Ruling — Arkham Horror (Third Edition)

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Arkham Horror (Third Edition)bg-257499-en-1e

To prepare everything before the first turn, follow these steps:

1. Choose one available scenario sheet as a group (for your first game, "Approach of Azathoth" is recommended) and place it in the play area, returning all other scenario sheets to the box.[1][2]

2. Arrange neighborhood and street tiles as shown on the back of the scenario sheet using tiles with the indicated icons.[1][2]

3. Shuffle encounter cards separately to create encounter decks, using only the street and neighborhood cards that correspond to the current scenario's neighborhoods; return all other neighborhood cards to the box.[1][2]

4. Prepare the event deck by taking the 24 event cards for the "Approach of Azathoth" scenario, shuffling them, and placing them facedown in the event deck holder, then return other scenario event cards to the box.[3]

5. Create the monster deck by gathering the monster cards indicated on the back of the scenario sheet, returning all others to the box; place starting monsters (e.g., one robed figure on Independence Square and a second on the Black Cave for "Approach of Azathoth") in their indicated spaces ready side up, then shuffle the remaining cards to form the deck.[3]

6. Create the mythos cup by gathering the quantities of mythos tokens indicated on the back of the scenario sheet and putting them into an opaque container (such as a dice bag, bowl, or game box lid), returning other tokens to the box.[3]

7. Shuffle headline cards and deal 13 into a facedown deck called the headline deck, returning others to the box.[4][5]

8. Separately shuffle item, ally, and spell cards to form three decks in the play area; take the top five cards of the item deck and place them in a faceup row called the display.[4][5]

9. Keep special and condition cards sorted and placed to the side.[4][5]

10. Separate all tokens by type and keep them nearby with the dice for easy access.[4][5]

11. Keep all archive cards in a single stack in numerical order.[4][5]

12. Spawn starting clues by drawing the top three cards of the event deck one at a time, placing one clue token in the central area of each corresponding neighborhood tile, and adding those cards to their respective neighborhood decks by shuffling them with the top two cards of that deck.[6]

13. Place starting doom by placing one doom token on each space indicated on the back of the scenario sheet (e.g., Arkham Advertiser, Independence Square, Velma's Diner, the Unvisited Isle, and the Black Cave for "Approach of Azathoth").[6]

14. Spread doom once by drawing the bottom card of the event deck and discarding it faceup next to the deck, then placing one doom token in each space that has a doom icon next to its name on that card.[6]

15. Finalize setup by resolving effects in the "Finalize Setup" section of the scenario sheet; for "Approach of Azathoth," take cards #2 and #3 from the archive and place them faceup in the codex, and create the anomaly deck by shuffling "Temporal Fissure" anomaly cards together, returning others to the box.[1][6]

[1] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.4

[2] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · Components · Setup · 1. Choose Scenario · 2. Prepare Board and Encounters

[3] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.5

[4] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.6 · Different Card Backs · 6. Create Headline Deck · 7. Prepare Assets and Display · 8. Prepare Token Pools · 9. Prepare the Archive

[5] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.6

[6] RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook · p.7 · 11. Final Preparations · Investigator Roles

🔧 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 232 ms · ask 13635 ms · total 13877 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13877 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "With everything in place, all that remains is to set up the clues and doom that await the investigators in the coming story. Spawn Starting Clues -Draw the top three cards of the event deck one at a time. For each card, place one clue token in the central area of its corresponding neighborhood tile.", "headingPath": "11. Final Preparations · Investigator Roles", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "After you finish resolving the effects of an encounter, discard that card to the bottom of the deck it was drawn from unless that card is an event card (see sidebar). After resolving an encounter on an event card, if you gained a clue from your neighborhood, discard that card faceup to the event car", "headingPath": "Finishing the Encounter", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Scenario Sheet To set up the game, follow these steps in order: As a group, choose one of the available scenario sheets. For your first game, we recommend 'Approach of Azathoth.' Place that sheet in the play area. Return all other scenario sheets to the game box. Arrange the neighborhood and street ", "headingPath": "Components · Setup · 1. Choose Scenario · 2. Prepare Board and Encounters", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "5 3. Prepare Event Deck Each scenario has a unique deck of event cards that correspond to the five neighborhoods in that scenario. Event cards are kept in a single deck despite not sharing the same card back. There is an identifying label along the bottom-left of each event card that indicates which", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "7 10. Choose Investigator(s) Each player chooses one of the investigator sheets. There are many investigators, and each one has unique abilities and skills. Each player takes their respective investigator token (inserted into a plastic stand), one activation token, and one reference card. As a group", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Each player chooses one of the investigator sheets. There are many investigators, and each one has unique abilities and skills. Each player takes their respective investigator token (inserted into a plastic stand), one activation token, and one reference card. As a group, choose one player to be the", "headingPath": "10. Choose Investigator(s)", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each scenario has a unique deck of event cards that correspond to the five neighborhoods in that scenario. Event cards are kept in a single deck despite not sharing the same card back. There is an identifying label along the bottom-left of each event card that indicates which scenario that card belo", "headingPath": "3. Prepare Event Deck · Event Deck Holder · 4. Create Monster Deck · 5. Create Mythos Cup · Different Card Backs", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "After the mythos phase is done, the game continues with a new round, starting with the action phase. This continues until you have won or lost the game. During the mythos phase, each investigator takes a turn drawing tokens from the mythos cup, starting with the leader and proceeding around the tabl", "headingPath": "Another Round! · Mythos Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Components · Setup · 1. Choose Scenario · 2. Prepare Board and Encounters", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Different Card Backs · 6. Create Headline Deck · 7. Prepare Assets and Display · 8. Prepare Token Pools · 9. Prepare the Archive", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "11. Final Preparations · Investigator Roles", "sharpsignalDocId": 413}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 413 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 413 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 7, 2026 05:05

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 (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	11. Final Preparations · Investigator Roles	p.7	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))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	Finishing the Encounter	p.13	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
#3	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	Components · Setup · 1. Choose Scenario · 2. Prepare Board and Encounters	p.4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)		p.5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)		p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	10. Choose Investigator(s)	p.7	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 (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	3. Prepare Event Deck · Event Deck Holder · 4. Create Monster Deck · 5. Create Mythos Cup · Different Card Backs	p.5	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 (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	Another Round! · Mythos Phase	p.14	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 (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	Components · Setup · 1. Choose Scenario · 2. Prepare Board and Encounters	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	Different Card Backs · 6. Create Headline Deck · 7. Prepare Assets and Display · 8. Prepare Token Pools · 9. Prepare the Archive	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Arkham Horror (Third Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 413)	11. Final Preparations · Investigator Roles	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 232 ms · first delta 7040 ms · total 13877 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 232 ms · ask 13635 ms · gateway work 13877 ms · total 13877 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4303
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 712
tok/sec: 104.8 tok/sec — 712 output tokens in 6.797 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 50s 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: BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question): before the first turn

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 342), 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.