Ruling — Valley of the Kings

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Valley of the Kingsbg-150999-en-1e

The game is played by 2-4 players.[1] The starting player takes the first turn, and play continues clockwise around the table.[2] Players continue taking turns until all of the following conditions are met: no cards are left in the stock, no cards are left in the pyramid, and all players have taken the same number of turns.[3][4]

During your turn, you must follow these four steps in order:

1. Play Cards: Each card in your hand can be played for only one of these purposes: buy a card from the base of the pyramid, execute the action listed on the card, or entomb the card (once per turn).[2][3] You may buy cards, execute actions, and entomb a card in any order you wish during your turn.[2]

2. Discard: When you have played all the cards you chose to play, discard all of your cards in play and all cards remaining in your hand to your personal discard pile.[2][3] Cards may be discarded in any order you wish.[2]

3. Rebuild Pyramid: If you have made no changes whatsoever to the pyramid during your turn, sacrifice any card in the pyramid by putting the selected card on top of the boneyard, which causes the pyramid to crumble as normal.[2][3] Regardless of whether or not you changed the pyramid, replace cards removed from the pyramid with cards from the stock, drawing cards one at a time and filling the empty spaces starting from the base up.[2][3]

4. Draw New Hand: Draw a new hand of 5 cards.[2][3] If your draw deck is empty when you are required to draw, shuffle your discard pile to form a new deck.[2]

After you have completed each step, the next player clockwise around the table takes his turn.[2][3]

**Buying Cards**

Cards are bought one at a time from the base of the pyramid.[5] You may only buy from the three cards in the base; cards in the middle and top rows cannot be bought until they crumble down to the base.[5] You may buy any number of cards you can afford.[5] To buy a card, you must:

1. Lay out cards with sufficient gold value to pay the card's cost.[5]

2. Remove the purchased card from the pyramid and place it on top of your discard pile.[5]

If you overpay, no change is given and the extra gold is lost.[5] When a card is played for its gold value, you cannot use its action.[5][6]

**End of Game and Scoring**

At the end of the game, players count the victory points (VP) in their tomb.[3] Only cards in your tomb count; cards in your hand, deck, and discard pile are worthless.[4]

* **Starter cards and unique artifacts:** Add up the victory points listed on the cards.[4]

* **Sets:** Determine how many different cards in each set you have (do not count duplicates) and square the result.[4]

The player with the most points wins.[3][4] In the event of a tie, the player with the fewest cards in his tomb wins; further ties result in a shared victory.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.2 · Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components

[2] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.7 · How to Play · Taking a Turn

[3] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.16 · Setup · End of Game

[4] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.10 · Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring

[5] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.8 · Buying Cards · Buying Example

[6] RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook · p.9 · Executing Actions · Action Terms

So says the rulebook. So plays the table.

🔧 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 181 ms · ask 5055 ms · total 5239 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5239 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "The starting player takes the first turn of the game, then play contintues clockwise around the table. Players continue taking turns until the end of the game (see 'End of Game' on page 10). During your turn you must follow these four steps in order: Play Cards: Each card in your hand can be played ", "headingPath": "How to Play · Taking a Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Set Up Players Set Up Starter Cards Set Up Draw Decks Set Up Stock Set Up Pyramid Set Up Boneyard Determine Starting Player The game continues until all conditions have been met: No cards are left in the stock. No cards are left in the pyramid. All players have taken the same number of turns. Player", "headingPath": "Setup · End of Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Place your card on the table and carry out its action. If a card has more than one part to its action, you must complete all parts. Furthermore, you must execute the parts in order, completing one part before you move on to the next. If one of the parts cannot be executed (for example, because a req", "headingPath": "Executing Actions · Action Terms", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Set Up Players: Each player takes a tomb card and a reference card and places them in front of his play area . Set Up Starter Cards: Take all of the level I cards and give each player 4 Shabtis, 3 Urns, 2 Boxes of Food, and 1 Offering Table. These are starter cards. When playing with fewer than four", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Cards are bought one at a time from the base of the pyramid. You may only buy cards from among the 3 cards in the base of the pyramid: cards in the middle and top row cannot be bought until they crumble down to the base of the pyramid. You may buy any number of cards during your turn that you can af", "headingPath": "Buying Cards · Buying Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.044118, "snippet": "A Game by Tom Cleaver For 2-4 players, ages 14 and up Players are Egyptian nobles at the time of the pharaohs, preparing for their death and burial in the Valley of the Kings. In the Egyptian religion, when you die you can take it with you! Egyptians therefore stocked their tombs with food, shabti (", "headingPath": "Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Tom Cleaver's A deck-building game of ancient Egypt For 2 - 4 players", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Once per turn you may put a card from your hand into your tomb. Some actions allow you to place additional cards into your tomb. When a card entombed, you cannot use its gold value or action. The cards put in your tomb are public knowledge. Lay out your tomb as shown in the example image to the righ", "headingPath": "Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "How to Play · Taking a Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · End of Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Buying Cards · Buying Example", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Executing Actions · Action Terms", "sharpsignalDocId": 1146}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1146 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1146 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 0.91128 of 2288 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 28, 2026 15:04 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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	How to Play · Taking a Turn	p.7	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Setup · End of Game	p.16	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
#3	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Executing Actions · Action Terms	p.9	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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Setup	p.4	0.047131 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Buying Cards · Buying Example	p.8	0.045476 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components	p.2	0.044118 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)		p.1	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))	69
#8	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring	p.10	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

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 16 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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	How to Play · Taking a Turn	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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Setup · End of Game	p.16	#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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Buying Cards · Buying Example	p.8	#5	0.045476 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components	p.2	#6	0.044118 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Card Clarifications	p.13	#11	0.014493 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring	p.10	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Executing Actions · Action Terms	p.9	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Setup	p.4	#4	0.047131 (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 Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Valley of the Kings · Game Overview · Goal · Components	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	How to Play · Taking a Turn	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Setup · End of Game	p.16	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Entombing Cards · End of Game · Scoring	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Buying Cards · Buying Example	p.8	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Valley of the Kings — Rulebook (corpus doc 1146)	Executing Actions · Action Terms	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 181 ms · first delta 1718 ms · total 5239 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 181 ms · ask 5055 ms · gateway work 5239 ms · total 5239 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2849
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 695
tok/sec: 202.9 tok/sec — 695 output tokens in 3.425 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 1076), 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.