Ruling — Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Twilight Imperium: Fourth Editionbg-233078-en-1e

1. Randomly determine one player to gain the speaker token; that player is the speaker.[1]

2. Each player chooses one faction sheet and places it in their play area.[1]

3. Each player takes the following components that have their faction’s icon: 1 home system tile, 17 control tokens, 16 command tokens, 1 faction promissory note, 2 faction technology cards, and faction-specific tokens.[1] Players place these near their faction sheet and return any unused components to the game box.[1]

4. Each player chooses one color and takes the corresponding 59 plastic units, 1 command sheet, 25 technology cards, and 4 promissory notes.[2]

5. Each player combines their color-specific and faction technology cards into one technology deck and their color-specific and faction promissory note cards into one promissory note deck, placing these in their play area with their command sheet and plastic units.[2]

6. Each player takes the planet cards that correspond to the planets in their home system and places them faceup in their play area.[2]

7. Place the Mecatol Rex system tile in the center of the common play area.[2]

8. Separate the system tiles into a pile of blue-backed tiles and a pile of red-backed tiles (home systems are green-backed and not separated).[2]

9. Shuffle each pile of system tiles facedown and deal them to each player based on player count: 3-player (6 blue, 2 red), 4-player (5 blue, 3 red), 5-player (4 blue, 2 red), or 6-player (3 blue, 2 red).[2]

10. For a five-player game, the speaker draws one random red-backed system tile and places it faceup in any space adjacent to Mecataol Rex before placing tiles.[2]

11. Players place their home systems in approximate positions where they will connect to the galaxy.[3]

12. Starting with the speaker and proceeding clockwise, each player places one system tile faceup in the first ring around Mecatol Rex; after the last player places their first tile, they place a second tile; then the order reverses and proceeds counterclockwise until it reaches the speaker, who places two tiles; then the process repeats, reversing again to proceed clockwise, until all tiles are placed.[3]

13. Each ring around Mecatol Rex must be fully built before any tile can be placed in the next ring.[3]

14. Anomaly system tiles cannot be placed next to one another unless there is no other option, and system tiles with the same type of wormhole cannot be placed next to one another unless there is no other option.[3]

15. After placing all dealt system tiles, players attach their home systems to the rest of the galaxy.[3] (Note: In a five-player game, players whose home systems are at a disadvantage based on position receive trade goods).[3]

16. Place the custodians token in the center of the game board on Mecatol Rex.[3][4]

17. Shuffle the action card, agenda, stage I objective, stage II objective, and secret objective decks separately and place them in the common play area.[3][4]

18. Each player draws two secret objectives and chooses one to keep, shuffling the unchosen ones back into the secret objective deck without revealing them.[3]

19. Place the victory point track near the game board; as a group, players decide whether to play with the 10- or 14-space side faceup, and each player places one control token on the “0” space.[3]

20. The speaker deals five facedown stage I objectives in a row above the victory point track and five facedown stage II objectives in a row below the victory point track, then reveals the first two stage I objectives.[3][5]

21. Create separate piles in the common play area for trade good tokens, fighter tokens, and infantry tokens.[4]

22. Place each of the eight strategy cards faceup in the common play to reach of the speaker.[4]

23. Each player gains their starting technologies and units listed on the back of their faction sheet, placing technology cards faceup near their faction sheet and starting units in their home system.[4]

24. Each player places three command tokens in their tactic pool, three in their fleet pool, and two in their strategy pool.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook · p.4

[2] RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook · p.5

[4] RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook · p.5

[5] RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook · p.19

🔧 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 233 ms · ask 21616 ms · total 97239 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 75380 ms · generation 21859 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "4 STEP 4—CHOOSE COLOR: Each player chooses one color and takes the following components that correspond to that color. • 59 plastic units • 1 command sheet • 25 technology cards • 4 promissory notes Each player combines their color-specific and faction technology cards into one technology deck and t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "STEP 7—PLACE CUSTODIANS TOKEN: Place the custodians token in the center of the game board on Mecatol Rex. STEP 8—SHUFFLE COMMON DECKS: Shuffle the action card, agenda, stage I objective, stage II objective, and secret objective decks separately and place them in the common play area. STEP 9—CREATE S", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "USING THIS REFERENCE This document is the definitive source for all Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition rules. The Living Rules Reference will occasionally be updated with additions, clarifications, errata, and an FAQ, changes to which are listed on page 3. Additionally, the related topics of each ent", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "70.7 STEP 7—REPAIR UNITS: Each player repairs all of their units that have the “Sustain Damage” ability by turning those units upright. 70.8 STEP 8—RETURN STRATEGY CARDS: Each player returns their strategy card to the common play area. Then, if a player has removed the custodians token from Mecatol ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "5 STEP 12—PREPARE OBJECTIVES: Prepare objectives as follows: i. Each player draws two secret objectives and chooses one to keep. Shuffle the unchosen secret objectives back into the secret objective deck without revealing them. ii. Place the victory point track near the game board. As a group, playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "25 70 STATUS PHASE During the status phase, players score objectives and prepare for the next game round. To resolve the status phase, players perform the following steps: 70.1 STEP 1—SCORE OBJECTIVES: Following initiative order, each player may score up to one public objective and one secret object", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Then, that player must place the unit on the game board as instructed by the effect that is placing the unit. RELATED TOPICS: Initiative Order, Strategic Action, Strategy Card, Structures 24 CONTROL Each player begins the game with control of each planet in their home system. During the game, player", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.02967, "snippet": "The speaker is always the last player to vote and decides which outcome to resolve if the outcomes are tied. 69.3 During setup, the speaker prepares the objectives. 69.4 During the status phase, the speaker reveals a public objective. 69.5 A random player gains the speaker token during setup before ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 249}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 249 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 249 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 6, 2026 14:09

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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.5	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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.4	0.047643 (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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.25	0.045476 (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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.5	0.031746 (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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.25	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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.12	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 Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.25	0.02967 (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	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 249)	p.19	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 233 ms · first delta 14759 ms · total 97239 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 75380 ms · retrieval 233 ms · ask 21616 ms · gateway work 21859 ms · total 97239 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4602
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 960
tok/sec: 136.4 tok/sec — 960 output tokens in 7.039 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 51s 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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 175), 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.