Ruling — Shards of Infinity

← Shards of Infinity

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Shards of Infinitybg-244115-en-1e

### Setup

1. Randomly determine which player goes first; play proceeds in a clockwise direction.[1]

2. Each player uses a character card to track Health and Mastery.[1]

3. Each player begins with 50 Health.[1]

4. Players begin with different amounts of Power: the first player starts with 0, and each subsequent player receives 1 more than the previous player.[1]

5. Each player shuffles their own starting deck (consisting of seven Crystals, one Shard Reactor, one Blaster, and one Infinity Shard) and draws five cards.[1]

6. Shuffle all black-bordered cards face down to form the center deck.[1]

7. Flip six cards face up in a row between all players to form the center row.[1]

8. Place the center deck on one side of the center row.[1]

### Turn Structure

Each turn is broken down into three phases, including a Play Phase.[2]

**Play Phase Actions** (can be taken in any order):

1. Play cards from your hand to gain resources, effects, or other benefits.[2]

* Playing a card means taking it from your hand and putting it in your Play Zone.[3]

* When playing an Ally, announce its effect and follow instructions from top to bottom.[3]

* When playing a Champion, it remains in your Play Zone from turn to turn.[4]

* You may fast-play any number of Mercenaries by paying their cost and putting them into the Play Zone to gain their effect immediately.[2][5]

2. Exhaust Champions to gain their effects.[2] To exhaust a champion, turn it sideways; each may only be exhausted once per turn.[4]

3. Recruit any number of Allies, Champions, or Mercenaries by paying their cost.[2] Once recruited, place them into your discard pile.[2]

4. Use your Character's focus ability once per turn by spending 1 to gain 1 Mastery.[2][3]

5. Use Power to destroy Champions.[2][5]

**End of Turn**:

1. Discard any cards left in your hand.[2]

2. Draw 5 new cards for your next turn.[2]

3. Reset all Champions you control so they are ready to be used again.[4]

4. Cards in the Play Zone go to your discard pile at the end of your turn (except for Champions).[2][6]

### General Rules

* **Deck Depletion**: If your personal deck is empty and you need to draw or reveal a card, shuffle your discard pile to replenish it.[2] If you run out during a multi-card draw, shuffle the discard pile mid-draw.[2]

* **Center Row**: Whenever a card leaves the center row, replace it immediately from the center deck before anything else occurs.[2]

* **Card Text**: If card text contradicts the rules, follow the card text.[2]

* **Winning**: The last player with Health remaining wins the game.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.3 · GETTING STARTED · Contents · SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.5 · General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase

[3] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.11 · Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus

[4] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.10 · Champion Cards

[5] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.15 · GLOSSARY

[6] RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook · p.8 · Ally Cards

Rule found, game on.

🔧 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 89 ms · ask 7429 ms · total 22887 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 15366 ms · generation 7521 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 11, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Playing a card means to take it from your hand and put it in front of you in your Play Zone. When playing an Ally card, announce its effect, and follow the instructions on the card in order from top to bottom. Any choices required by the card must be made at that time and any conditionals must alrea", "headingPath": "Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "To play a card from your hand, place it face up in front of you in your Play Zone. Cards in the Play Zone don't go to your discard pile until the end of your turn. At any time, if your personal deck is empty and you need to draw a card or reveal a card from the top of your deck, shuffle all cards in", "headingPath": "General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046452, "snippet": "Champions are recruited just like Allies and go to your discard pile once recruited. Unlike Allies, once a Champion has been played it stays in your Play Zone from turn to turn. Champions go to the discard pile only when they've been dealt damage equal to their or destroyed by a card's effect. You c", "headingPath": "Champion Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "When you recruit an Ally, it becomes a part of your deck for the rest of the game, but you need to wait until you draw it to gain its effect. Sometimes, you need an effect immediately, and that is where Mercenaries come in. In addition to having the option to recruit a Mercenary just like other alli", "headingPath": "Mercenary Allies · Name", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045335, "snippet": "You can recruit Allies when they are in the center row by paying their cost and putting them into your discard pile. You can play any number of Ally cards from your hand each turn. When you play an Ally from your hand, gain the effect listed on the card. If an ally has multiple effects, perform them", "headingPath": "Ally Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "Ƿ Assign any remaining to attack your opponents. Damage does not have to be assigned evenly between opponents. Ƿ After all damage is assigned, players who are attacked may reveal any number of cards with Shields ( ) from their hand to prevent damage equal to the number in the icon of the revealed ca", "headingPath": "2. Attack Phase · 3. End Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Allies: Allies are the champions you can recruit to aid you. When you play an Ally from your hand, you gain the effect listed on the card. It goes to your discard pile at the end of your turn. Banish: When a card is banished, it is placed in the banish pile (removed from the game). Champions: After ", "headingPath": "GLOSSARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Some cards allow you to gain . Once is gained, increase your on your Character Card by the amount stated. Player cannot go above 50 . When a card tells you to banish a card from your hand and/or your discard pile, you may put a card from that zone into your banished pile. Cards in your banished pile", "headingPath": "Gaining Health ( ) · Banishing Cards · Ending Your Turn · Game End", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GETTING STARTED · Contents · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Champion Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GLOSSARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Ally Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 689}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 689 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 689 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 0.88349 of 2120 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 23, 2026 17:00 UTC

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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus	p.11	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
#2	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase	p.5	0.047938 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Champion Cards	p.10	0.046452 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Mercenary Allies · Name	p.9	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
#5	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Ally Cards	p.8	0.045335 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	2. Attack Phase · 3. End Phase	p.6	0.045055 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	GLOSSARY	p.15	0.044796 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Gaining Health ( ) · Banishing Cards · Ending Your Turn · Game End	p.13	0.044796 (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 16 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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase	p.5	#2	0.047938 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Champion Cards	p.10	#3	0.046452 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus	p.11	#1	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
#4	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	GETTING STARTED · Contents · SETUP	p.3	#12	0.028382 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	GLOSSARY	p.15	#7	0.044796 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Q: If I play Cache Warden and it gains me my 10th , do I draw a card from its bonus? · Q: When I exhaust Systema AI, do I gain the Mastery Threshold Bonus listed beneath the exhaust text? · Q: Can I use Shields to defend Champions? · Q: If I fast-play a Spore Cleric, does it count as an Undergrowth Ally played for purposes of Unify and Dominion? · Q: Do I discard shield cards from my hand when I use them to prevent damage? · Q: Can I use multiple shield cards to prevent damage? · …	p.14	#10	0.029324 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)		p.14	#9	0.029762 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Ally Cards	p.8	#5	0.045335 (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 Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	GETTING STARTED · Contents · SETUP	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	General Rules · Turn Breakdown · 1. Play Phase	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Playing Cards · Gaining Mastery ( ) · Mastery Threshold Bonus	p.11	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Champion Cards	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	GLOSSARY	p.15	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Shards of Infinity — Rulebook (corpus doc 689)	Ally Cards	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 2478 ms · total 22887 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 15366 ms · retrieval 89 ms · ask 7429 ms · gateway work 7521 ms · total 22887 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3157
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 654
tok/sec: 131.0 tok/sec — 654 output tokens in 4.992 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 33s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 60h, checked 1s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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 622), 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.