RuleSage cited table rulings
← Everdell

You asked

how do i start?

Answered counted as answered
To start the game, follow these steps:
* **Setup:** Place the board on the table, place the Ever Tree on the stump, and arrange the twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries in piles along the bank of the river.[1] Place point tokens and occupied tokens beside the board.[1]
* **Cards and Tiles:** Shuffle the Forest cards and place them on the forest clearings.[1] Place 4 basic Event tiles along the river, then shuffle the special Event cards and place 4 special Events on the lower branches of the Ever Tree.[1] Shuffle the main deck and randomly place 8 cards faceup in the Meadow; place the remaining deck inside the Ever Tree.[1]
* **Player Setup:** Each player chooses a color and starts with 2 workers of that color.[1] The first player draws 5 cards, the second player draws 6 cards, the third player draws 7 cards, and the fourth player draws 8 cards.[1] Each player places their other 4 workers on the upper branches of the Ever Tree (1 on spring, 1 on summer, and 2 on autumn).[1]
* **Special Rules (Rugwort):** If playing as Rugwort, select black as your color and set up for two players.[2] You start with a hand of 5 cards while Rugwort has no hand.[2] Place one of Rugwort's workers on the top-left Forest card and his other worker on the 3 twig Basic location.[2]
* **Turn Order:** The most humble player goes first.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.6 · SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook · p.16 · YEAR E "RUGWORT THE RASCAl"

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
unset-dev (corpus lane freezes the deploy value)
timings
search 120 ms · ask 8905 ms · total 9036 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9036 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.031545, "snippet": "Place the board on the table. Place the Éver Tree on the stump at the top of the board. Place the twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries in piles along the bank of the river. Place the point tokens and occupied tokens beside the board. Shuffle the Forest cards and place them on the forest clearings. Use", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029643, "snippet": "Select a player color for Rugwort (he prefers black) and set up the game according to the two-player setup. You have a starting hand of 5 cards, and Rugwort does not have a hand of cards. Take one of Rugwort's workers and place it on the top-left Forest card, blocking it. Place his other worker on t", "headingPath": "YEAR E \"RUGWORT THE RASCAl\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "When preparing for the next season, new workers from the Ever Tree join your growing city. Gain the corresponding worker(s) and activate the next season's listed bonus. In spring, you gain 1 new worker and activate all green Production cards in your city in any order you choose.", "headingPath": "PREPARE FOR SEASON", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Wandering the woods Gathering the stones Wearing in the path That leads to our home Laying down the floors Raising up the walls Working through the days mu Where the grass is thick From the river drink See stars come out to meet us I Is be near to you In the evening breeze By the Ever Tree Farmer in", "headingPath": "\"Everdell\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "If you have placed all of your workers and you cannot play a card or do not wish to, then you must prepare for the next season. On your turn, bring back all of your deployed workers, then gain the listed bonuses for the next season, as shown atop the Ever Tree. After doing so, your turn is finished,", "headingPath": "PREPARE FOR SEASON", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "In Everdell, you will be deploying workers to various locations on the board in order to gather resources, which you will use to play cards faceup in front of you, forming your own woodland city. Each turn you will perform only one of three possible actions: Place a Worker Play a Card Prepare for Se", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "When you have reached the end of autumn and cannot perform any more actions (or do not wish to), you have finished the game and must pass. If a player has passed, they cannot be given any cards or resources. If cards or resources have to be given to a player and all other players have passed, discar", "headingPath": "ENO GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "When a card is played, follow this sequence of actions, when applicable: Use \"card playing ability\" (Dungeon, Judge, Innkeeper, etc). If the card comes from the Meadow, replenish the Meadow. Pay resources or use occupied token. Place the newly played card in your city. (If the played card effect rem", "headingPath": "TIMING", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "YEAR E \"RUGWORT THE RASCAl\"", "sharpsignalDocId": 63}]
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
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 8, 2026 22:03

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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) SETUP p.6 0.031545 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) YEAR E "RUGWORT THE RASCAl" p.16 0.029643 (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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) PREPARE FOR SEASON p.13 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 279
#4 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) "Everdell" p.2 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
#5 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) PREPARE FOR SEASON p.12 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
#6 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) OVERVIEW p.3 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
#7 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) ENO GAME p.14 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
#8 RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) TIMING p.11 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

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 Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) SETUP p.6 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Everdell — Rulebook (corpus doc 63) YEAR E "RUGWORT THE RASCAl" p.16 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 120 ms · first delta n/a · total 9036 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 120 ms · ask 8905 ms · gateway work 9036 ms · total 9036 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s 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
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
HOW_DO_I_START — "how do I start"
matched words (in the normalized question)
how do i start

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 10), 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.