RuleSage cited table rulings
← Dune: Imperium

You asked

How do I set up Dune: Imperium for 2 players?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Dune: Imperiumbg-316554-en-1e

Answered before

This question didn't get an answer just now — but Dune: Imperium has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.

How do I set up Dune: Imperium for 4 players?

Answered Aug 13, 2026 gemma4:26b read Dune: Imperium

How do I set up Dune: Imperium for 4 players?

Answered Aug 12, 2026 gemma4:26b read Dune: Imperium

I looked through Dune: Imperium's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.5 · GAme components
Want to enhance your DUNE: IMPERIUM experience? Check out the Dire Wolf Game Room companion app for your PC, smartphone or tablet. Each player takes 1 water and places it in their supply. Create a bank next to the game board containing the Solari, spice, and remaining water tokens. These are not mea
RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.2 · Across the ImperIum
DUNE: IMPERIUM is a deck-building worker placement game that finds inspiration in elements and characters from the Dune legacy, both the new film from Legendary Pictures and the seminal literary series from Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson. Note: The game comes with two leaders ea
RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.6 · AGents
You start the game with two Agents (and can gain a third during play). You send Agents to spaces on the game board, sometimes gathering resources, sometimes paying resources to advance your strategy. (This is explained fully in Phase 2: Player Turns, while board spaces are described in detail in the
RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.4 · GAme components
Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area, and then place the following components on it: Place the Mentat on its side in the Mentat space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of the Faction's Influence tracks (Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gess
RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.20 · setup
Select a difficulty level from the chart at the right. Choose two Leaders, one for each Rival. During the game, these Rivals will use only the Signet ability on their Leaders, ignoring the ability on the left. Your opponents can't play Paul Atreides or Helena Richese. (For your first solo game, Earl
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 100 ms · ask 2617 ms · total 9048 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 6329 ms · generation 2719 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 5, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Want to enhance your DUNE: IMPERIUM experience? Check out the Dire Wolf Game Room companion app for your PC, smartphone or tablet. Each player takes 1 water and places it in their supply. Create a bank next to the game board containing the Solari, spice, and remaining water tokens. These are not mea", "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "DUNE: IMPERIUM is a deck-building worker placement game that finds inspiration in elements and characters from the Dune legacy, both the new film from Legendary Pictures and the seminal literary series from Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson. Note: The game comes with two leaders ea", "headingPath": "Across the ImperIum", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "You start the game with two Agents (and can gain a third during play). You send Agents to spaces on the game board, sometimes gathering resources, sometimes paying resources to advance your strategy. (This is explained fully in Phase 2: Player Turns, while board spaces are described in detail in the", "headingPath": "AGents", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area, and then place the following components on it: Place the Mentat on its side in the Mentat space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of the Faction's Influence tracks (Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gess", "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Select a difficulty level from the chart at the right. Choose two Leaders, one for each Rival. During the game, these Rivals will use only the Signet ability on their Leaders, ignoring the ability on the left. Your opponents can't play Paul Atreides or Helena Richese. (For your first solo game, Earl", "headingPath": "setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "DUNE: IMPERIUM is played in a series of rounds. Each round consists of five phases, in this order: Round Start Player Turns Agent Turn Reveal Turn", "headingPath": "round structure", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In DUNE: IMPERIUM , the four Factions represent powerful forces on Dune and elsewhere in the Imperium. Increasing your Influence and earning an Alliance with one or more of them is one of the key routes to victory in the game. See 'Across the Imperium' on Page 2 for short descriptions of each of the", "headingPath": "FActIons", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "In a two-player game, a third, Rival player, House Hagal, competes against you and your opponent, serving a spoiler role. It operates by its own set of rules. It doesn't collect resources, build a deck, earn rewards, or score Victory Points. It does, however, use the House Hagal cards as described e", "headingPath": "two-plAyer GAmes", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 87 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 87 boosted
answered-before recall
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
  • ruling 2947 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.9091
  • ruling 2858 — matched by trigram similarity — measured similarity 0.9091
debug row retained until
Nov 11, 2026 13:06

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) GAme components p.5 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) Across the ImperIum p.2 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) AGents p.6 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) GAme components p.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)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) setup p.20 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) round structure p.8 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)) 146
#7 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) FActIons p.7 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) two-plAyer GAmes p.19 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.

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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) AGents p.6 #3 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#2 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) round structure p.8 #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
#3 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) FActIons p.7 #7 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#4 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) GAme components p.4 #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
#5 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) Special thanks to all those involved in the creation of this game: p.15 #10 0.014286 (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
#6 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) Across the ImperIum p.2 #2 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#7 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) house hAGAl cArds - solo & two-plAyer GAmes p.19 #9 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
#8 RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) GAme components p.5 #1 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

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
timing split
retrieval 100 ms · first delta 2616 ms · total 9048 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 6329 ms · retrieval 100 ms · ask 2617 ms · gateway work 2719 ms · total 9048 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2753
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
155.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.058 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s 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
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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 18), 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.