Action phase**: Spirits of Nature play in turn, starting with the Spirit of the Nature possessing the Sacred Tree.[4]

* If your Help Line shows strictly less than three solitary symbols Z (not canceled by Y), you can perform 2 different Actions.[4]

* If your Help Line shows three solitary symbols Z (not canceled by Y), you can perform only 1 Action.[4]

* Possible actions include:

* **Take a Fragment tile**: Take a Fragment tile and place it next to your Forest to be played in a following Guardian Animal Phase.[5]

* **Attract one or more Guardian Animals**: Add up your amount of L and take one or more Guardian Animal cards from the reserve for a total cost equal to or lower than your number of L; place these cards on top of your personal draw stack, face down.[5]

* **Extinguish the Fire**: Add up your amount of W and pick Fire tiles from the Circle of Spirits for a total cost equal to or lower than your number of W; place these tiles next to your Forest, on their face without numbers.[5]

* The strength of an Action is determined by the number of corresponding Elements visible on the Guardian Animal cards in your Help Line and on your Forest individual board (Note: Element N is not used for Actions, but is a victory condition).[4]

* After a player performs their action(s), it is the next Spirit's turn clockwise.[4]

3. **End of Game turn**.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook · p.6 · Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase

[2] RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook · p.7 · The Guardian Animals' phase

[3] RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook · p.8 · The Fragment tiles · Example

[4] RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook · p.9 · The Action phase

[5] RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook · p.10 · The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 91 ms · ask 4186 ms · total 4278 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4278 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "During this phase, the Spirits of Nature play in turn , starting with the Spirit of Nature possessing the Sacred Tree. 2 Actions Z -Y < 3 1 Action Z -Y = 3 If your Help Line shows strictly less than three solitary symbols Z (not canceled by gregarious symbols Y ), you can then perform 2 different Ac", "headingPath": "The Action phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Place the Circle of Spirits on the table. 1 Take all components related to the Spirit of Nature you play with: 2 1 Forest individual board 1 starting Protective Tree tile 3 Victory tiles representing a Fire, a Sacred Flower and a Protective Tree respectively 1 Spirit of Nature standee 14 starting Gu", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "In Living Forest you play a Spirit of Nature trying to save the Forest and its sacred Tree from Onibi's relentless attacks. You have one of three ways to do this: by planting 12 different Protective Trees, by collecting 12 Sacred Flowers to awaken Sanki the great Guardian of the Forest, by extinguis", "headingPath": "Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "L Take a Fragment tile and place it next to your Forest. It can be played in a following Guardian Animal Phase. Add up the amount of L you have and take one or more Guardian Animal cards visible in the reserve of Guardian Animals, for a total cost equal to or lower than your number of . L Place the ", "headingPath": "The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "A game by Aske Christiansen Illustrated by Apolline Etienne Four Spirits of Nature - Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn - have been called to rescue the Sacred Tree of the Forest facing the devastating flames of Onibi. All of them want to become a legend by saving their home and, this way, receiving ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "S Add up the number of S and move your Spirit of Nature standee clockwise on the Circle of Spirits by a number of rocks equal to or lower than your number of . S If one or more Spirits of Nature are on a rock ahead of you, jump over them without counting their rocks and take one of their Victory til", "headingPath": "Example · Move forward on the Circle of Spirits", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Refill the Guardian Animal reserve by revealing as many new cards per level as there were cards taken this turn. The Guardian Animals of the Forest have heard your call, they are gathering close to the Circle of Spirits founded millennia ago by Sanki. They are standing by to help if you ask. Move al", "headingPath": "3. The arrival of new Guardian Animals · 4. The Return of Guardian Animals · 5. Giving the Sacred Tree · End of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Add up the amount of P and take one, and only one, Protective Tree for a total cost equal to or lower than your number of . P Place it on your Forest, on a space adjacent to a Protective Tree already planted. Diagonal spaces do not count. P A planted Protective Tree instantly and permanently gives y", "headingPath": "Plant one and only one Protective Tree", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Guardian Animals' phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Fragment tiles · Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Action phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire", "sharpsignalDocId": 712}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 712 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 712 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 0.92090 of 1909 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 25, 2026 18:52 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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Action phase	p.9	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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Setup	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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase	p.6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire	p.10	0.045928 (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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)		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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Example · Move forward on the Circle of Spirits	p.11	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
#7	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	3. The arrival of new Guardian Animals · 4. The Return of Guardian Animals · 5. Giving the Sacred Tree · End of the Game	p.15	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
#8	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Plant one and only one Protective Tree	p.12	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

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 16 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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Setup	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
#2	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase	p.6	#3	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
#3	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Fragment tiles · Example	p.8	#9	0.028814 (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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)		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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Setup	p.5	#11	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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Guardian Animals' phase	p.7	#10	0.028718 (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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Action phase	p.9	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire	p.10	#4	0.045928 (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 Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	Goal of the game · The Guardian Animals' phase	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Guardian Animals' phase	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Fragment tiles · Example	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The Action phase	p.9	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Living Forest — Rulebook (corpus doc 712)	The different Actions: · Take a Fragment tile · Attract one or more Guardian Animals · Example · Extinguish the Fire	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 91 ms · first delta 1506 ms · total 4278 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 91 ms · ask 4186 ms · gateway work 4278 ms · total 4278 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2323
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 552
tok/sec: 202.2 tok/sec — 552 output tokens in 2.730 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s 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: 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 646), 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.