RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dunebg-283355-en-1e

1. Place all spice tokens in the Spice Bank.[1]
2. Shuffle the Spice Deck and Treachery Deck and place them face down next to the game board.[1]
3. Players take their Player Shields and player sheets.[2]
4. Players set up their factions.[2]
5. Players choose factions by either using faction cards from the Prediction Deck to randomly determine what faction each player will play (shuffling the cards and dealing 1 card to each player), or by having each player randomly draw a card from the Bene Gesserit turn prediction cards and selecting a faction in the order of their drawn card, with the highest card choosing first.[1]
6. Players may swap factions with each other at this point if they wish.[1]
7. Players place their Player Marker on the player circle closest to their shield and seat at the table.[3]
[1] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.6 · SET-UP FOR PLAY
[2] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.6 · Four & Five player games
[3] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook · p.6 · 1. Positions
🔧 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 230 ms · ask 9884 ms · total 316759 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 306636 ms · generation 10123 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Place all spice tokens in the Spice Bank. 'I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. The Spice Deck and Treachery Deck are shuffled and placed face down next to the game board. Played cards will be piled face up next to the decks as discards a", "headingPath": "SET-UP FOR PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "For 4 player, consider leaving out both the Spacing Guild and Bene Gesserit, while for 5 player games try playing with no Bene Gesserit. Players take their Player Shields and player sheets and set up their factions as follows.", "headingPath": "Four & Five player games", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each player picks up a Battle Wheel and secretly dials a number from zero to the number of forces they have in the disputed territory. Both players will lose the number of forces dialed on the Battle Wheel.", "headingPath": "Battle Wheel", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Players place their Player Marker on the player circle closest to their shield and seat at the table.", "headingPath": "1. Positions", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The first time the storm is moved, the Storm Marker is placed at a random location along the map edge using the following procedure. The two players whose player circles are nearest on either side of the Storm Start Sector will secretly dial a number from 0 to 20 on the wheels. The two numbers are s", "headingPath": "First Storm", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The Rulebook contains the Basic Game and Advanced Game Sections as well as Strategy Hints, Q&A, and Dune Synopsis. There are 6 sequence of play quick reference cards to help you keep track of the order that everything happens in a turn. SPICE BLOW", "headingPath": "Rulebook, Quick Start Guide, & Quick Reference cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The Basic Game is changed by increasing the number of Spice Blows, adding a spice advantage for holding a city or Tuek's Sietch , (the smuggler stronghold), an enhanced Karama Card, and an advanced battle system.", "headingPath": "INTRODUCTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The game board is a map of the planet Dune showing four types of territories: Sand: Yellow or tan with a single border. Rock: Brown with double borders. Strongholds: Red brown with triple borders. Polar Sink: Mottled white with a double border. Some territories are marked with a Spice Blow icon to s", "headingPath": "Game Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SET-UP FOR PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Four & Five player games", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. Positions", "sharpsignalDocId": 104}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 104 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 104 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 14:13

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) SET-UP FOR PLAY p.6 0.047371 (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 Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Four & Five player games p.6 0.045724 (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)) 226
#3 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Battle Wheel p.10 0.032787 (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)) 206
#4 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) 1. Positions 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)) 101
#5 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) First Storm p.7 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
#6 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Rulebook, Quick Start Guide, & Quick Reference cards p.4 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)) 247
#7 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) INTRODUCTION p.13 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)) 212
#8 RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Game Board p.4 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 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.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) SET-UP FOR PLAY p.6 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) Four & Five player games p.6 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Dune — Rulebook (corpus doc 104) 1. Positions p.6 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 230 ms · first delta 8821 ms · total 316759 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 306636 ms · retrieval 230 ms · ask 9884 ms · gateway work 10123 ms · total 316759 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1721
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
183
tok/sec
148.1 tok/sec — 183 output tokens in 1.236 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 10s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 35), 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.