Ruling — DVONN — RuleSage

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: DVONNbg-2346-en-1e

**Phase 1: Placing Pieces**

1. Draw lots to determine who begins.[1]

2. The starting player takes 2 DVONN pieces and the 2/23 white pieces; the other player takes the remaining DVONN piece and the 23 black pieces.[1]

3. Place the board horizontally between the players so each player has 9 intersections (spaces) on their side.[1]

4. The game starts with an empty board.[1]

5. Players take turns placing their pieces on the spaces of the board, one at a time.[1]

6. Players must start with the DVONN pieces and then continue with their own color in this order: White: first DVONN piece; Black: second DVONN piece; White: third DVONN piece; Black: first black piece; White: first white piece; Black: second black piece, and so on.[1]

7. A piece may be put on any vacant space, without restriction.[1]

8. The first phase ends when all pieces are placed on the board and all spaces are occupied.[1]

**Phase 2: Stacking Pieces**

1. The player who started the first phase also starts the second phase.[2]

2. Players alternate turns.[2]

3. Each turn, a player must move one piece or one stack of their own color.[2]

4. The color of the topmost piece in a stack determines who owns the stack and may move it.[2]

5. A single piece may move one space in any direction, but only to an occupied space (on top of another piece or stack of any color).[1]

6. A stack must be moved as a whole, moving exactly as many spaces as there are pieces in the stack, in a straight line.[2]

7. A move may not end in an empty space, but may move across empty spaces.[2]

8. A piece or stack that is surrounded on all 6 sides cannot be moved.[2]

9. A single DVONN piece cannot be moved, but a piece or stack may move on top of it.[2]

10. A piece or stack must remain in contact (directly or through a chain) with at least one DVONN piece to remain in play; any piece or stack that becomes isolated must be removed from the board immediately.[3]

11. You may not pass a turn unless you cannot make any more moves.[2]

12. If one player cannot make a move, the other must continue to play until they also have no more possible moves.[4]

13. If a player who must pass gets the opportunity to move again (e.g., because their pieces are no longer blocked), they must do so.[4]

**End of the Game**

1. The game ends when the last move is made.[4]

2. Each player puts all the stacks they control on top of each other.[4]

3. The player with the highest stack wins the game, regardless of the color of the pieces in the stack.[4]

4. If both players have an equal stack, the game ends in a tie.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook · p.3 · B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES

[2] RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook · p.3 · E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S

[3] RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook · p.3 · F L O S I N G P I E C E S

[4] RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook · p.3 · G END OF THE GAME

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 102 ms · ask 4656 ms · total 4760 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4760 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "1/ IMPORTANT: the player who started the first phase also starts the second phase! Thus, after White has put his last piece on the board, he must immediately play again. Then the players alternate turns. (As Black is the first to put a piece of his own color on the board in the 1st phase, so now it ", "headingPath": "E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "1/ Phase 1: when placing the pieces on the board, make sure that you put enough of them at the edge and close to the DVONN pieces. Do not put too many of your pieces close together. 2/ Phase 2: when making a move, you neutralize an opponent's piece each time you play on top of one. A neutralized pie", "headingPath": "H STRATEGIC TIPPS", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "1/ Pieces and stacks must somehow remain in contact with at least one DVONN piece to remain in play. 'In contact' means that there must always be a link (directly or through a chain of other pieces) with at least one DVONN piece. Each and every piece and/ or stack that is not linked to any of the DV", "headingPath": "F L O S I N G P I E C E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "1/ The players must play for as long as they can do so. If one player can't make a move any more, the other must continue to play until he, too, has made his very last possible move. In the rare event that a player who must pass gets the opportunity to make a move again, he must do so. This can happ", "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "1/ Draw lots to determine who begins. The starting player takes 2 DVONN pieces and the 23 white pieces; the other player takes the remaining DVONN piece and the 23 black pieces. 3/ A single piece may move one space in any direction, but only to an occupied space (i.e. on top of another piece or stac", "headingPath": "B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The fourth game of the GIPF project . For 2 players. Build stacks, try to control your opponent's pieces and, above all, remain linked to the red DVONN pieces. If you do not? Well, you may suddenly see quite a few of your pieces disappear from the board. Be aware of everything your opponent does, bu", "headingPath": "Do not get cut off! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "N N O V D 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 Basic rules ...............................................4 Standard rules ......................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "© 2017 Rio Grande Games © 2017 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": 595}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "F L O S I N G P I E C E S", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "G END OF THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 595}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 595 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 595 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 0.89582 of 2083 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 12:44 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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S	p.3	0.047883 (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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	H STRATEGIC TIPPS	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
#3	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	F L O S I N G P I E C E S	p.3	0.046696 (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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES	p.3	0.032787 (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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	Do not get cut off! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E	p.2	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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)		p.1	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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)		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 8 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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES	p.3	#5	0.032787 (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
#2	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	Do not get cut off! · A CONTENTS · B A I M O F T H E G A M E	p.2	#6	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
#3	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	#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
#4	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)		p.1	#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
#5	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)		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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	F L O S I N G P I E C E S	p.3	#3	0.046696 (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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S	p.3	#1	0.047883 (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 DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	H STRATEGIC TIPPS	p.4	#2	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	B P R E P A R A T I O N · D THE FIRST PHASE: PLACING PIECES	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	E T H E S E C O N D P H A S E : S T A C K I N G P I E C E S	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	F L O S I N G P I E C E S	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK DVONN — Rulebook (corpus doc 595)	G END OF THE GAME	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 102 ms · first delta 1345 ms · total 4760 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 102 ms · ask 4656 ms · gateway work 4760 ms · total 4760 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2862
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 679
tok/sec: 202.0 tok/sec — 679 output tokens in 3.361 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 32s 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 527), 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.