RuleSage cited table rulings
← Wingspan

You asked

What is the best opening move in chess?

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

I looked through Wingspan'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 Wingspan — Appendix · p.2 · End of the Round
Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Place 1 action cube to mark your score on the end-of-round goal: If playing with majority goals and players tie, add the values of the tied and next places and divide by number of players, rounded down. 4th place scores 0. If playing with points-per-item
RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.5 · Round Structure
When all players have placed all of their action cubes, the round is over. Follow these steps in order: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and restock the bird tray with cards fro
RULEBOOK Wingspan: Oceania Expansion — Rulebook · p.1 · End of Round Reference OE
1. Use round end bird powers (if playing with European Expansion). 2. Discard any unused nectar. 3. Score end-of-round goal. 4. Remove all action cubes. Discard and replace all cards in the bird tray. If Round 4 is over, use game-end powers. Otherwise, pass the first-player token. WS_OE_Punchboard_r
RULEBOOK Wingspan — Rulebook · p.11 · END OF THE ROUND
When players have placed all their available action cubes (1 cube per turn), the round is over. At round end: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and replenish them. Rotate the fir
RULEBOOK Wingspan Asia — Rulebook · p.4 · Duet Mode
Pass the first player token to the player who came in second on the end-of-round goal. If the players tied, then pass it to the other player. Round one: 8 turns per player Round two: 7 turns per player Round three: 6 turns per player Round four: 5 turns per player DESIGNER'S NOTE: Players have fewer

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 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
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
unset-dev (corpus lane freezes the deploy value)
timings
search 107 ms · ask 2597 ms · total 2714 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2714 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Place 1 action cube to mark your score on the end-of-round goal: If playing with majority goals and players tie, add the values of the tied and next places and divide by number of players, rounded down. 4th place scores 0. If playing with points-per-item", "headingPath": "End of the Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 46}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "When all players have placed all of their action cubes, the round is over. Follow these steps in order: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and restock the bird tray with cards fro", "headingPath": "Round Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 45}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "1. Use round end bird powers (if playing with European Expansion). 2. Discard any unused nectar. 3. Score end-of-round goal. 4. Remove all action cubes. Discard and replace all cards in the bird tray. If Round 4 is over, use game-end powers. Otherwise, pass the first-player token. WS_OE_Punchboard_r", "headingPath": "End of Round Reference OE", "sharpsignalDocId": 48}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "When players have placed all their available action cubes (1 cube per turn), the round is over. At round end: Remove all action cubes from your player mat. Score the end-of-round goal for the round you just completed. Discard all face-up bird cards on the bird tray and replenish them. Rotate the fir", "headingPath": "END OF THE ROUND", "sharpsignalDocId": 45}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Pass the first player token to the player who came in second on the end-of-round goal. If the players tied, then pass it to the other player. Round one: 8 turns per player Round two: 7 turns per player Round three: 6 turns per player Round four: 5 turns per player DESIGNER'S NOTE: Players have fewer", "headingPath": "Duet Mode", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "When all players have placed all of their action cubes, the round is over. Follow these steps in order: Use 1 of your action cubes to mark your score on the end-of-round goal. As a result, you will have 1 fewer action cube to use each round: Use round-end bird powers for birds on your player mat. Sc", "headingPath": "Round Structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Place an action cube in the leftmost exposed slot in the 'DRAW CARDS' row on your player mat, and draw the number of cards shown there from either the face-up cards on the bird tray or the bird deck. There is no limit on how many cards you can have in your hand. If the slot where you placed your act", "headingPath": "When you choose to draw cards, do the following:", "sharpsignalDocId": 49}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "+ ONCE BETWEEN TURNS: When another player takes the 'gain food' action, if they gain any number of , also gain 1 from the supply and cache it on this card. Shrikes impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire, and may save them for later. Loggerhead Shrike Lanius ludovicianus", "headingPath": "Swainson's Hawk", "sharpsignalDocId": 65}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
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
Oct 8, 2026 05:22

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 Wingspan — Appendix (corpus doc 46) End of the Round 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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 45) Round Structure 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 Wingspan: Oceania Expansion — Rulebook (corpus doc 48) End of Round Reference OE p.1 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 Wingspan — Rulebook (corpus doc 45) END OF THE ROUND p.11 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 Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49) Duet Mode 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 Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49) Round Structure 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 Wingspan Asia — Rulebook (corpus doc 49) When you choose to draw cards, do the following: p.9 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 OFFICIAL Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bird Cards) (corpus doc 65) Swainson's Hawk p.10 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) 274

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
timing split
retrieval 107 ms · first delta n/a · total 2714 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 107 ms · ask 2597 ms · gateway work 2714 ms · total 2714 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

6 errata cards registered for edition 3 — these are what the gate above had to match against

  • anatomist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.2
  • belted kingfisher · HAND_PINNED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bird Cards) · corpus doc 65 · p.17
  • ecologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.5
  • oologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.1
  • photographer · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.3
  • rodentologist · HEADING_EXTRACTED · Wingspan — Update Pack (Corrected Bonus Cards) · corpus doc 66 · p.4

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.