Ruling — Trickerion: Legends of Illusion

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trickerion: Legends of Illusionbg-163068-en-1e

The game is played through a series of turns, following these phases:

1. **Roll Dice**: Roll the six Downtown dice and place them on the Downtown Location.[1]

2. **Set Initiative Order**: Rearrange the Initiative Order according to the opposite of the Fame point ranking of each player (the player with the fewest Fame points takes the first position); this phase is skipped in the first turn.[1]

3. **Advertise**: Players may receive 2 Fame points once by paying 1-4 Coins depending on their position in the Initiative Order.[1]

4. **Assignment Phase**: Players simultaneously plan the upcoming ‘Place Characters’ phase by placing Assignment cards from their hands face down below their Characters.[1]

5. **Place Characters Phase**: All Assignment cards are revealed, and following the Initiative Order, players place their Characters at the Location specified on the Assignment card below them, one at a time.[1]

**End Turn Phase**

The 'End Turn' phase consists of eight sub-phases:

1. **Pay Wages**: Each player pays 1 Coin for each of their non-Idle Apprentices (except for the one on the Assistant's Board Extension) and 2 Coins for each of their non-Idle Specialists; players who cannot pay lose 2 Fame for each Coin not paid, to a minimum of 0.[2]

2. **Return Characters**: Return every Character to its owner's Game Board, including those hired during the Place Characters phase; if a new Specialist was hired, add its respective Board Extension to its owner's Game Board.[2]

3. **Orders Arrive**: Move all Components from the Order area to the respective slots in the Buy area, replacing existing components which are returned to the supply; the Component in the Quick Order slot is also returned to the supply; move all Performance cards one slot around the Theater in a clockwise direction; from the third turn onward, discard the last Performance card, return all Trick markers on it to their owners' supply, and place the top card of the Performance deck face up on the leftmost empty slot; return all Magician Posters to their owners' hands.[2]

4. **Move Turn Counter**: Advance the Trickerion Stone token one step forward on the Turn Counter track.[2]

5. **Move Prophecies**: (If playing with the Dark Alley) Discard the Active Prophecy, move the leftmost Pending Prophecy into the Active Prophecy slot, move the remaining Pending Prophecies one slot clockwise, and draw a new one from the pile to place face up on the rightmost Prophecy slot.[2]

6. **Discard Special Assignment Cards**: (If playing with the Dark Alley) Place all used Special Assignment cards face down at the bottom of their respective decks; return all face-down cards below Idle Characters to their owner's hand.[2]

**Game End and Scoring**

* The game ends at the end of the seventh turn (or the fifth turn if playing without the Dark Alley).[3]

* Final scoring involves collecting Fame points based on acquired assets.[3]

* Scoring includes: 1 Fame for each unspent Trickerion Shard; 1 Fame per 3 leftover Coins; 2 Fame for each Apprentice (only if playing without the Dark Alley); 3 Fame for each Specialist (only if playing without the Dark Alley); and 2 Fame for each leftover Special Assignment card in hand (only if playing with the Dark Alley).[3]

* Players may also gain Fame for Level 3 Tricks if their Component requirements are met.[3]

* The maximum extra Fame from these categories and Level 3 Tricks is limited to 20.[3]

* The player with the most Fame points wins; in the event of a tie, the player ahead in the Initiative Order wins.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.10

[2] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.19 · END TURN PHASE

[3] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook · p.20 · GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:

🔧 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 84 ms · ask 6784 ms · total 6871 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6871 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048916, "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": 9, "score": 0.046642, "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": 20, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "The game ends at the end of the seventh turn. At this point, final scoring occurs, where players can collect further Fame points based on the assets they acquired throughout the game. If playing without the Dark Alley, the game ends at the end of the fifth turn. 1 Fame for each unspent Trickerion Sh", "headingPath": "GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045956, "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": 16, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Tricks on the Engineer's Trick slot receive 1 additional Trick marker when Prepared. The following Actions become available when the respective Specialist is hired. They can be taken by any Character, not only the Specialist. Remember: The Specialists' Trick/Component/Apprentice slots are better tha", "headingPath": "I M P O R TA N T", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "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": 10, "score": 0.030303, "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": 4, "score": 0.029437, "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}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "END TURN PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}, {"page": 20, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:", "sharpsignalDocId": 301}]
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 0.91940 of 2953 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 04:47

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)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	0.048916 (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)	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	0.046642 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:	p.20	0.046244 (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)	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	0.045956 (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)	I M P O R TA N T	p.16	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
#6	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		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
#8	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	COMPONENTS · ASSIGNMENT CARDS · WOODEN CHARACTER DISKS · MAIN GAME BOARD · DOWNTOWN DICE	p.4	0.029437 (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 37 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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GENERAL SETUP	p.8	#1	0.048916 (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)	L O C A T I O N S	p.13	#11	0.027433 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	END TURN PHASE	p.19	#10	0.027971 (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 Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	PROPHECIES	p.6	#13	0.025131 (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	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT CARDS	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
#7	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:	p.20	#3	0.046244 (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
#8	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	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)		p.10	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	END TURN PHASE	p.19	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Legends of Illusion — Rulebook (corpus doc 301)	GAME END · E X A M P L E · I M P O R TA N T:	p.20	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 84 ms · first delta 2837 ms · total 6871 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 84 ms · ask 6784 ms · gateway work 6871 ms · total 6871 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3151
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 797
tok/sec: 200.3 tok/sec — 797 output tokens in 3.979 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 25s 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: 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 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.