Ruling — Trickerion: Legends of Illusion

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trickerion: Legends of Illusionbg-163068-en-1e · Trickerion: Arcane Artsbg-441341-en-1e

To set up the game, follow these steps:

1. Place the Main Game Board in the middle of the table.[1] (If playing for the first time, it is suggested to play without the Dark Alley; if doing so, use the side of the Main Board without a gameplay interface on the Dark Alley area).[1]

2. Separate the Trick cards into four decks by category (Mechanical, Spiritual, Escape and Optical), and place them face up above their corresponding slots in the Dahlgaard Residence part of the Downtown (if playing without the Dark Alley, leave all Level 3 Tricks in the box).[1]

3. Fill the Market Row's Buy area with a Wood, a Metal, a Glass, and a Fabric Component to serve as initial stock.[1]

4. Create the face-down Performance deck by taking two random face-down Performance cards of each type (2 Riverside Theater, 2 Grand Magorian, 2 Magnus Pantheon) and stacking them in that order from top to bottom; place this deck face down next to the Theater.[1]

5. Fill the Performance card slots in the Theater with a number of Riverside Theater Performance cards (drawn randomly from the remaining cards, not from the Performance deck) equal to the number of players minus one (if playing without the Dark Alley, leave all Magnus Pantheon cards in the box, meaning the Performance deck will only consist of 4 cards).[1]

6. Place all Components, Trickerion Shards, and Coins in a pile next to the game board where all players can reach them.[1]

7. Shuffle the four Special Assignment decks (sorted by Location) and place them face down on their respective slots in the Dark Alley (skip this step if playing without the Dark Alley).[1]

8. Place the Trickerion Stone token on the I. slot of the Turn Counter track, which is below the Fame track.[1]

9. After completing Player Setup, choose three starting Pending Prophecies at random and place them on the respective slots on the Fortune Teller orb, placing the remaining Prophecies in a face-down pile next to the Main Game Board (note: there is no Active Prophecy in the first turn; skip this step if playing without the Dark Alley).[2]

10. Place the Arcanist board near the Main Game Board (use the side with the Academy icon when playing with the Dahlgaard's Academy expansion).[3]

11. Randomly select one of the following using a player's Permanent Assignment cards: the Downtown, the Market Row, the Dark Alley, or the Academy (if playing with that expansion), and place the Wagon marker near the selected Location.[3]

12. Shuffle all 12 Enchantments and place them into one of the provided cloth bags; draw 3 of them and place them on the offer beneath the Arcanist board (leave the middle slot empty if playing with 2 players).[3]

13. Place the 4 Arcane Workers and their Unique Assignment/reminder cards next to the Arcanist board to create their supply.[3]

14. If playing with 2, 3, or 4 players, place 4, 6, or 8 Arcane Shards into the supply, respectively, and return any remaining shards to the box.[3]

15. Place the two Arcane dice next to the Arcanist board.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.8 · GENERAL SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.9 · PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S

[3] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME SETUP

🔧 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 7756 ms · total 7837 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7837 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "STARTING FAME POINTS AND INITIATIVE ORDER After having completed the Player Setup, place a wooden Player marker in each of the players’ colors on the Initiative Order circles (left edge of the Main Game Board) in a random order. This will be the Initiative Order in the first turn. In the subsequent ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Place the Main Game Board in the middle of the table. For your first game, we suggest playing without the Dark Alley - in this case, use the side of the Main Board without gameplay interface on the Dark Alley (the lower right area). NOTE: The game is playable without the Dark Alley, but for the full", "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "10 • All C haracter disks of the player’s color. Place the Magician and 1 Apprentice disk on their respective slots on the Player Game Board. Keep the rest next to the Player Game Board as a personal supply. • A S pecialist of the player’s choice, its respective Game Board Extension, and a bonus bas", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045462, "snippet": "7 Choose the three starting Pending Prophecies at random, and place them on the respective slots on the Fortune Teller orb. Put the remaining Prophecies in a face-down pile next to the Main Game Board. (There is no Active Prophecy in the first turn.) Do this only after the player setup (on the next ", "headingPath": "PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "Basic Advanced Superior Each Trick needs a certain number of Components to be prepared and performed. There are three categories of Components in Trickerion: Basic, Advanced and Superior, costing 1, 2 and 3 Coins respectively. They can be bought at the Market Row and are kept in the Magician's Works", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · ASSIGNMENT CARDS · WOODEN CHARACTER DISKS · MAIN GAME BOARD · DOWNTOWN DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.043503, "snippet": "The Player Game Board is the Magician's headquarters. This is where the Assignment cards are placed during the 'Assignment' phase and where the player's Components and Tricks are kept. It also serves as the Workshop Location. The Player Game Board can be extended to the right by hiring Specialists. ", "headingPath": "PLAYER GAME BOARDS · SPECIALIST GAME BOARD EXTENSIONS · T H E M A G I C I A N C A R D S · MAGICIAN POSTER CARDS · PLAYER MARKERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031778, "snippet": "1 Place the Arcanist board near the Main Game Board. Use the side with the Academy icon when playing with the Dahlgaard's Academy expansion. 2 Using a player's Permanent Assignment cards, randomly select one of the following: the Downtown, the Market Row, the Dark Alley, or the Academy (if playing w", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "This is done simultaneously by all players until everyone has either placed a face-down Assignment card below all of their Characters, or chooses not to place any more. Characters with no Assignment cards below them cannot be placed during the 'Place Characters' phase and will automatically be Idle ", "headingPath": "ASSIGNMENT PHASE · PL ACE CHARACTERS PHASE · I D L E C H A R A C T E R S · T H E A C T I O N P O I N T S Y S T E M", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GENERAL SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 301 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 301 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.92527 of 2489 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 12, 2026 18:51

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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	0.04866 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	0.048387 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	0.047371 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S	p.9	0.045462 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	COMPONENTS · ASSIGNMENT CARDS · WOODEN CHARACTER DISKS · MAIN GAME BOARD · DOWNTOWN DICE	p.4	0.044563 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PLAYER GAME BOARDS · SPECIALIST GAME BOARD EXTENSIONS · T H E M A G I C I A N C A R D S · MAGICIAN POSTER CARDS · PLAYER MARKERS	p.5	0.043503 (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 Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	0.031778 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	ASSIGNMENT PHASE · PL ACE CHARACTERS PHASE · I D L E C H A R A C T E R S · T H E A C T I O N P O I N T S Y S T E M	p.12	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

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 51 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 — 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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	#2	0.048387 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	#1	0.04866 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S	p.9	#4	0.045462 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	#12	0.027212 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	#3	0.047371 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	I M P O R TA N T · RULES OF TRICK MARKER PLACEMENT · T R I C K L I N K S	p.17	#9	0.028992 (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 Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E	p.3	#10	0.028083 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	#7	0.031778 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PERFORMANCE CARDS · P L A Y E R S E T U P · PLAYER GAME BOARD · ASSIGNMENT CARDS POSTER · ONE CHOSEN SPECIALIST · T R I C K & S Y M B O L M A R K E R S	p.9	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 79 ms · first delta 2905 ms · total 7837 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 79 ms · ask 7756 ms · gateway work 7837 ms · total 7837 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4126
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 721
tok/sec: 148.4 tok/sec — 721 output tokens in 4.859 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 229), 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.