Ruling — Spirit Island

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e

This game has a verified setup checklist. Every step is quote-checked against the rulebook, judged for entailment, and approved by a person — with honest holes wherever any of that failed.

Open the setup checklist for Spirit Island →

approved Aug 12, 2026 · baked by gemma4:12b · prompt checklist-structurer-v4

1. Select any Adversary or Scenario first, as they can change how the game is set up.[1]

2. Arrange the Island Boards by randomly picking one per player and arranging them to form the Island.[2]

3. For a definitive geography at each player count: use Northeast for 1 Player; West and East (touching on the side opposite the Ocean) for 2 Players; West, East, and Northeast above East for 3 Players; and West, East, Northwest, and Northeast for 4 Players.[3]

4. Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as indicated by the icons in each land.[2]

5. Shuffle the Minor and Major Power Decks and place them near the board with room for a discard pile.[2]

6. Place the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and the Dahan near the board, ensuring all players can reach them.[2]

7. Set up the Invader Board by placing it on one side of the play area.[4]

8. Put 4 Fear Markers per player into the Fear Pool.[4]

9. Shuffle the Fear Cards and put 9 on the Fear Deck space, using dividers to create three groups of 3 cards (the 'Terror Level 3' divider 3 cards from the bottom and the 'Terror Level 2' divider 3 cards above that).[4]

10. Create the Invader Deck by mixing up the cards from each Stage and choosing 3 Stage I cards, 4 Stage II cards, and 5 Stage III cards, then place it on the Invader Board on the Explore Action Space.[1][4]

11. Take a random Blight Card and place it on top of the Blight Space on the board, 'Healthy Island' side up, without looking at the back (if not using a Blight Card, use the pre-printed Blight instructions on the Invader Board instead).[4][5]

12. Place the shown amount of Blight onto the card.[4]

13. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color.[6]

14. Each player chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards as their starting hand.[6]

15. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card.[6]

16. Each player starts on a different Island Board and follows the Setup instructions on the back of their Spirit Panel, which includes putting Presence into one or more lands on their starting board.[6]

17. Players flip their Spirit Panels and place all remaining Presence onto the dashed circles on their Presence Tracks, leaving the leftmost numbers with solid circles uncovered.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · MAKING THE INVADER DECK

[2] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY

[3] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.23 · THEMATIC BOARD SETUP

[4] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · INVADER BOARD

[5] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.3 · TABLE OF CONTENTS

[6] RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook · p.6 · PLAYER SETUP

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): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 281 ms · ask 12137 ms · total 243214 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 230786 ms · generation 12428 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045945, "snippet": "Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "If you're getting crushed and it's no fun: For a slightly easier game, give all Spirits a bonus Growth at the end of Setup. For a moderately easier game, omit the Invaders' initial Explore at the end of Setup. For a much easier game, do both. Note: Two Blight rules can make the game extremely punish", "headingPath": "GAME TOO HARD?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.044071, "snippet": "As you play Power Cards, put the required Energy on top of them. This will help you remember to pay for them. When you resolve a Power Card, you can push it forward or turn it sideways to note that it has been used. Don't discard it until end of turn, because you may be making use of its Elements fo", "headingPath": "STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.043549, "snippet": "The Thematic Boards have a fixed layout relative to each other. Y ou can use any of them that you want - but for the definitive geography at each player count: 1 Player: Use Northeast. 2 Players: Use West and East, touching on the side opposite the Ocean. 3 Players: Use West and East as above, plus ", "headingPath": "THEMATIC BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "To set up the Island: Randomly pick one Island Board per player and arrange them to form the Island (see sidebar). Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight (from the box, not the Blight Card) as indicated by the icons in each land. To set up the Supply: Shuffle the Minor and Major", "headingPath": "THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "To set up the Invader Board: Place the Invader Board on one side of the play area. Put 4 Fear Markers per player into the Fear Pool. Shuffle the Fear Cards and put 9 on the Fear Deck space. Place the 'Terror Level 3' divider 3 cards from the bottom and the 'Terror Level 2' divider 3 cards above that", "headingPath": "INVADER BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action. Reveal the top card of the Invader Deck. The Invaders Explore in that land type (see Explore, page 10). Then place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space.", "headingPath": "INVADERS' STARTING ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MAKING THE INVADER DECK", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THEMATIC BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INVADER BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 58 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 14:11

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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	0.046032 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	0.045945 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	GAME TOO HARD?	p.21	0.044563 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY	p.20	0.044071 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THEMATIC BOARD SETUP	p.23	0.043549 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY	p.6	0.032258 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	INVADER BOARD	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
#8	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	INVADERS' STARTING ACTION	p.6	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))	221

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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	MAKING THE INVADER DECK	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THEMATIC BOARD SETUP	p.23	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	INVADER BOARD	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 281 ms · first delta 8423 ms · total 243214 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 230786 ms · retrieval 281 ms · ask 12137 ms · gateway work 12428 ms · total 243214 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1762
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 584
tok/sec: 147.7 tok/sec — 584 output tokens in 3.955 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 31s 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: SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
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 7), 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.