Ruling — Cosmic Encounter

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Cosmic Encounterbg-39463-en-1e

For a standard game of Cosmic Encounter, the setup steps are:

1. Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color.[1][2]

2. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of them, stacking four of their ships on each of their planets.[1][2]

3. Place the warp in the center of the play area.[1][2]

4. Place colony markers at '0' on the colony track.[1][2]

5. Prepare Destiny Deck: Take the three destiny cards that correspond to the color each player has chosen and shuffle them with the wild and special destiny cards to create the destiny deck.[1][2]

6. Return any cards that correspond to a color not chosen to the game box; these are not used during the game.[1][2]

Additional setup steps for specific variants or components:

* **Choosing Aliens:** Shuffle the cosmic combo cards and reveal the top card of the deck, then gather the alien sheets indicated for the appropriate number of players and deal one randomly to each player.[3] (Note: In the "Advanced Game" variant, players shuffle flare cards and deal two facedown to each player; each player takes the two matching alien sheets, chooses one to keep, and returns the other to the box, then all players reveal their chosen sheet simultaneously [4]).

* **Preparing Cosmic Deck:** Shuffle the encounter, reinforcement, and artifact cards to create the cosmic deck.[3] (Note: In the "Advanced Game" variant, players shuffle 10 flares with the encounter, reinforcement, and artifact cards to create the deck [4]).

* **Dealing Hands:** Deal a starting hand of eight cosmic cards to each player.[3]

* **Choosing First Player:** If it is the players' first game, the youngest player is the first player.[3] Otherwise, reveal cards from the destiny deck until a card matching a player's color is revealed; that player is the first player, then shuffle the destiny deck.[3]

* **Technology Variant:** After standard setup is completed, shuffle the tech deck and deal two cards to each player; each player selects one to keep (placed facedown) and discards the other faceup in the tech discard pile.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook · p.4 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[4] RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook · p.16 · Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns

[5] RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook · p.17 · Technology · Setup · Combining the Technology and Four-Planet Variants · Tech Cards · Researching Tech · Completing Tech · …

🔧 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 624 ms · ask 14485 ms · total 15123 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 15123 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To set up a game of Cosmic Encounter , players perform the following steps: Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of them, stacking", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "4 Setup T o set up a game of Cosmic Encounter, players perform the following steps: 1. Choose Player Color: Each player chooses a player color and takes the colony marker, five planets, and 20 ships of that color. 2. Set Up Warp, Planets, Ships, and Colonies: Players place their planets in front of ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "Once players are comfortable with the core rules of the game, they should add flare cards to their future games. Flare cards provide players with powerful abilities that can be used repeatedly. Each flare has a blue bar indicating the prerequisities for it to be played. When a player plays a flare c", "headingPath": "Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "Choose Aliens: Shuffle the cosmic combo cards and reveal the top card of the deck. Then, gather the alien sheets indicated for the appropriate number of players and deal one randomly to each player. Experienced players can use the alien selection rules described in 'Advanced Game' on page 16. Prepar", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "To play a game of Cosmic Encounter , players take turns in clockwise order starting with the first player, who is determined during setup. During a player's turn, they have an encounter . An encounter is an interaction between two or more players who are trying to either establish or defend a colony", "headingPath": "Playing The Game · Start Turn Phase · Regroup Phase · Destiny Phase · Launch Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "This section contains the basic concepts for Cosmic Encounter that players need to understand before learning how to play the game. During the game, each player controls an alien that can alter the rules of the game. To understand how alien powers work, the players must first understand the basic me", "headingPath": "Basic Concepts · Aliens · Planets and Systems · Ships and Colonies · Moving Ships · The Warp", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If the offense drew their own color destiny card, they may choose to point the hyperspace gate at a foreign colony on one of their own home planets, or they can discard the card and draw a new one. After choosing a planet, the offense must decide how many of their ships to commit to the encounter. T", "headingPath": "Launch Phase · Alliance Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Launch Phase During the Launch Phase, the offense chooses the planet where the encounter occurs and commits their ships to the encounter. T o choose a planet, the offense takes the hyperspace gate and points it at any planet in the home system that was indicated on their destiny card—that planet is ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}, {"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Technology · Setup · Combining the Technology and Four-Planet Variants · Tech Cards · Researching Tech · Completing Tech · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 231}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 231 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 231 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)
debug row retained until: Nov 4, 2026 19:09

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. 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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Setup	p.4	0.048916 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)		p.4	0.048131 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns	p.16	0.046244 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Setup	p.5	0.046239 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Playing The Game · Start Turn Phase · Regroup Phase · Destiny Phase · Launch Phase	p.7	0.046175 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Basic Concepts · Aliens · Planets and Systems · Ships and Colonies · Moving Ships · The Warp	p.6	0.030769 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Launch Phase · Alliance Phase	p.8	0.030303 (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 Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)		p.7	0.029412 (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.

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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Advanced Game · Flare Cards · Advanced Setup · Variants · Four Planets · Single-Encounter Turns	p.16	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Cosmic Encounter — Rulebook (corpus doc 231)	Technology · Setup · Combining the Technology and Four-Planet Variants · Tech Cards · Researching Tech · Completing Tech · …	p.17	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 624 ms · first delta 11381 ms · total 15123 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 624 ms · ask 14485 ms · gateway work 15123 ms · total 15123 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3692
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 503
tok/sec: 136.4 tok/sec — 503 output tokens in 3.689 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s 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.

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: 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 157), 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.