Ruling — Imperium: Horizons

← Imperium: Horizons

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Imperium: Horizonsbg-367518-en-1e

The game is played over an indeterminate number of rounds.[1] The sequence of play is as follows:

1. The player to the left of the Solstice token takes the first turn.[1]

2. Turn order proceeds to the left.[1]

3. During a turn, you declare what type of turn you are taking: Activate, Innovate, or Revolt.[1]

4. If taking an "Activate" turn, you can take Actions and use Exhaust abilities in any order and any combination.[1]

5. To take an Action, you must first set aside an $\text{A}$ token from your State card; you cannot take an Action if you have no $\text{A}$ tokens on your State card (with a few exceptions).[1]

6. The most common Action is playing a card from your hand into your Play area and resolving its effects according to the card text.[1]

7. Once you have finished resolving your chosen turn type, you Clean-up.[1]

8. After Clean-up, the player to your left takes their turn.[1]

9. If the Solstice token is between you and the player to your left, all players resolve all their Solstice effects before the next round begins.[1]

10. Solstice is always the last thing to happen each round.[1]

11. Play continues until either Scoring or Collapse is triggered, which signals the end of the game.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook · p.14

🔧 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 90 ms · ask 5996 ms · total 6089 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6089 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 38, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "38 FIND Search the following areas for the card(s) specified in this order: 1. Your hand 2. Your Discard pile 3. Your Draw deck 4. Your Nation deck (excluding your card). Some cards may explicitly instruct you to only search in some of these areas, or to include cards in play or cards in your Histor", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045945, "snippet": "5 Using this Rulebook Imperium is a game meant to be played many times. It has a large number of possible game combinations available in each box (especially Horizons) and it can be daunting to learn the rules while also choosing between so many options and reading so many exceptions to the rules. T", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "ACTIVATE INNOVATE REVOLTOR OR 14 Flow of Play The game is played over an indeterminate number of rounds. Each round starts with the player to the left of the Solstice token taking the first turn. Turn order proceeds to the left. Play continues until either Scoring or Collapse is triggered, which sig", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "When an effect instructs you to place a card into your History, place a card (from your hand, unless indicated otherwise) underneath your Power card. Cards in your History are out of play, and they cannot be interacted with unless a card effect specifies otherwise. They still score victory points. Y", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.042744, "snippet": "Play this . Exile a card from the market. If this card has , discard the top card of the bot deck and gain 1 . Reveal the top of the main deck. If a is revealed, resolve it; if the card is not a , put it into history. Discard the top card of the bot deck. Gain 1 per / the bot has in play. Spend 2 to", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.042616, "snippet": "24 Optional Rules & Gameplay Variants Practice mode (solo) If you are learning the game, or you wish to familiarise yourself with a new Nation, Practice mode is the streamlined way to do that. It is a type of Solo mode (see page 28), but with no Bot to play against. This allows you to concentrate on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.039851, "snippet": "Check difficulty levels on page 32 for what these are. If playing with the Trade Routes expansion, place the Merchants card besides their State card to indicate its Merchant state. You will also need the Trade Routes table (see back page). All symbols and text on the Bot’s Merchant Power card (inclu", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.038069, "snippet": "28 SETUP .....................................................29 HOW TO PLAY .........................................29 CHANGES TO GAMEPLAY DURING SOLO PLAY ...............................30 GAME END ..............................................32 DIFFICULTY LEVELS ...............................3", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 771}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 771 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 771 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 0.89990 of 999 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 05:05

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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.38	0.048652 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.5	0.045945 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.14	0.045037 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.38	0.045009 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.28	0.042744 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.24	0.042616 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.29	0.039851 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.3	0.038069 (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 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 at	document	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.5	#2	0.045945 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.11	#18	0.025152 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.13	#12	0.025978 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.14	#16	0.025307 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.13	#27	0.022245 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.39	#23	0.023133 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.29	#7	0.039851 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)	p.14	#3	0.045037 (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 Imperium: Horizons — Rulebook (corpus doc 771)		p.14	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 90 ms · first delta 4532 ms · total 6089 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 90 ms · ask 5996 ms · gateway work 6089 ms · total 6089 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4755
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 307
tok/sec: 203.9 tok/sec — 307 output tokens in 1.506 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 40s 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 705), 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.