Ruling — Love Letter: Premium Edition

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Love Letter: Premium Editionbg-196326-en-1e

**Setup (2 to 4 players)**

1. Assemble the Princess, Countess, King, Prince (two copies), Handmaid (two copies), Baron (two copies), Priest (two copies), and Guard (five copies) into a deck.[1]

2. Shuffle these 16 cards to form a face-down draw deck.[1]

3. Remove the top card of the deck from the game without looking at it and place it aside.[1]

4. If playing a 2-player game, take 3 more cards from the top of the deck and place them to the side, face up.[1]

5. Each player draws 1 card from the deck, which is kept secret from other players.[1]

**Setup (5 to 8 players)**

1. Assemble all 32 cards into a deck.[2]

2. Shuffle them to form a face-down draw deck.[2]

3. Remove the top card of the deck from the game without looking at it and place it aside.[2]

4. Each player draws 1 card from the deck.[2]

**Taking a Turn**

1. Draw the top card from the deck and add it to your hand.[3]

2. Choose one of the two cards now in your hand and discard it face up in front of you.[3]

3. Apply any effect on the card you discarded, even if it is bad for you.[3]

4. Once the effect is applied, the turn passes to the player on your left.[3]

5. If a player is knocked out of the round, they discard the card in their hand face up (without applying its effect) and take no more turns until the next round.[3]

**Ending a Round**

A round ends if the deck is empty at the end of a player's turn, or if all players but one are out of the round.[4]

1. If the deck is empty, all players still in the round reveal their hands.[4]

2. The player with the highest number in their hand wins the round.[4]

3. In the event of a tie, players add the numbers on the cards in their discard pile and the highest total wins.[4]

4. If a tie persists, all tied players are considered to have won the round.[4]

5. If only one player remains in the round, that player wins.[4]

6. The winner (or winners) receives a Token of Affection.[4]

7. For a new round, shuffle the cards and follow the setup rules; the winner of the previous round goes first (if there was a tie, the player most recently on a date goes first).[4]

**Winning the Game**

* **2 to 4 Players:** A player wins after winning 7 tokens (for 2 players), 5 tokens (for 3 players), or 4 tokens (for 4 players).[4]

* **5 to 8 Players:** A player wins after winning 4 Tokens of Affection.[2] A player may win without winning a round due to specific card effects.[2] If players are tied for the win, they play another round to break the tie.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)

[2] RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook · p.7 · Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)

[3] RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook · p.5 · Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player

[4] RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook · p.6 · Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 84 ms · ask 4903 ms · total 4990 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4990 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "If you are playing the game with 5 to 8 players, then assemble all 32 of the cards into a deck. Shuffle them to form a face-down draw deck. Remove the top card of the deck from the game without looking at it and place it aside. Each player draws 1 card from the deck. Play now proceeds as it would fo", "headingPath": "Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "4 If you are playing the game with 5 to 8 players, consult the setup and play rules on page 7. For 2 to 4 players, assemble the following cards into a deck and place the others aside, as they won't be used in the game: Princess Countess King Prince (two copies) Handmaid (two copies) Baron (two copie", "headingPath": "Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "6 A round ends if the deck is empty at the end of a player's turn. The royal residence closes for the evening, the person closest to the Princess delivers the love letter, and Princess Annette retires to her chambers to read it. All players still in the round reveal their hands. The player with the ", "headingPath": "Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "On your turn, draw the top card from the deck and add it to your hand. Then, choose one of the two cards now in your hand and discard it face up in front of you. Apply any effect on the card you discarded. You must apply its effect, even if it is bad for you! See page 8 for the effects of each indiv", "headingPath": "Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045695, "snippet": "From his satchel, Bartolemew produced a sealed, wooden tube. 'If you will be so kind as to deliver these sheets of music, my dear Susannah,' he said with a smile and a genteel nod. The guard intercepted the tube, but as it changed hands, something with a little weight shifted inside it. 'What's this", "headingPath": "Rulebook · Object of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "14 Although often seen in court, Jester Darius is a mere entertainer. This might seem to suggest his influence is negligible, but like many of low station who work in the royal court, Darius is largely invisible to the powerful courtiers around him. As a result, he sees and hears much more than most", "headingPath": "1: Guard Dougaul · 0: Jester Darius · 0: Assassin", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.043935, "snippet": "8 Here are brief profiles of the people in the game. Hampered only by the naïveté of youth, Princess Annette is elegant, charming, and beautiful. Obviously, you want the princess to carry your letter. However, she is self-conscious about matters of the heart, and if confronted, will toss your letter", "headingPath": "Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players) · About the People · 8: Princess Annette · 7: Countess Wilhelmina", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "Your game of Love Letter should include the following. If it does not, contact customerservice@alderac.com for assistance. 32 Game cards 8 Player Reference cards 25 tokens of affection The game has 32 cards, 16 of which are used when playing with 2 to 4 players. The other 16 are added to the game wh", "headingPath": "Components · Game Cards · Reference Cards · Tokens of Affection", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)", "sharpsignalDocId": 638}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 638 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 638 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 0.87244 of 1999 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 06:18 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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)	p.7	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)	p.4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)	p.6	0.046032 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player	p.5	0.045743 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Rulebook · Object of the Game	p.2	0.045695 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	1: Guard Dougaul · 0: Jester Darius · 0: Assassin	p.14	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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players) · About the People · 8: Princess Annette · 7: Countess Wilhelmina	p.8	0.043935 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Components · Game Cards · Reference Cards · Tokens of Affection	p.3	0.029911 (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 15 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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)	p.7	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player	p.5	#4	0.045743 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	1: Guard Dougaul · 0: Jester Darius · 0: Assassin	p.14	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Components · Game Cards · Reference Cards · Tokens of Affection	p.3	#8	0.029911 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	5: Count Guntram · 4: Sycophant Morris · 3: Baroness Fiona	p.12	#11	0.029083 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players) · About the People · 8: Princess Annette · 7: Countess Wilhelmina	p.8	#7	0.043935 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)	p.6	#3	0.046032 (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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)	p.4	#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))	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 Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Tokens of Affection · Setup (2 to 4 Players) · How to Play (2 to 4 Players)	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Setup and Play (5 to 8 players) · Game End and How to Win (5 to 8 Players)	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Taking A Turn · Out of the Round · Honesty · Choosing a Player	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Love Letter: Premium Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 638)	Choosing a Player · End of a Round · Game End and How to Win (2 to 4 Players)	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 84 ms · first delta 1533 ms · total 4990 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 84 ms · ask 4903 ms · gateway work 4990 ms · total 4990 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3327
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 687
tok/sec: 202.4 tok/sec — 687 output tokens in 3.395 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 18s 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 571), 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.