Ruling — Dune: Imperium – Uprising

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Dune: Imperium – Uprisingbg-397598-en-1e

I looked through Dune: Imperium – Uprising'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 – Uprising — Rulebook · p.9 · PLAYER TURN - AGENT TURN · You can't send an Agent to a board space that already has one. · Board Space Costs

In an Agent turn, you play one card from your hand face up in front of you, using it to send an Agent from your Leader to an unoccupied space on the game board. This board space must have an icon in its upper left corner matching one of the Agent icons on the card. (Though Spies, explained on page 1

RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook · p.20 · ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS

Acquire. Some cards have a special acquire box, shown underneath their cost. You gain the eff ect here one time, at the moment you acquire the card (and not later, when you play it from your hand). Agent. From the Swordmaster space, you can gain your third Agent (that was placed next to the board du

RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook · p.11 · Spies

Across the board are various observation posts where players may place Spies. Each of these is connected to one or more board spaces. Whenever the Spy icon appears on a card or board space, you may place a Spy from your supply on an unoccupied observation post on the board. If you have no Spies in y

RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYER COMPONENTS

Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area (with the side shown face up), and then place the following components on it: Place the Shield Wall token in the marked area below the Spice Refi nery board space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of

RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook · p.14 · Acquiring Cards · COMBAT INTRIGUE CARDS

Combat is resolved during this phase, but fi rst, players have the chance to play Combat Intrigue cards. Starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise, each player with at least one unit in the Confl ict may play any number of Combat Intrigue cards, or may pass. Y

🔧 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 75 ms · ask 2166 ms · total 2242 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 2242 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 9, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "In an Agent turn, you play one card from your hand face up in front of you, using it to send an Agent from your Leader to an unoccupied space on the game board. This board space must have an icon in its upper left corner matching one of the Agent icons on the card. (Though Spies, explained on page 1", "headingPath": "PLAYER TURN - AGENT TURN · You can't send an Agent to a board space that already has one. · Board Space Costs", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "Acquire. Some cards have a special acquire box, shown underneath their cost. You gain the eff ect here one time, at the moment you acquire the card (and not later, when you play it from your hand). Agent. From the Swordmaster space, you can gain your third Agent (that was placed next to the board du", "headingPath": "ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Across the board are various observation posts where players may place Spies. Each of these is connected to one or more board spaces. Whenever the Spy icon appears on a card or board space, you may place a Spy from your supply on an unoccupied observation post on the board. If you have no Spies in y", "headingPath": "Spies", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.044604, "snippet": "Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area (with the side shown face up), and then place the following components on it: Place the Shield Wall token in the marked area below the Spice Refi nery board space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of", "headingPath": "PLAYER COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.044408, "snippet": "Combat is resolved during this phase, but fi rst, players have the chance to play Combat Intrigue cards. Starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise, each player with at least one unit in the Confl ict may play any number of Combat Intrigue cards, or may pass. Y", "headingPath": "Acquiring Cards · COMBAT INTRIGUE CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.042351, "snippet": "Trash one card from your hand, discard pile, or in play. Return it to the game box; it won't be used for the rest of the game. (Reserve cards are returned to their stack in the Reserve instead.) Trashing is optional unless it's paying a cost, or if a card directs you to trash itself. Troop. Recruit ", "headingPath": "ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.041317, "snippet": "1 The Persuasion you gain during a round is used during your Reveal turn to acquire new cards for your deck. You may acquire any of the fi ve cards in the Imperium Row, or Prepare the Way or The Spice Must Flow from the Reserve. The cost to acquire a card is shown at the top right of that card. You ", "headingPath": "Acquiring Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each player takes a 10-card starting deck, shuffl es it, and places it face down in their supply to the left of their Leader. Games for one, two, or six players require additional setup. For details, see the separate rules supplements: Rivals or Six-Player Games. Each player takes 1 water and places", "headingPath": "PLAYER COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 253}]

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 253 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 253 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 14, 2026 14:31

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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER TURN - AGENT TURN · You can't send an Agent to a board space that already has one. · Board Space Costs	p.9	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
#2	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS	p.20	0.046642 (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 – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	Spies	p.11	0.045455 (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 – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.4	0.044604 (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 – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	Acquiring Cards · COMBAT INTRIGUE CARDS	p.14	0.044408 (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 – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS	p.20	0.042351 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	Acquiring Cards	p.13	0.041317 (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 – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER 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

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 36 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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.4	#4	0.044604 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER TURN - AGENT TURN · You can't send an Agent to a board space that already has one. · Board Space Costs	p.9	#1	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
#3	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	Spies · REVEAL CARDS · RESOLVE REVEAL EFFECTS · Setting Your Strength · CLEAN UP	p.12	#12	0.027826 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	CHOAM MODULE · SETUP · TAKING CONTRACTS	p.16	#13	0.02712 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS	p.20	#2	0.046642 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	Acquiring Cards · COMBAT INTRIGUE CARDS	p.14	#5	0.044408 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	ICON GUIDE AND ADDITIONAL TERMS	p.20	#11	0.02895 (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 Dune: Imperium – Uprising — Rulebook (corpus doc 253)	PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.5	#8	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 75 ms · first delta 2146 ms · total 2242 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 75 ms · ask 2166 ms · gateway work 2242 ms · total 2242 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3593
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 195.7 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.046 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 21s 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: 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

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 179), 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.