Ruling — Dead of Winter: The Long Night

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dead of Winter: The Long Nightbg-193037-en-1e

To play Dead of Winter, follow these procedures:

Setup

1. Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around it.[1]

2. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player; each player chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck, then re-shuffle the survivor deck.[1]

3. Each player collects a player reference sheet.[1]

4. Choose a standard main objective or pick 1 randomly, then place the main objective card in its space on the colony board and set up the game board according to that objective's instructions.[1]

5. Shuffle non-betrayal secret objective cards and set aside 2 (facedown) per player.[1]

6. Shuffle betrayal secret objective cards, add 1 to the non-betrayal cards that were set aside, and return the rest to the box.[1]

7. Shuffle the combined secret objective cards and deal 1 to each player.[1]

8. Shuffle the crisis cards and place the deck on its space on the colony board.[1]

9. Shuffle and make decks of the survivor, exiled objective, and crossroad cards and place them off to the side.[1]

10. Shuffle all starter item cards and deal 5 to each player.[1]

11. Separate remaining item cards into decks according to their location, shuffle each, and place them on their corresponding location card.[1]

12. Each player chooses 1 of their 2 survivors to be the group leader, placing that card in the space on their reference card and the other survivor below their reference sheet.[1]

13. Add the corresponding survivor standees for each player's survivors to the colony.[1]

14. Separate remaining standees and tokens and place them within reach of all players.[1]

15. The player whose group leader has the highest influence value receives the first player token and takes the first turn.[1]

Round Order and Player Turns

1. Each round is divided into two phases played in order: Player Turns Phase and Colony Phase.[2]

2. During the Player Turns Phase, resolve these three effects in order:

a. Reveal Crisis: Reveal the top card of the $crisis$ deck; its effect will take place during the colony phase if not prevented.[2]

b. Roll Action Dice: Each player removes any remaining action dice from their used and unused pools, receives 1 action die plus 1 additional die for each survivor they control, and must roll all dice, keeping the results in their unused action dice pool.[2]

c. Player Turns: Starting with the first player, each player takes a turn.[2]

3. At the beginning of a player's turn, the player to her right draws a crossroads card.[2]

4. During a turn, a player may perform multiple actions, some of which require spending an action die by moving it from the unused pool to the used pool.[2]

5. Once a player has performed all desired actions (or runs out of actions), play passes to the player on her left, continuing clockwise.[2]

6. Once every player has taken a turn, the player turns phase ends and the colony phase begins.[2]

Actions That Do Not Require an Action Die

1. A player may play a card from their hand as many times as they like during their turn by placing it on top of the waste pile.[3]

2. When an event item card is played, remove it from the game instead of placing it in the waste pile.[3]

3. A player may equip an item card with an equip ability to any survivor they control by placing the card next to that survivor.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.8 · ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS

[3] RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook · p.10 · Actions that do not require an Action Die

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 196 ms · ask 5011 ms · total 5211 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5211 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Play a Card: As many times as he likes during his turn, a player may play a card from his hand. To play a card, place it on top of the waste pile. When an event item card is played do not place it in the waste pile but instead remove it from the game. Reminder: For every 10 cards in the waste pile d", "headingPath": "Actions that do not require an Action Die", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Dead of Winter is played over a series of rounds. Each round is divided into 2 phases that must be played in order. Player Turns Phase Colony Phase During the player turns phase resolve the following 3 effects in order. Reveal Crisis: Reveal the top card of the crisis deck. This card's effect will t", "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "During the game players may be given the option to vote with a thumbs up or down, either because a player initiated a vote to exile or because a crossroads card called for a vote to be cast. Players may take time to deliberate before casting their vote. Once players are ready to vote, count down fro", "headingPath": "VOTING · CARD TEXT · RANDOM LOCATIONS · SEARCHING A DECK · ROLL A DIE · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "Place the colony board in the center of the play area and place the 6 location cards and the Graveyard around it as shown or as best accommodates your table. Deal 4 survivor cards to each player. Each player then chooses 2 to keep and returns the others to the deck. Re-shuffle the survivor deck. Eac", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.044415, "snippet": "Stop! If you want us to teach you how to play, you can visit plaidhatgames.com and watch a video explanation.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.043935, "snippet": "7 Library HOSPITAL GAS STATION POLICE STATION GROCERY STORE SCHOOL ROUND SUMMARY GROUP LEADER SECRET OBJECTIVE FOLLOWERS PLAYER TURN ACTIONS PLAYER TURNS PHASE 1. Reveal Crisis 2. Roll Action Dice 3. Player T urns COLONY PHASE 1. Pay Food 2. Check W aste 3. Resolve Crisis 4. Add Zombies 5. Check Mai", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.042803, "snippet": "If you revealed any outsider cards you may place 1 into your hand. Shuffle the remaining cards back into the search deck. 2 3 ALEXIS GREY Librarian 46 LIBRARY: Once per round, when performing a search at the library you may look at and keep 1 additional card. 5 4 ROUND SUMMARY GROUP LEADER SECRET OB", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029907, "snippet": "Players may choose to play the game cooperatively. Use the hardcore side of the main objective card and do not assign secret objectives. Each player's only objective is to complete the main objective. Players cannot vote to exile a player. During setup, remove from the game every card showing the no", "headingPath": "CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Actions that do not require an Action Die", "sharpsignalDocId": 497}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 497 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 497 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 0.91784 of 2763 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 7, 2026 23:32 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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	Actions that do not require an Action Die	p.10	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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS	p.8	0.046898 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	VOTING · CARD TEXT · RANDOM LOCATIONS · SEARCHING A DECK · ROLL A DIE · ROLEPLAYING, SECRET OBJECTIVES AND GAME BALANCE	p.15	0.046898 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	p.6	0.046635 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)		p.1	0.044415 (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))	109
#6	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)		p.7	0.043935 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)		p.7	0.042803 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT	p.15	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 59 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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)		p.1	#5	0.044415 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	Actions that do not require an Action Die	p.10	#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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS	p.8	#2	0.046898 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	BANDIT BLITZ	p.22	#16	0.02481 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	THE CHIMP AND THE CODE	p.20	#21	0.02396 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	THE LONG NIGHT RULES · PREPARING FOR THE LONG NIGHT · NEW RULES FOR EVERY GAME · FIRST PLAYER VOTE · RANDOM LOCATIONS · THE GRAVEYARD	p.16	#14	0.025522 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	CO-OP VARIANT · 2 PLAYER VARIANT · BETRAYER VARIANT · HARDCORE VARIANT · PLAYER ELIMINATION VARIANT	p.15	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	p.6	#4	0.046635 (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 Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	GAME SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	ROUND ORDER · PLAYER TURNS PHASE · PLAYER TURN ACTIONS	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dead of Winter: The Long Night — Rulebook (corpus doc 497)	Actions that do not require an Action Die	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 196 ms · first delta 1181 ms · total 5211 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 196 ms · ask 5011 ms · gateway work 5211 ms · total 5211 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2953
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 801
tok/sec: 202.3 tok/sec — 801 output tokens in 3.960 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 2h, checked 7s 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 428), 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.