RuleSage cited table rulings
← Mage Knight Board Game

You asked

How do I set up Mage Knight Board Game for 3 players?

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

Asked with: Mage Knight Board Gamebg-96848-en-1e

I looked through Mage Knight Board Game'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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.15 · COOPERATIVE AND SOLO SCENARIOS · Dummy Player · When picking Tactics: · TEAM RULES
In the Mage Knight Board Game, players themselves determine the pace of the game. If someone is rushing, playing most of their cards each turn, the others have to adjust their tempo, or end up with half of their decks unused at the end of a Round. If the players cooperate, it would be advantageous t
RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.1 · RULEBOOK
This book has two parts, the Rulebook and the Scenario Book. The Rulebook provides the complete rules for playing the Mage Knight Board Game. We strongly recommend that players start by reading the Game Walkthrough, where the rules are explained in a more natural order, with many pictures and exampl
RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.22 · MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION A GAME BY VLAADA CHVÁTIL MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION · Special Rules
Original Game Design: Vlaada Chvátil Development Team: Vlaada Chvátil, David Korejtko, Filip Murmak, Phil Pettifer, Paul Grogan Illustrations: J. Lonnee, Milan Vavroň, Octographics.net Graphic Design: Chris Raimo, Filip Murmak, Scott Hartman Deal Regular (silver) Units only during the fi rst half of
RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.3 · ~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~
Tile deck. The Scenario description says how many tiles of each type you should use to form this deck. For Countryside tiles (green back), pick them randomly. For Core tiles (brown back), separate them into city and non-city tiles (according to whether they have a City icon in the middle). Then rand
RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.14 · SCENARIO BOOK · MAP SHAPE · Wedge Map · Fully Open Map · Open Map Limited to 4 or 3 Columns
This scenario book has three parts. First, there are some general principles that apply to all scenarios, or to a subcategory of scenarios (like cooperative scenarios). In the second part, there are optional variant rules you can use for your game. The third part contains descriptions of the scenari
🔧 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 70 ms · ask 4263 ms · total 4335 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 4335 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 15, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "In the Mage Knight Board Game, players themselves determine the pace of the game. If someone is rushing, playing most of their cards each turn, the others have to adjust their tempo, or end up with half of their decks unused at the end of a Round. If the players cooperate, it would be advantageous t", "headingPath": "COOPERATIVE AND SOLO SCENARIOS · Dummy Player · When picking Tactics: · TEAM RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "This book has two parts, the Rulebook and the Scenario Book. The Rulebook provides the complete rules for playing the Mage Knight Board Game. We strongly recommend that players start by reading the Game Walkthrough, where the rules are explained in a more natural order, with many pictures and exampl", "headingPath": "RULEBOOK", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Original Game Design: Vlaada Chvátil Development Team: Vlaada Chvátil, David Korejtko, Filip Murmak, Phil Pettifer, Paul Grogan Illustrations: J. Lonnee, Milan Vavroň, Octographics.net Graphic Design: Chris Raimo, Filip Murmak, Scott Hartman Deal Regular (silver) Units only during the fi rst half of", "headingPath": "MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION A GAME BY VLAADA CHVÁTIL MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION · Special Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Tile deck. The Scenario description says how many tiles of each type you should use to form this deck. For Countryside tiles (green back), pick them randomly. For Core tiles (brown back), separate them into city and non-city tiles (according to whether they have a City icon in the middle). Then rand", "headingPath": "~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "This scenario book has three parts. First, there are some general principles that apply to all scenarios, or to a subcategory of scenarios (like cooperative scenarios). In the second part, there are optional variant rules you can use for your game. The third part contains descriptions of the scenari", "headingPath": "SCENARIO BOOK · MAP SHAPE · Wedge Map · Fully Open Map · Open Map Limited to 4 or 3 Columns", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Players: 2, or 4 (two teams) Type: Very competitive Length: Four rounds (4 players), six rounds (2 players) Purpose: A very competitive scenario full of opportunities for Heroes to fi ght each other. Victory points for controlled sites instead of Fame! You are sent to this problematic province by th", "headingPath": "CONQUER AND HOLD · Map (for 2, 3, or 4 players) · ONE TO RETURN", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Rounds are either Day or Night. Players take their turns within a Round. Prepare the Round (skip this step for the fi rst Round of the game, as it was completed during setup): Flip the Day/Night Board - If it was Day, fl ip the board to Night; if Night, fl ip to Day. Reset the Source - Reroll all ma", "headingPath": "~ One Round of the Game (Day or Night) ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "For a more strategic game, you may reveal the map tiles from the very start (if you will not miss the thrill of exploring). You can also play this scenario with 3 players, but it can suff er from the 'if two fi ght each other, the third one benefi ts' syndrome. If you want to anyway, we recommend to", "headingPath": "Variants · Team Variant", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}]
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 260 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 260 boosted
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 13:19

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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) COOPERATIVE AND SOLO SCENARIOS · Dummy Player · When picking Tactics: · TEAM RULES p.15 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) RULEBOOK p.1 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION A GAME BY VLAADA CHVÁTIL MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION · Special Rules p.22 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) ~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~ p.3 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) SCENARIO BOOK · MAP SHAPE · Wedge Map · Fully Open Map · Open Map Limited to 4 or 3 Columns p.14 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) CONQUER AND HOLD · Map (for 2, 3, or 4 players) · ONE TO RETURN p.22 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) ~ One Round of the Game (Day or Night) ~ p.4 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) Variants · Team Variant p.22 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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) COOPERATIVE AND SOLO SCENARIOS · Dummy Player · When picking Tactics: · TEAM RULES p.15 #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
#2 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) RULEBOOK p.1 #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
#3 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) The Winner · Variants · Team Rules p.22 #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
#4 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) ~ One Round of the Game (Day or Night) ~ p.4 #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
#5 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) FULL COOPERATION · Map (for 2 or 3 players) · BLITZ COOPERATION · MINES LIBERATION · Map (for 2, 3, or 4 players) p.20 #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
#6 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · … p.23 #14 0.013514 (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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) Variants · Team Variant p.22 #8 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
#8 RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260) MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION A GAME BY VLAADA CHVÁTIL MAGE KNIGHT ULTIMATE EDITION · Special Rules p.22 #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

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 70 ms · first delta 4194 ms · total 4335 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 70 ms · ask 4263 ms · gateway work 4335 ms · total 4335 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4417
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
145.2 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.062 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.
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 189), 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.