You asked
How do I setup the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Dune: Imperiumbg-316554-en-1e
Answered before
This question didn't get an answer just now — but Dune: Imperium has been asked something like it before. The corpus may have changed since, so check the date and the answerer on each one before you rule from it.
I looked through Dune: Imperium'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.
Want to enhance your DUNE: IMPERIUM experience? Check out the Dire Wolf Game Room companion app for your PC, smartphone or tablet. Each player takes 1 water and places it in their supply. Create a bank next to the game board containing the Solari, spice, and remaining water tokens. These are not mea
Select a difficulty level from the chart at the right. Choose two Leaders, one for each Rival. During the game, these Rivals will use only the Signet ability on their Leaders, ignoring the ability on the left. Your opponents can't play Paul Atreides or Helena Richese. (For your first solo game, Earl
In a two-player game, a third, Rival player, House Hagal, competes against you and your opponent, serving a spoiler role. It operates by its own set of rules. It doesn't collect resources, build a deck, earn rewards, or score Victory Points. It does, however, use the House Hagal cards as described e
Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area, and then place the following components on it: Place the Mentat on its side in the Mentat space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of the Faction's Influence tracks (Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gess
You start the game with a 10-card deck containing the same cards as the other players. Adding to and changing that deck is the key element of play in a deck-building game. During each round, you may acquire new cards to add to your deck. Because cards do many different things, each player's deck and
🔧 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 96 ms · ask 2925 ms · total 3024 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3024 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Want to enhance your DUNE: IMPERIUM experience? Check out the Dire Wolf Game Room companion app for your PC, smartphone or tablet. Each player takes 1 water and places it in their supply. Create a bank next to the game board containing the Solari, spice, and remaining water tokens. These are not mea", "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Select a difficulty level from the chart at the right. Choose two Leaders, one for each Rival. During the game, these Rivals will use only the Signet ability on their Leaders, ignoring the ability on the left. Your opponents can't play Paul Atreides or Helena Richese. (For your first solo game, Earl", "headingPath": "setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "In a two-player game, a third, Rival player, House Hagal, competes against you and your opponent, serving a spoiler role. It operates by its own set of rules. It doesn't collect resources, build a deck, earn rewards, or score Victory Points. It does, however, use the House Hagal cards as described e", "headingPath": "two-plAyer GAmes", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Do you prefer to learn by watching a video? Place the game board in your play area, and then place the following components on it: Place the Mentat on its side in the Mentat space. Place the four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of the Faction's Influence tracks (Emperor, Spacing Guild, Bene Gess", "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "You start the game with a 10-card deck containing the same cards as the other players. Adding to and changing that deck is the key element of play in a deck-building game. During each round, you may acquire new cards to add to your deck. Because cards do many different things, each player's deck and", "headingPath": "deck buIldInG", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the start of each round, the current Conflict card is revealed, offering rewards for which the players will compete in Combat. Whenever the cube icon appears on a card or board space, you recruit one troop. Take a troop from your supply and place it in your garrison on the game board. (If you run", "headingPath": "Deploying Troops to the Conflict", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Each round begins by revealing a new Conflict card from the top of the Conflict Deck. Place it face up in the space next to the Conflict Deck (on top of any Conflict cards from previous rounds). Next, each player draws five cards from their own deck, forming their hand for the round.", "headingPath": "phAse 1: round stArt", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "Acquire. Some cards have a special acquire box, shown underneath their cost. You gain the effect here one time, at the moment you acquire the card (and not later, when you play it from your hand). Acquire a Foldspace card from the Reserve. Agent. From the Swordmaster space, you can gain your third A", "headingPath": "Icon GuIde And AddItIonAl terms", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}]
- 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 87 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 87 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
past answered rulings were found and offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- ruling 942 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 685 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- ruling 525 — matched by the same question (normalized, punctuation folded) — measured similarity 1.0
- debug row retained until
- Nov 15, 2026 05:53
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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | GAme components | p.5 | 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | setup | p.20 | 0.047131 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | two-plAyer GAmes | p.19 | 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | GAme components | p.4 | 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 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | deck buIldInG | p.6 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | Deploying Troops to the Conflict | p.10 | 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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | phAse 1: round stArt | p.8 | 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)) | 284 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | Icon GuIde And AddItIonAl terms | p.16 | 0.030018 (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 | heading | page | fused rank | fused RRF score | carried by | how it got its slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | setup | p.20 | #2 | 0.047131 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | GAme components | p.4 | #4 | 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | deck buIldInG | p.6 | #5 | 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)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | Swordmaster | p.18 | #10 | 0.027501 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | AGents | p.6 | #9 | 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 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | Icon GuIde And AddItIonAl terms | p.16 | #8 | 0.030018 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | GAme components | p.5 | #1 | 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) | vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87) | two-plAyer GAmes | p.19 | #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
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 96 ms · first delta 2936 ms · total 3024 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 96 ms · ask 2925 ms · gateway work 3024 ms · total 3024 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 2564
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 200.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.045 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s 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
- 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)
-
setup
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 18), 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.