You asked
How do I setup the game?
Passages only — retrieval up, answerer down counted as app errorAnswered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Pandemic has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
The answerer is down, but retrieval still works — here are the raw passages that match your question. No composed answer, on purpose.
2 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata
3 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata
The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe
You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard
delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the
3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s
Each player has a role with special abilities to improve your team's chances. The Contingency Planner may, as an action, take an Event card from anywhere in the Player Discard Pile and place it on his Role card. Only 1 Event card can be on his role card at a time. It does not count against his hand
At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- SEARCH_ONLY_LLM_DOWN — Passages only — retrieval up, answerer down
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 368 ms · ask null ms · total 30407 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 30407 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "2 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031319, "snippet": "3 San FranciS co chicago MontrÉal new York waShington atlanta loS angeleS Mexico citY liMa Santiago BuenoS aireS São Paulo lagoS kinS haS a JohanneSBurg khartouM riYadh cairo algierS Madrid london eSSen PariS Milan St. PeterSBurg MoS cow iStanB ul Baghdad tehran karachi MuMBai chennai delhi kolkata ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029206, "snippet": "The Quarantine Specialist prevents both outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and all cities connected to that city. She does not affect cubes placed during setup. When doing the Share Knowledge action, the Researcher may give any City card from her hand to another playe", "headingPath": "QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "You may do up to 4 actions each turn. Select any combination of the actions listed below. You may do the same action several times, each time counting as 1 action. Your role's special abilities may change how an action is done. Some actions involve discarding a card from your hand; all these discard", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "delhi When playing the Introductory game (4 Epidemic cards), place your cards face up in front of you, for all players to see. algierS Madrid Baghdad karachi karachi Only Player cards count towards your hand limit. Your Role and your Reference cards are not part of your hand. cairo When playing the ", "headingPath": "PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "3-INTENSIFY SHUFFLE THE CARDS IN THE INFECTION DISCARD PILE AND PUT THEM ON TOP OF THE INFECTION DECK. 575,000 2,800/KM2 GERMANY GERMANY ESSEN ESSEN Play any time. Not an action. EVENT reMove Any 1 cArd in the infection discArd pile froM the GAMe. you MAy plAy this between the infect And intensify s", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Each player has a role with special abilities to improve your team's chances. The Contingency Planner may, as an action, take an Event card from anywhere in the Player Discard Pile and place it on his Role card. Only 1 Event card can be on his role card at a time. It does not count against his hand ", "headingPath": "ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same color from your hand to cure the disease of that color . Move the disease's cure marker to its Cure Indicator. If no cubes of this color are on the board, this disease is now eradicated . Flip its cure marker from its 'vial' side to its ' ' s", "headingPath": "Discover a Cure", "sharpsignalDocId": 174}]
- 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 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
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 2002 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
- ruling 887 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.8148
- error detail
- corpus gateway call 'ask' failed
- debug row retained until
- Nov 1, 2026 06:48
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. 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 rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.2 | 0.032002 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.3 | 0.031319 (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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | QUARANTINE SPECIALIST · RESEARCHER · SCIENTIST · CREDITS | p.8 | 0.029206 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | ACTIONS · Drive / Ferry · Direct Flight · Charter Flight · Shuttle Flight CITY · Build a Research Station · … | p.4 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | PLAYER CARDS i StanBul Baghdad · GAME END São Paulo | p.7 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | p.1 | 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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | ROLES · CONTINGENCY PLANNER · DISPATCHER · MEDIC · COMMONLY OVERLOOKED RULES · OPERATIONS EXPERT | p.8 | 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 Pandemic — Rulebook (corpus doc 174) | Discover a Cure | 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 |
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.
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.
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
no payload was recorded for this ruling (the call never returned one)
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 368 ms · first delta n/a · total 30407 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 368 ms · ask n/a ms · gateway work 30407 ms · total 30407 ms
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 38s ago)
- stream path
- requested, and the gateway WAS called — but the ask itself failed mid-flight, so this row makes no claim about what the child did or did not emit
- 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
- SEARCH_ONLY_LLM_DOWN — Passages only — retrieval up, answerer down
- abstain rationale
- the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- 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)
-
setup
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 43), 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.