Ruling — Trickerion: Legends of Illusion

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trickerion: Legends of Illusionbg-163068-en-1e

### General Setup

1. Place the Main Game Board in the middle of the table.[1] (If playing without the Dark Alley for your first game, use the side of the Main Board without the gameplay interface on the Dark Alley area).[1]

2. Separate the Trick cards into four decks by category (Mechanical, Spiritual, Escape and Optical), and place them face up above their corresponding slots in the Downtown's Dahlgaard Residence part.[1] (If playing without the Dark Alley, leave all Level 3 Tricks in the box).[1]

3. Fill the Market Row's Buy area with a Wood, a Metal, a Glass, and a Fabric Component to serve as initial stock.[1]

4. Create the face-down Performance deck by stacking two random face-down Performance cards of each type (2 Riverside Theater, 2 Grand Magorian, 2 Magnus Pantheon) from top to bottom, and place it next to the Theater.[1] (If playing without the Dark Alley, leave all Magnus Pantheon cards in the box, resulting in a 4-card deck).[1]

5. Fill the Performance card slots in the Theater from left to right with a number of Riverside Theater Performance cards (drawn randomly from remaining cards, not from the Performance deck) equal to the number of players minus one.[1]

6. Place all Components, Trickerion Shards, and Coins in a pile next to the game board where all players can reach them.[1]

7. Shuffle the four Special Assignment decks (sorted by Location) and place them face down on their respective slots in the Dark Alley; skip this step if playing without the Dark Alley.[1]

8. Place the Trickerion Stone token on the I. slot of the Turn Counter track, below the Fame track.[1]

### Player Setup

1. Each player chooses a Magician with a 1 Magician disk, a Magician card, 1 Apprentice disk, Components (total Coin value of 2), and 1 Trick (Level 1) from their Favorite Trick category, which is placed in the Workshop and marked with a Symbol marker.[2]

2. Each player receives their respective Player Game Board, a Magician Poster card, all Trick and Symbol markers in their color (4 different symbols with 4+1 markers each), 1 Trickerion Shard, and a starting hand of Permanent Assignment cards (6 cards: 2 Theater, 1 Workshop, 1 Market Row, 1 Downtown, 1 Dark Alley; or 9 cards if playing without the Dark Alley).[2]

3. Each player chooses a Specialist and receives its respective Game Board Extension and a bonus based on the choice:

* Manager: Additional Components (total Coin value of 2) placed on the Manager’s Board Extension.[3]

* Engineer: A Level 1 Trick card of the player's choice, placed on the Engineer’s Board Extension and marked with a Symbol marker.[3]

* Assistant: An additional Apprentice placed on the Apprentice slot on the Assistant’s Board Extension.[3]

4. Each player receives 10/12/14/16 Coins based on their starting position in the Initiative Order.[3]

5. After completing Player Setup, place a wooden Player marker in each player's color on the Initiative Order circles (left edge of the Main Game Board) in a random order.[4][3]

6. Place a second wooden Player marker in each player's color on the 5 Fame slot on the Fame Track.[4]

### Additional Setup (If playing with Dark Alley and Prophecies)

1. Choose three starting Pending Prophecies at random and place them on the respective slots on the Fortune Teller orb, then place the remaining Prophecies in a face-down pile next to the Main Game Board.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.8 · GENERAL SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.9 · PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S

[3] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.10

[4] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.10

🔧 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 310 ms · ask 13516 ms · total 125672 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 111834 ms · generation 13838 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "STARTING FAME POINTS AND INITIATIVE ORDER After having completed the Player Setup, place a wooden Player marker in each of the players’ colors on the Initiative Order circles (left edge of the Main Game Board) in a random order. This will be the Initiative Order in the first turn. In the subsequent ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Place the Main Game Board in the middle of the table. For your first game, we suggest playing without the Dark Alley - in this case, use the side of the Main Board without gameplay interface on the Dark Alley (the lower right area). NOTE: The game is playable without the Dark Alley, but for the full", "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "10 • All C haracter disks of the player’s color. Place the Magician and 1 Apprentice disk on their respective slots on the Player Game Board. Keep the rest next to the Player Game Board as a personal supply. • A S pecialist of the player’s choice, its respective Game Board Extension, and a bonus bas", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "7 Choose the three starting Pending Prophecies at random, and place them on the respective slots on the Fortune Teller orb. Put the remaining Prophecies in a face-down pile next to the Main Game Board. (There is no Active Prophecy in the first turn.) Do this only after the player setup (on the next ", "headingPath": "PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Basic Advanced Superior Each Trick needs a certain number of Components to be prepared and performed. There are three categories of Components in Trickerion: Basic, Advanced and Superior, costing 1, 2 and 3 Coins respectively. They can be bought at the Market Row and are kept in the Magician's Works", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · ASSIGNMENT CARDS · WOODEN CHARACTER DISKS · MAIN GAME BOARD · DOWNTOWN DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "The Player Game Board is the Magician's headquarters. This is where the Assignment cards are placed during the 'Assignment' phase and where the player's Components and Tricks are kept. It also serves as the Workshop Location. The Player Game Board can be extended to the right by hiring Specialists. ", "headingPath": "PLAYER GAME BOARDS · SPECIALIST GAME BOARD EXTENSIONS · T H E M A G I C I A N C A R D S · MAGICIAN POSTER CARDS · PLAYER MARKERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "This is done simultaneously by all players until everyone has either placed a face-down Assignment card below all of their Characters, or chooses not to place any more. Characters with no Assignment cards below them cannot be placed during the 'Place Characters' phase and will automatically be Idle ", "headingPath": "ASSIGNMENT PHASE · PL ACE CHARACTERS PHASE · I D L E C H A R A C T E R S · T H E A C T I O N P O I N T S Y S T E M", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "exactly one weekday during a turn, which must not already be occupied by an opponent. No 'Enhance Character': Players cannot buy additional Action Points for their Characters in the Theater for Trickerion Shards. Performance Slots: In the bottom line of the Character slots are the Performance slots,", "headingPath": "I M P O R TA N T · RULES OF TRICK MARKER PLACEMENT · T R I C K L I N K S", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 301 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 301 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	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	0.048652 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	0.047619 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S	p.9	0.046154 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	COMPONENTS · ASSIGNMENT CARDS · WOODEN CHARACTER DISKS · MAIN GAME BOARD · DOWNTOWN DICE	p.4	0.045455 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PLAYER GAME BOARDS · SPECIALIST GAME BOARD EXTENSIONS · T H E M A G I C I A N C A R D S · MAGICIAN POSTER CARDS · PLAYER MARKERS	p.5	0.044557 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	ASSIGNMENT PHASE · PL ACE CHARACTERS PHASE · I D L E C H A R A C T E R S · T H E A C T I O N P O I N T S Y S T E M	p.12	0.03125 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	I M P O R TA N T · RULES OF TRICK MARKER PLACEMENT · T R I C K L I N K S	p.17	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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 310 ms · first delta 8210 ms · total 125672 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 111834 ms · retrieval 310 ms · ask 13516 ms · gateway work 13838 ms · total 125672 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4610
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 813
tok/sec: 146.3 tok/sec — 813 output tokens in 5.558 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 11s 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 229), 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.