Ruling — Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Gamebg-29368-en-1e

The setup process depends on whether you are playing the Basic Game or the Advanced Game:

**Basic Game Setup**

1. Set aside the two sets of Advanced Cards (20 Hero Cards and 20 Zombie Cards marked with the Advanced symbol) or remove them from the decks if they have previously been integrated.[1]

2. Place the "Die Zombies, Die!" Scenario card face up on the table near the Hero Players.[1]

3. Place the Town Center board on a large table.[1]

4. Randomly (face down) choose four of the six L-shaped Outer Boards and place them around the town center.[1]

5. Flip these boards over to create the full game board.[1]

6. Place the Sun Track near the board where everyone can see it.[1]

7. Shuffle the Zombie Card and Hero Card decks and place them near their respective players.[1]

8. The Hero players randomly draw four of the Hero Character Sheets to form their Hero team.[1]

9. Place the selected character sheets on the table face up.[1]

10. Take the selected Heroes' playing pieces out of the box and place each on the board in their Start: location listed on their Hero Character Sheet (the Hero Player may choose any space within the listed Building).[1]

11. If a Hero's Start: building is not on the board, place their model in the center space of the Town Center Board and provide them a free Hero Card drawn from the top of the Hero Deck (if it is an Item, place it near the character sheet; if it is an Event, add it to the player's hand).[1]

12. The Zombie Player starts the game with 2 D 6 Zombies on the board (or 1 D 6 each if there are two Zombie Players).[2]

13. Place the rolled number of Zombies from the Zombie Pool onto the board at the Zombie Spawning Pits, dividing them as evenly as possible amongst all pits.[2]

14. Place all Wound Markers and other counters in a pile near the board.[2]

15. Distribute the dice between the players.[2]

**Advanced Game Setup**

1. Shuffle the two sets of extra Advanced Cards into both the Hero Deck and the Zombie Deck (each deck increases to 60 cards).[3]

2. Establish which players will be Heroes and which will be Zombies.[3]

3. One Hero player should randomly draw a Scenario card (or the players may choose one if everyone agrees).[3]

4. Hero Players may choose their Hero Characters to fit their play style.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.7 · The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters

[2] RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.8 · Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice

[3] RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook · p.18 · The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …

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 174 ms · ask 4578 ms · total 4755 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4755 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "For your first game, it is recommended that you play the Basic Game. The Basic Game focuses more on the core rules of the game and is a good introduction for new players or a fast paced alternative for more experienced players. Set aside the two sets of Advanced Cards ( 20 Hero Cards and 20 Zombie C", "headingPath": "The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Once all fights have been resolved, it is time to place newly spawned Zombies (if you did not roll high enough at the start of the turn to get more Zombies, skip this step). Roll a D 6 (or a D 3 if there are two Zombie players). You may now place up to that many Zombies from your Zombie Pool onto th", "headingPath": "6 ) Place Newly Spawned Zombies", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.045956, "snippet": "Many times players will need to roll for a Random Building. To do this, roll a dice and look at the arrows arrayed around the edges of the Town Center Board. This roll determines which L-shaped Outer Board the Random Building is on (Note that a roll of 1 is Hero's Choice which means that the Heroes ", "headingPath": "Rolling a Random Building · Winning the Game · Running Out of Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.045805, "snippet": "In the Advanced Game there are a few changes and additions to the Rules and the Game Setup. Before the game begins, shuffle the two sets of extra Advanced Cards into both the Hero Deck and the Zombie Deck (each deck gets an extra 20 cards bringing them up to 60 cards each). Advanced Cards are marked", "headingPath": "The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Each Game Round is split into two Turns, the Zombie Turn and the Hero Turn. During the Zombie Turn, the Zombie player(s) get to move and attack with their Zombies as well as possibly spawn new Zombies. During the Hero Turn, each Hero gets to take their actions, in any character order they wish. The ", "headingPath": "The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The Zombie Player starts the game with 2 D 6 Zombies on the board (or 1 D 6 each if there are two Zombie Players). Place the rolled number of Zombies on the board from your Zombie Pool. Zombies are placed on the board at the Zombie Spawning Pits (the big red X's on the L-shaped Outer Boards). When p", "headingPath": "Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The Hero Player whose character was just killed now gets to draw a new Hero to control from the remaining unused Hero Character Sheets. Immediately place the figure for the new Hero on the board (as detailed below in the Section Placing New Heroes During the Game ). When a player's last Hero charact", "headingPath": "The Sun Track - Black Zone · Death of Your Last Hero · Placing New Heroes During the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "The Manor House side of the Town Center Board is currently only used for the Defend the Manor House Scenario. If this Scenario is being played, place the Manor House side face up during the Game Setup. The Manor House counts as a normal Building in every way, with the following exceptions: Heroes ma", "headingPath": "The Manor House · Corner Walls · Die Zombies, Die! · Save the Townsfolk · Burn 'em Out", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 970}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 970 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 970 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 0.90973 of 1861 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 27, 2026 02:57 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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters	p.7	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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	6 ) Place Newly Spawned Zombies	p.10	0.047619 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Rolling a Random Building · Winning the Game · Running Out of Cards	p.17	0.045956 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …	p.18	0.045805 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies	p.9	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
#6	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice	p.8	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
#7	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Sun Track - Black Zone · Death of Your Last Hero · Placing New Heroes During the Game	p.19	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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Manor House · Corner Walls · Die Zombies, Die! · Save the Townsfolk · Burn 'em Out	p.20	0.030018 (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 33 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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …	p.18	#4	0.045805 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters	p.7	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Manor House · Corner Walls · Die Zombies, Die! · Save the Townsfolk · Burn 'em Out	p.20	#8	0.030018 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Game Round · Game Round · The Zombie Turn · 1 ) Move the Sun Track Marker · 2 ) Draw New Zombie Cards · 3 ) Roll To Spawn New Zombies	p.9	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Rolling a Random Building · Winning the Game · Running Out of Cards	p.17	#3	0.045956 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Create Zombie Pool	p.7	#10	0.029418 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	6 ) Place Newly Spawned Zombies	p.10	#2	0.047619 (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 Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice	p.8	#6	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Basic Game · Scenario · Create the Game Board · Shuffle and Place the Card Decks · Draw and Place the Hero Characters	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	Place Starting Zombies · Prepare Counters and Dice	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 970)	The Advanced Game · Advanced Cards · Random Scenario · Constructing the Hero Team · Explosives · Dynamite · …	p.18	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 174 ms · first delta 1839 ms · total 4755 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 174 ms · ask 4578 ms · gateway work 4755 ms · total 4755 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3342
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 563
tok/sec: 200.5 tok/sec — 563 output tokens in 2.808 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 30s 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 8s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 900), 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.