Ruling — Eight-Minute Empire: Legends

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Eight-Minute Empire: Legendsbg-142326-en-1e

I looked through Eight-Minute Empire: Legends's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook · p.2

Set aside the card labeled 'Card Cost', the four cards labeled 'Victory Point Counter', and the four cards labeled 'Leader'. If playing with 3 players, go through the cards and remove the cards with the little number ' 4 ' in the bottom left corner of the top scroll. If playing with 2 players, also

RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook · p.4

-Destroy army. You may remove an army from the board belonging to any player as long as you have one or more armies in the same region. If you only have a city and no armies in the same region, you may not remove a player's army. Return the army to the player's supply. -' And/Or' actions. If there a

RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook · p.7

Full Game: For a longer experience, play three games. The player with the highest sum of victory points from all three games is the winner. Explore Tokens: During game setup (Step 1), the player chosen to set up the board places each explore token one at a time face up on any region of the board tha

RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook · p.3

if they lost the bid. If the bids are tied for most, the youngest player wins the bid and pays his coins. If all bids are zero, the youngest player wins the bid. There is only one bid per game. The winner of the bid chooses who will be first player. Starting with the first player and going in clockw

RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook · p.8

Leader Cards: During game setup, randomly give one leader card to each player. Each player then places his leader card in front of him, face up. The leader gives the player some special abilities that apply throughout the game. Fairy Queen: The Fairy Queen grants 1 extra victory point at the end of

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 164 ms · ask 896 ms · total 1062 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 1062 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 2, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Set aside the card labeled 'Card Cost', the four cards labeled 'Victory Point Counter', and the four cards labeled 'Leader'. If playing with 3 players, go through the cards and remove the cards with the little number ' 4 ' in the bottom left corner of the top scroll. If playing with 2 players, also ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "-Destroy army. You may remove an army from the board belonging to any player as long as you have one or more armies in the same region. If you only have a city and no armies in the same region, you may not remove a player's army. Return the army to the player's supply. -' And/Or' actions. If there a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "Full Game: For a longer experience, play three games. The player with the highest sum of victory points from all three games is the winner. Explore Tokens: During game setup (Step 1), the player chosen to set up the board places each explore token one at a time face up on any region of the board tha", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "if they lost the bid. If the bids are tied for most, the youngest player wins the bid and pays his coins. If all bids are zero, the youngest player wins the bid. There is only one bid per game. The winner of the bid chooses who will be first player. Starting with the first player and going in clockw", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Leader Cards: During game setup, randomly give one leader card to each player. Each player then places his leader card in front of him, face up. The leader gives the player some special abilities that apply throughout the game. Fairy Queen: The Fairy Queen grants 1 extra victory point at the end of ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Flying. Each 'flying' ability you own reduces the movement cost to move over water by 1, to a minimum of 1. For example, if you have one 'flying' ability, the cost to move over water is 2 per army. Elixir. At the end of the game, the player with the most elixirs gains 2 extra victory points. Gain Co", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "He then places each token, face down, on a region on the board that does not already have a token (making sure to not reveal the face of the token to himself or any player). The first player to build a city in the same region as one of these tokens (including the poison swamp token) gains the token ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The game ends when each player owns a certain number of cards depending on the number of players. 2 Players 11 Cards 3 Players 10 Cards 4 Players 8 Cards Players now count up victory points, keeping track by placing spare coin tokens on their 'Victory Point Counter' cards. Regions: A player gains on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1219}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)

no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1219 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 1219 boosted

answered-before recall

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

debug row retained until

Dec 2, 2026 13:36 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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.2	0.048139 (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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.4	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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.7	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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	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
#5	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.8	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
#6	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.8	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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.6	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 9 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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.2	#1	0.048139 (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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.4	#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 Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.8	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.6	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.5	#6	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
#6	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.1	#9	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
#7	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.8	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Eight-Minute Empire: Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 1219)	p.7	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 164 ms · first delta 964 ms · total 1062 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 164 ms · ask 896 ms · gateway work 1062 ms · total 1062 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3062
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 176.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.051 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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 5s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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 1149), 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.