Ruling — Inferno

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You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Infernobg-393165-en-1e

Standard setup involves the following steps:

1. Place the board on the side matching the number of players.[1]

2. Randomly place the 8 locations in Florence, each on an outline matching its shape.[1]

3. For each player, place a set of four different Guests in the PALACE location.[1]

4. Create a supply of Souls, Florins, Drachmas, and "½ Diplomas" near the central board.[1]

5. Place Dante on the step of his path corresponding to the number of $\text{players}$.[1]

6. If playing a 3-player game, place Dante on the last step before the River Acheron.[1]

7. Place a Shortcut on the depicted position of Dante's path.[1]

8. Place the 8 Phlegethon cubes on their marked spaces on the board.[1]

9. Shuffle the gold and silver bonuses and place them on the board, covering the printed bonuses.[1]

10. Select one Black and one Red Guardian card at random, and place them face-up near the game board.[1]

11. Choose Medusa and Minos.[1]

12. Place the standees for the chosen Guardians in shields in Hell, as shown on their cards.[1]

Additional setup steps for specific components include:

1. Place Minos' standee in the far-right shield of the PURPLE circle.[2]

2. Place Cerberus' standee in the far-right shield of the GREEN circle.[2]

3. Place Minotaur's standee in the far-right shield of the RED circle.[2]

4. Place Medusa's standee in the far-left shield of the YELLOW circle.[3]

5. Place Antaeus' standee in the far-left shield of the ICE BLUE circle.[3]

6. Place Geryon's standee in the far-left shield of the GRAY circle.[3]

For the "Apprentice" variant setup:

1. Place an individual player board in front of you, with one floor of each Tower level (1-4).[4]

2. Choose a player color and take all player components belonging to that color.[4]

3. Take a matching-colored tile for Minos, Antaeus, or Minotaur if any were chosen in Step 9.[4]

4. Shuffle the Family deck and deal one card to each player, returning unused cards to the box.[4]

5. Take the Resources indicated on the card.[4]

6. Place any coins and Fraud cards in your play area, then place any Nobles, Urchins, Tower floors, Barrels and Guests on your player board.[4]

7. Use the Apprentice deck instead.[4]

8. Advance on 1 or 2 Sin Tracks based on your family card.[4]

9. Place a Skull on the first space of the indicated Sin Track(s).[4]

10. Place the Boats at the starting position of the Loan track.[4]

11. Shuffle the Plague cards into a face-up deck.[4]

12. Move the Souls shown on the topmost card to the Graveyard, then move that card to the bottom of the deck, face-up.[4]

13. Place the Infamy tokens at the starting position of the Infamy track.[4]

14. Place 2 Skulls on the first spaces of the Sin Tracks indicated in your Apprentice card.[4]

15. For each player, place one Barrel of each color in the MARKET.[4]

16. Shuffle the remaining Fraud cards into a face-down deck near the central board and reveal the first 3 cards face-up as the Fraud card market.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.4 · INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME

[2] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.23 · BLACK GUARDIANS

[3] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.22 · RED GUARDIANS

[4] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.5 · SETUP

Settled. Play 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 209 ms · ask 7527 ms · total 7738 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7738 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "- 2 - COMPONENTS ................................................................... 3 GAME SETUP ....................................................................... 4 HOW TO PLAY ..................................................................... 6 GAME BOARDS ................................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "If this is your first game, we recommend implementing a few adjustments to the standard setup. They are indicated by this symbol: Place the board on the side matching the number of players: Or Regardless of the number of players, place the board on the side matching the icon: Randomly place the 8 lo", "headingPath": "INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047493, "snippet": "If the selected Guardians include Medusa, Geryon, or Cerberus, add their respective elements to the supply, within everyone's reach. Place an individual player board in front of you, with one floor of each Tower level (1-4). This is your personal play area. Choose a player color. Take all player com", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Setup: Place Medusa's standee in the far-left shield of the YELLOW circle. Leave the Petrified Souls near the playing area. How to play: Move the standee to an empty shield. Choose a Soul from an adjacent shield, remove it, and place a Petrified Soul in its place. Listen to her voice, but avoid her ", "headingPath": "RED GUARDIANS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "Use these setup variants to increase player interaction in your games: Before placing Guests at the PALACE , randomly remove from the game as many Guests as there are players. Example: In a 3-player game you would pick 12 Guests (3 of each color), and then randomly remove 3 of any color(s). Leave th", "headingPath": "VARIANTS · DIPLOMATIC CRISIS · TIME OF THIEVES · DANTE'S RUSH · CHANGES TO SETUP · RULE CHANGES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Setup: Place Minos' standee in the far-right shield of the PURPLE circle. Leave the Tail token of your color in your play area. How to play: Move the standee to an empty shield. Place your Tail token to the right of the circle, on the Infamy points symbol. You cannot place your Tail if there is alre", "headingPath": "BLACK GUARDIANS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Your family members start the game at home on your player board. Over the course of the game you will take them to different locations in Florence to perform actions. At some point you will use one of them to accuse a sinner (by choice or by having no family members left at home). When this happens,", "headingPath": "Manage your family", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Move Dante to his next step (shortcuts must be bypassed) and receive the reward that matches one of the icons below: » Place a cream-colored Soul in the Graveyard. It belongs to a pagan. Like any other Soul, it will score points when taken to its corresponding circle (the first one). Additionally, y", "headingPath": "5.\t Move Dante :", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "BLACK GUARDIANS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 22, "quote": null, "headingPath": "RED GUARDIANS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1019 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1019 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 0.88400 of 2431 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 28, 2026 08:32 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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)		p.2	0.048139 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME	p.4	0.047883 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	SETUP	p.5	0.047493 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	RED GUARDIANS	p.22	0.046898 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	VARIANTS · DIPLOMATIC CRISIS · TIME OF THIEVES · DANTE'S RUSH · CHANGES TO SETUP · RULE CHANGES	p.18	0.046176 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	BLACK GUARDIANS	p.23	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
#7	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	Manage your family	p.6	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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	5. Move Dante :	p.14	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))	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 48 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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME	p.4	#2	0.047883 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	VARIANTS · DIPLOMATIC CRISIS · TIME OF THIEVES · DANTE'S RUSH · CHANGES TO SETUP · RULE CHANGES	p.18	#5	0.046176 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	BLACK GUARDIANS	p.23	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	CHALLENGE 2 - THE BLACK DEATH · · ADDITIONAL VICTORY REQUIREMENT	p.20	#9	0.028485 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	Manage your family	p.6	#7	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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)		p.2	#1	0.048139 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	SETUP	p.5	#3	0.047493 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	RED GUARDIANS	p.22	#4	0.046898 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	BLACK GUARDIANS	p.23	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	RED GUARDIANS	p.22	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	SETUP	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 209 ms · first delta 3630 ms · total 7738 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 209 ms · ask 7527 ms · gateway work 7738 ms · total 7738 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3057
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 814
tok/sec: 201.1 tok/sec — 814 output tokens in 4.047 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s 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 0s 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: 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 949), 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.