Ruling — Arkham Horror: The Card Game

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Arkham Horror: The Card Gamebg-205637-en-1e

To set up the first game of the Brethren of Ash campaign, perform the following steps in order:

1. Choose Investigator(s): Each player chooses an investigator and takes that investigator's pack of cards.[1] If playing solo, Joe Diamond is the recommended choice.[1]

2. Gather Decks: Each player opens their investigator's pack of cards (which includes an investigator card and a starter deck), places their investigator card faceup in their play area, and shuffles their starter deck.[1] You may also set your investigator card aside and shuffle your starter deck.[2]

3. Choose Lead Investigator: Choose one player to be the lead investigator, giving them the lead investigator token and the campaign guide.[1] Each player then chooses either an investigator token or their investigator mini-card to represent their position on the map.[1]

4. Gather Scenario Cards: Open the 'Spreading Flames' scenario pack and gather all cards of each encounter set listed for that scenario.[3]

5. Set Agenda Deck: Assemble the agenda deck by stacking the agenda cards from the Spessific encounter set in sequential order so that '1a' is on top, '2a' is next, etc..[3] (The universal rule states to assemble the agenda deck in sequential order with the art side faceup so 'agenda 1a' is on top and then read the story text on agenda 1a [4]).

6. Set Act Deck: Assemble the act deck in sequential order, with the art side faceup, so that 'act 1a' is on top.[5][4] Read the story text on act 1a.[5][4]

7. Assemble Token Pool: Place all damage tokens, horror tokens, clue/doom tokens, connector tokens, and resource tokens in separate piles within easy reach of all investigators.[6]

8. Assemble the Chaos Bag: Place the 16 chaos tokens shown into the chaos bag and return the rest to the game box.[6] (For other scenarios, place chaos tokens as indicated by campaign setup instructions [4]).

9. Collect Starting Resources: Each investigator takes five resources from the token pool and places them near their investigator card.[6]

10. Draw Opening Hand: Each investigator draws five cards from their deck.[6] If a weakness card is drawn, set it aside and draw an additional card; at the end of this step, shuffle all set-aside weaknesses back into the deck.[6] Each player may take a single mulligan by setting aside up to five cards and drawing an equivalent number of cards.[6]

11. Finalize Scenario Setup: Place the scenario reference card next to the agenda deck.[5][4] (The campaign guide instructions for 'Spreading Flames' also include placing locations, placing investigator tokens/mini-cards at starting locations, setting aside listed cards, and shuffling remaining encounter cards to form the encounter deck [4]).

[1] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.6 · First Game Setup · Daniela Reyes · Trish Scarborough · Isabelle Barnes · Joe Diamond · Dexter Drake

[2] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.6

[3] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.8 · Scenario Setup · Encounter Set Icons

[4] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.20 · Setting Up a Game

[5] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.20 · Setting Up a Game

[6] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook · p.7 · Dexter Drake

🔧 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 296 ms · ask 18553 ms · total 797884 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 779025 ms · generation 18859 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 20, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "Read the story text on agenda 1a. Set act deck. Assemble the act deck in sequential order, with the art side faceup, so that 'act 1a' is on top. Read the story text on act 1a. Place the scenario reference card next to the agenda deck. The game is now afoot! There are no action windows during setup. ", "headingPath": "Setting Up a Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "The following section is a condensed universal version of the setup rules that can be used for any scenario of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Choose investigators. Each player chooses an investigator and places that investigator's card in their play area. (Note that players must each choose a differe", "headingPath": "Setting Up a Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "To set up the first game of the Brethren of Ash campaign, perform the following steps in order. 1 Choose Investigator(s) : Each player chooses an investigator and takes that investigator's pack of cards. If playing solo, Joe Diamond is the recommended investigator choice. The mechanic Daniela Reyes ", "headingPath": "First Game Setup · Daniela Reyes · Trish Scarborough · Isabelle Barnes · Joe Diamond · Dexter Drake", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "6 RULEBOOK First Game Setup To set up the first game of the Brethren of Ash campaign, perform the following steps in order. The mechanic Daniela Reyes is willing to step in harm’s way to protect those in danger. She excels at retaliating against enemies who attack her and her friends. The steely-eye", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045445, "snippet": "The remaining setup steps contain scenario-specific information for the first scenario in the Brethren of Ash campaign. Open the campaign guide to page 3 and follow along with the setup instructions for the 'Spreading Flames' scenario as you perform these following steps. These instructions are writ", "headingPath": "Scenario Setup · Encounter Set Icons", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 48, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Fight (  ). Fight an engaged enemy at your location, using  . Evade (  ). Evade an engaged enemy at your location, using  . Investigate (  ). Investigate your location using  . Engage . Engage an enemy at your current location. Draw . Draw 1 card. Move. Move to a connecting location. Resource ", "headingPath": "Action Types", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Place Reference Card: 11 Place the scenario reference card for 'Spreading Flames' (#105) next to the agenda deck. Flip it to the side appropriate for your chosen difficulty. 13 Assemble Encounter Deck: Following the scenario setup instructions, set aside all five copies of the Fire! treachery (#129)", "headingPath": "Encounter Sets in Spreading Flames", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When the game begins, investigators are searching for their friend at Miskatonic University. How should they proceed? In this situation, some actions are be er than others. If an investigator has asset cards in hand that seem useful, that investigator should consider using the Play action to play on", "headingPath": "First Scenario Tip", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "First Game Setup · Daniela Reyes · Trish Scarborough · Isabelle Barnes · Joe Diamond · Dexter Drake", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Scenario Setup · Encounter Set Icons", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setting Up a Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setting Up a Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Dexter Drake", "sharpsignalDocId": 259}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 259 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 259 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 14:21

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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Setting Up a Game	p.20	0.047938 (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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Setting Up a Game	p.20	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
#3	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	First Game Setup · Daniela Reyes · Trish Scarborough · Isabelle Barnes · Joe Diamond · Dexter Drake	p.6	0.047379 (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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)		p.6	0.047163 (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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Scenario Setup · Encounter Set Icons	p.8	0.045445 (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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Action Types	p.48	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
#7	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Encounter Sets in Spreading Flames	p.9	0.029851 (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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	First Scenario Tip	p.11	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 Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	First Game Setup · Daniela Reyes · Trish Scarborough · Isabelle Barnes · Joe Diamond · Dexter Drake	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Scenario Setup · Encounter Set Icons	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Setting Up a Game	p.20	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Setting Up a Game	p.20	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror: The Card Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 259)	Dexter Drake	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 296 ms · first delta 14128 ms · total 797884 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 779025 ms · retrieval 296 ms · ask 18553 ms · gateway work 18859 ms · total 797884 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3408
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 615
tok/sec: 135.1 tok/sec — 615 output tokens in 4.552 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 12s 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 187), 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.