Ruling — Dominant Species: Marine

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dominant Species: Marinebg-262941-en-1e

The game is played in a series of turns in which a single animal takes one action.[1] The order of play follows the reverse of the food chain: Crustaceans, then Fishes, then Cephalopods, then Reptiles, and back to Crustaceans.[1]

During each turn, a player must choose exactly one of two options:[2]

1. **Placement**: Place one available pawn—either a basic pawn in the player's color or a white special pawn acquired during play—into a single action space (those with fossil icons) on the action display and perform the associated action.[1][2]

2. **Retrieval**: Retrieve all controlled pawns (both basic and special) from the action display and place them on the table in front of the player to be used for future turns.[2] This is the only option if a player has no available pawns.[2]

**Evolution Card Play**

If a player is the active player and has at least one thriving (non-endangered) species on a tile that has just been scored, they must select and resolve one face-up card from the Evolution Cards section.[3]

* The player may only choose a card in a numbered slot at or below the value of the action space where their pawn was placed.[3]

* The player must resolve all of the card's effects in their entirety and in the order they appear.[3]

* After resolution, the card is placed on a face-up discard pile, the cards above the empty slot slide down one slot, and a new card is drawn from the pile and placed into slot number 5.[3]

* If the Asteroid card is selected, the game ends at the conclusion of the current round.[3]

**End of Round and Game**

* A round is a series of player turns that ends after each animal has retrieved at least once, triggering a Reseed event.[4]

* A round ends and a Reseed event occurs immediately if a player's food chain cube is moved to the rightmost box.[4]

* The game ends when the Asteroid card is selected [3] or when the evolution card draw pile is depleted.[3]

* At the end of the game, players conduct a final scoring of each tile.[5] The player controlling the animal with the highest VP total wins.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook · p.8 · Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play

[2] RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook · p.9 · Player Options

[3] RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook · p.16 · Evolution Card Play

[4] RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook · p.10 · Retrieve · Abundance

[5] RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook · p.2 · Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board

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 218 ms · ask 4605 ms · total 4825 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4825 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "The large hexagonal tiles are used throughout the game to create an ever-expanding interpretation of the main ocean on earth as it might have appeared tens of millions of years ago. The smaller Hydrothermal Vent (or just ' Vent ') tiles will be placed atop some of the larger tiles throughout play, c", "headingPath": "Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044982, "snippet": "During your turn, you must choose exactly one of two options: Placement -Place one of your available pawns - either a basic pawn in your animal's color that you began the game with or a white special pawn you acquired during the course of play - into a single action space (those with the fossil icon", "headingPath": "Player Options", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044949, "snippet": "After placing a pawn, you immediately perform the associated action according to the tag to the left of the action space (for example, ' Tectonics ' or ' Evolution ') . Actions are never mandatory. You may choose to voluntarily forfeit the allowed action. If so, it must be skipped in its entirety. Y", "headingPath": "Actions · Endgame", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.044092, "snippet": "The action display is the large boxed area on the right side of the game board. This is the game's engine, so to speak, which will facilitate each player's wants and desires as far as furthering their animal's destiny on earth. The wooden cylinders are the pawns that players will use to take actions", "headingPath": "The Action Display · Pawns", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.043301, "snippet": "Place the six square markers with white cylinder icons into their matching spaces near the bottom left of the board. Place the six special pawns (the white wooden cylinders) atop their matching markers. Place the six smaller square mark - ers showing element icons on the “1” space of the Victory Poi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.042817, "snippet": "When you choose to retrieve pawns (instead of placing one) as the action for your turn, return all of your controlled pawns both basic and special - from the action display to the table in front of you. They are now available pawns for future turns. Then, if not already there, slide your animal's cu", "headingPath": "Retrieve · Abundance", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Conduct a Domination action by choosing exactly one of the six element types that your animal currently dominates [page 7], then perform the following activities: Take control of the special pawn associated with the chosen element. If the pawn is in front of a player or still in its setup location, ", "headingPath": "Domination", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029907, "snippet": "The wooden cubes represent the 'species' that each animal will use to represent itself on earth. Most species will begin the game in their owner's Gene Pool. Most or all of them will eventually occupy (be placed on) the tiles of earth. Prior to being placed on a tile of earth, species belonging to a", "headingPath": "Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Options", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Evolution Card Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Retrieve · Abundance", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 716}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 716 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 716 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 0.92426 of 1690 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 08:14 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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board	p.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))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Player Options	p.9	0.044982 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Actions · Endgame	p.9	0.044949 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	The Action Display · Pawns	p.8	0.044092 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)		p.5	0.043301 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Retrieve · Abundance	p.10	0.042817 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Domination	p.17	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
#8	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play	p.8	0.029907 (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 41 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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Evolution Card Play	p.16	#11	0.028571 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Survival	p.4	#18	0.026709 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board	p.2	#1	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
#4	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play	p.8	#8	0.029907 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Retrieve · Abundance	p.10	#6	0.042817 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Evolution Card Play	p.17	#21	0.025712 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	The Action Display · Pawns	p.8	#4	0.044092 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Player Options	p.9	#2	0.044982 (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 Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Species · Gene Pool · Survival Card · Special Actions · Sequence of Play	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Player Options	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Evolution Card Play	p.16	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Retrieve · Abundance	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Dominant Species: Marine — Rulebook (corpus doc 716)	Game Overview · Inventory · Main Board	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 218 ms · first delta 2168 ms · total 4825 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 218 ms · ask 4605 ms · gateway work 4825 ms · total 4825 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3540
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 503
tok/sec: 196.8 tok/sec — 503 output tokens in 2.556 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 54s 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 0s 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 650), 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.