Ruling — Spirit Island

You asked

How do I set up Spirit Island for 3 players?

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 an Adversary and/or Scenario first, as they can change how the game is set up.[1]

2. Arrange the Island Boards using West and East boards touching on the side opposite the Ocean, plus Northeast above East.[2]

3. Randomly pick one Island Board per player and arrange them to form the Island.[3]

4. Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as indicated by the icons in each land.[3]

5. Shuffle the Minor and Major Power Decks and put them near the board with room for each deck to have a discard pile.[3]

6. Put the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and the Dahan near the board.[3]

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.[4]

10. Place the 'Terror Level 3' divider 3 cards from the bottom and the 'Terror Level 2' divider 3 cards above that, so the deck is divided into 3 groups of 3 cards each.[4]

11. Make the Invader Deck (consisting of 3 Stage I cards, 4 Stage II cards, and 5 Stage III cards) and put it on the Invader Board on the Explore Action Space.[1][4]

12. 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 Blight instructions printed on the Invader Board instead.[4]

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

14. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color.[5]

15. Each player chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards.[5]

16. Each player starts on a different Island Board and follows Setup instructions on the back of their Spirit Panel, which includes putting Presence into one or more lands on their starting board.[5]

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.[5]

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

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

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

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

[5] 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,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 79 ms · ask 6439 ms · total 6641 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 120 ms · generation 6521 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048652, "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": 6, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "The Invader Deck is 12 cards: 3 Stage I cards on top, then 4 Stage II cards, then 5 Stage III cards on the bottom. Mix up the cards from each Stage and choose without looking at them, putting unused cards back in the box. (The game comes with 4 Stage I cards, 5 Stage II cards, and 6 Stage III cards,", "headingPath": "MAKING THE INVADER DECK", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "You are powerful Spirits of the natural world, existing on an isolated Island. Invaders from beyond the known sea have recently begun their colonization of your Island, killing the native Islanders - a people called the Dahan - and upsetting the natural balance. The Spirits of the Island must grow i", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "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": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each Spirit does three things, in the following order: Grow: Choose one option (unless stated otherwise) next to 'Growth' at the upper-right of the Spirit Panel. Each section is a single choice. Y ou must do everything shown, but may choose the order. (For more on Growth options, see page 14.) Gain ", "headingPath": "SPIRIT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After Explore, slide all of the Invader Cards left: Move the Ravage Card to the discard, the Build Card to the Ravage Space, and the Explore Card to the Build Space, so that next turn they will Ravage where they Built this turn and Build where they Explored this turn. SPIRIT ISLAND PHASE ORDER IF TH", "headingPath": "4. ADVANCE INVADER CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Game Designer: R. Eric Reuss Developer: Ted Vessenes Editor-in-Chief: Christopher Badell Creative Director: Adam Rebottaro Managing Art Director: Jennifer Closson Graphic Design: SaRae Henderson, Darrell Louder Cover Art: Joshua Wright Cover Vines: Nolan N. Nasser Figure Design: Jorge Ramos Editors:", "headingPath": "CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.02971, "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}]
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": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THEMATIC BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INVADER BOARD", "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 11, 2026 13:04

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. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	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
#2	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	MAKING THE INVADER DECK	p.6	0.047875 (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)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	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
#4	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY	p.6	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	SPIRIT PHASE	p.8	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	4. ADVANCE INVADER CARDS	p.10	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	CREDITS	p.28	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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THEMATIC BOARD SETUP	p.23	0.02971 (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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 80 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	MAKING THE INVADER DECK	p.6	#2	0.047875 (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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY	p.6	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THEMATIC BOARD SETUP	p.23	#8	0.02971 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	4. ADVANCE INVADER CARDS	p.10	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	ENERGY AND CARD PLAYS	p.13	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	INVADER BOARD	p.6	#11	0.014493 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.3	#3	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	#1	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

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)	THEMATIC BOARD SETUP	p.23	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58)	THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY	p.6	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)	PLAYER SETUP	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 79 ms · first delta 3104 ms · total 6641 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 120 ms · retrieval 79 ms · ask 6439 ms · gateway work 6521 ms · total 6641 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2081
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 512
tok/sec: 151.0 tok/sec — 512 output tokens in 3.390 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 56s 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.