Ruling — Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition)

← Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition)

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition)bg-176920-en-1e

The game is played over 10 rounds.[1] A round consists of these six steps:

1. Choose Character: Each player simultaneously chooses one character card from his hand and places it facedown in front of him.[1]

2. Resolve Character Effects: Players reveal and resolve their characters' effects by reciting a "countdown to blastoff" starting with the number '9' (the Recruiter).[1] Each player whose facedown card matches the announced number reveals it, flips it faceup, and resolves its effect.[1] If two or more players reveal the same character, they resolve the effect in clockwise order, starting with the first player.[1] The first player continues the countdown in descending order until all players have revealed their cards.[1]

3. Land Launched Ships: Any launched ship lands on Mars, unloading all astronauts aboard in the indicated zone.[2] If a destination token is covering the destination, the ship lands in the zone indicated by the token.[2] When an astronaut is placed in a zone with a facedown resource token, the token is flipped faceup.[2] After landing, the ship is placed faceup in the ship discard pile, and any destination token is returned to the supply.[2]

4. Draw New Docked Ships: For each open dock at the launchpad, the first player draws one ship card and places it faceup at an open dock.[2] If the ship deck is depleted, the discard pile is shuffled to create a new deck.[2]

5. Assign New First Player: The player who resolved his character effect last during the round takes the round tracker and becomes the new first player.[2]

6. Advance Round Tracker: The first player slides the gauge clockwise until the pointer lines up with the next notch, indicating the next round or phase.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects

[2] RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · 3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 90 ms · ask 3340 ms · total 3433 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3433 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "To play the game with two players, the following rule changes apply. Set up the two-player game as a four-player game with a few minor changes to the steps below, as well as one additional step: Choose Colors and Arrange Seating: The players sit next to each other. Each player chooses one color to b", "headingPath": "2-player variant · setup · playinG the 2-player Game · playinG the neutral cOlOr", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "The game is played over a series of rounds, with a few different phases occurring in between certain rounds. The round tracker displays the order in which the rounds and phases occur. There are 10 rounds during the game, each indicated by a number on the round tracker. During a round, each player se", "headingPath": "playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Each launched ship lands on Mars, unloading all astronauts aboard that ship in the indicated zone. If there is a destination token covering the destination printed on the ship card, the ship instead lands in the zone indicated on the token. When an astronaut is placed in a zone with a facedown resou", "headingPath": "3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "Players reveal their mission cards and determine if they were completed. The player(s) with the most ice point tokens gain points for completing the 'Ice Monopoly' global mission. Then, each player calculates his final score as follows: ♦ He adds points from his completed missions. ♦ He adds the tot", "headingPath": "final scOrinG phase · event cards · destinatiOn tOkens", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "When resolving a neutral color's character effect, the controlling player makes all decisions for that neutral color (where to place astronauts, which ship to destroy, etc.). The controlling player can make a choice that causes his neutral color to kill or replace its own astronauts. When resolving ", "headingPath": "resOlvinG neutral characters · pOints fOr neutral cOlOrs · winninG the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Prepare Game Board: Connect the four pieces of Mars and place the assembled planet in the center of the play area. Place Phobos and the Lost in Space Memorial near Mars. Construct Launchpad: Connect dock pieces so that there are a number of docks equal to the number of players. Use the end cap docks", "headingPath": "setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "♦ All character effects are mandatory and must be fully resolved, if possible. If it is not possible to fully resolve the effect, then it should be resolved as fully as possible. The Travel Agent's effect, which must be fully resolved or not at all, is the only exception to this rule. ♦ A player mus", "headingPath": "character cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In case of a tie, the tied players evenly divide the 9 points, rounded down. Ice Monopoly GLOBAL MISSION 9 54 Character Cards 8 Place 1 astronaut in a docked ship AND make up to 3 moves on Mars with your astronauts. EXPLORER 9 for each color assemblinG the rOund tracker Assemble the round tracker as", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker", "sharpsignalDocId": 738}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 738 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 738 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 0.93231 of 1433 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 00:29 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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	2-player variant · setup · playinG the 2-player Game · playinG the neutral cOlOr	p.7	0.048652 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects	p.4	0.048172 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker	p.4	0.047379 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	final scOrinG phase · event cards · destinatiOn tOkens	p.5	0.046642 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	resOlvinG neutral characters · pOints fOr neutral cOlOrs · winninG the Game	p.7	0.046239 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	setup	p.3	0.045455 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	character cards	p.6	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
#8	RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)		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

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 17 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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects	p.4	#2	0.048172 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	setup	p.3	#6	0.045455 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	resOlvinG neutral characters · pOints fOr neutral cOlOrs · winninG the Game	p.7	#5	0.046239 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker	p.4	#3	0.047379 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	character cards	p.6	#7	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	character cards	p.6	#14	0.013699 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	final scOrinG phase · event cards · destinatiOn tOkens	p.5	#4	0.046642 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	2-player variant · setup · playinG the 2-player Game · playinG the neutral cOlOr	p.7	#1	0.048652 (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 Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	playinG the Game · the Game rOund · 1. chOOse character · 2. resOlve character effects	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 738)	3. land launched ships · 4. draw new dOcked ships · 5. assiGn new first player · 6. advance rOund tracker	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 90 ms · first delta 1487 ms · total 3433 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 90 ms · ask 3340 ms · gateway work 3433 ms · total 3433 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3539
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 378
tok/sec: 201.2 tok/sec — 378 output tokens in 1.879 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 6s 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 672), 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.