RuleSage cited table rulings
← Secret Hitler

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered
1. Select the Fascist track that corresponds to the number of players and place it next to any Liberal track.[1]
2. Shuffle the 11 Fascist Policy tiles and the 6 Liberal Policy tiles into a single Policy deck and place that deck face down on the Draw pile card.[1]
3. Prepare an envelope for each player containing a Secret Role card, a corresponding Party Membership card, one Ja! Ballot card, and one Nein Ballot card.[1]
4. Ensure Liberal Secret Role cards are packed with a Liberal Party Membership card, and Fascist and Hitler Secret Role cards are packed with a Fascist Party Membership card.[1]
5. Include the correct number of ordinary Fascists in addition to Hitler.[1]
6. Shuffle the envelopes so each player's role is a secret.[1]
7. Each player receives one envelope selected at random.[1]
8. Once envelopes are dealt, all players examine their Secret Role cards in secret.[2]
9. Randomly select the first Presidential Candidate and pass them both the President and Chancellor placards.[2]
10. For 5-6 players: Have everyone close their eyes; Fascists and Hitler open their eyes to acknowledge each other; pause; then everyone opens their eyes.[2]
11. For 7-10 players: Have everyone close their eyes and extend a fist; all Fascists (excluding Hitler) open their eyes to acknowledge each other, while Hitler keeps eyes closed and shows a thumbs-up; Fascists note the thumb; pause; then everyone closes eyes, puts hands down, and opens eyes.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook · p.2 · SET UP
[2] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook · p.3 · WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 224 ms · ask 5377 ms · total 5614 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 5614 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Select the Fascist track that corresponds to the number of players and place it next to any Liberal track. Shuffle the 11 Fascist Policy tiles and the 6 Liberal Policy tiles into a single Policy deck and place that deck face down on the Draw pile card. You'll need an envelope for each player, and ea", "headingPath": "SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "ABOUT LYING: Often, some players learn things that the rest of the players don't know, like when the President and Chancellor get to see Policy tiles, or when a President uses the Investigate power to see someone's Party Membership card. You can always lie about hidden knowledge in Secret Hitler. Th", "headingPath": "LEGISLATIVE SESSION · EXECUTIVE ACTION · Investigate Loyalty · Call Special Election", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Secret Hitler features an investigation mechanic that allows some players to find out what team other players are on, and this mechanic only works if Hitler's special role is not revealed. To prevent that from happening, every player has both a Secret Role card and a Party Membership card. Hitler's ", "headingPath": "WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "The President secretly looks at the top three tiles in the Policy deck and then returns them to the top of the deck without changing the order. The President executes one player at the table by saying 'I formally execute [player name].' If that player is Hitler, the game ends in a Liberal victory. I", "headingPath": "Policy Peek · Execution", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "During the Legislative Session, the President and Chancellor work together to enact a new Policy in secret. The President draws the top three tiles from the Policy deck, looks at them in secret, and discards one tile face down into the Discard pile. The remaining two tiles go to the Chancellor, who ", "headingPath": "LEGISLATIVE SESSION", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Term limits only affect nominations to the Chancellorship; anyone can be President, even someone who was just Chancellor. If there are only five players left in the game, only the last elected Chancellor is ineligible to be Chancellor Candidate; the last President may be nominated. There are some ot", "headingPath": "ON ELIGIBILITY: · 3. Vote on the government · If the vote is a tie, or if a majority of players votes no: · If a majority of players votes yes:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Secret Hitler was funded with Kickstarter. Secret Hitler was created by Mike Boxleiter, Tommy Maranges, and Mac Schubert. Secret Hitler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Share - copy and redistribute the game in any medium or format ", "headingPath": "THANK YOU · CREDITS & LICENSE · YOU ARE FREE TO: · UNDER THE FOLLOWING TERMS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "The year is 1932. The place is pre -WWII Germany. In Secret Hitler , players are German politicians attempting to hold a fragile Liberal government together and stem the rising tide of Fascism. Watch out though-there are secret Fascists among you, and one player is Secret Hitler. At the beginning of", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW · OBJECT · GAME CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET UP", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY:", "sharpsignalDocId": 126}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)
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)
debug row retained until
Oct 31, 2026 14:01

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) SET UP p.2 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) LEGISLATIVE SESSION · EXECUTIVE ACTION · Investigate Loyalty · Call Special Election p.5 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY: p.3 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) Policy Peek · Execution p.5 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) LEGISLATIVE SESSION p.4 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) ON ELIGIBILITY: · 3. Vote on the government · If the vote is a tie, or if a majority of players votes no: · If a majority of players votes yes: p.4 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) THANK YOU · CREDITS & LICENSE · YOU ARE FREE TO: · UNDER THE FOLLOWING TERMS: p.7 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) OVERVIEW · OBJECT · GAME CONTENTS p.2 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) SET UP p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Secret Hitler — Rulebook (corpus doc 126) WHY ARE THERE SECRET ROLE AND PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARDS? · GAMEPLAY · 1. Pass the Presidential Candidacy · 2. Nominate a Chancellor · Eligibility: · ON ELIGIBILITY: p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 224 ms · first delta 3099 ms · total 5614 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 224 ms · ask 5377 ms · gateway work 5614 ms · total 5614 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3212
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
339
tok/sec
138.1 tok/sec — 339 output tokens in 2.455 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 45s ago)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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)
set up

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 48), 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.