Ruling — Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game

← Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Gamebg-380135-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these procedures:

**Biome Setup**

1. Set up the 1a Mutation board, the 1b Annexe board, the 1c Combat board, and the 1d Biome board as shown.[1]

2. Place the Combat Round marker on the 2 line on the Combat board.[1]

3. Place the Damage, Shield, Tooth, Cell, and State tokens in supplies near the board.[1]

4. Place the 3 Upgrade decks, the Well deck, and the Deck of Secrets face-down, with Card 01 on the bottom of the pile and the last (double-sided) card on the top.[1]

5. Prepare the Biome's components by taking all the cards (Monster cards, Elite Monster cards, and Blueprint cards) from the Prisoners' Quarters section of the central compartment, all tiles from the Prisoners' Quarters small compartment, and the Equipment card deck.[1]

6. Shuffle and place the Monster cards on their space.[1]

7. Shuffle and place the Elite Monster cards on their space.[1]

8. Place the Blueprint cards on their space.[1]

9. Shuffle and place the Equipment cards on their space.[1]

10. Shuffle and place all the Prisoner's Quarters tiles face down at random on the spaces on the Biome board, according to their shape.[1]

11. Place the Group token on the starting space at the far left of the Biome board.[1]

**Player Setup**

1. Each player takes the Beheaded board of the Beheaded they would like to play and returns any unused Beheaded to the box.[2]

2. Take a Scroll marker in each colour (green, purple, red) and place each one on the first scroll space of their colour.[2]

3. Place the Maximum Health token on the 4th Heart from the left on the Health Track.[2]

4. Take the deck of Combat cards for your Beheaded, shuffle it, and deal yourself 3 cards, keeping them hidden from other players; place the remainder to the left of the Beheaded board to form a Draw Pile.[2]

5. Give each player their associated Beheaded Aid card.[2]

6. Give the First Player token to the player of your choice.[2]

**Combat Setup**

Once an Encounter tile has been flipped, follow the icons on it from top to bottom:

1. Place Enemies: Draw a card from the Monster (or Elite Monster) deck for each icon of that type on the Encounter tile and place the cards face up, one at a time, onto the Combat board in the same order as they appear on the Encounter tile, always starting on the space.[3]

2. Place the indicated token(s) on the Group space on the Combat board.[3]

3. If the token is an Equipment card, draw a card from the Equipment deck and place it face up on the Group space.[3]

4. If the token is a Blueprint, draw a Blueprint card from the bottom of the Blueprint deck and place it face up on the Group space.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.4 · IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD

[2] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD

[3] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.8 · COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 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 198 ms · ask 5945 ms · total 6145 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6145 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "1 Each player takes the Beheaded board of the Beheaded they would like to play. Return any unused Beheaded to the box. 2 Take a Scroll marker in each colour (green, purple, red) and place each one on the first scroll space of their colour, as indicated. 3 Place the Maximum Health token on the 4 th H", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Once you've set up the Combat board according to the directions on the Encounter tile, you're ready to fight! Before each Combat, there is a brief Preparation Phase in which players outline their overall strategy . There are 3 rules for this discussion period: When we say this discussion should be b", "headingPath": "COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "Once you have moved your Group token to a new space, you must flip the tile on that space, and carry out its effects. All the tiles you will come across in the game are listed below. Treasure Tile (a): Flip the tile and collect the reward(s). Cursed Treasure Tile (b) : Flip the tile, collect the rew", "headingPath": "2. FLIP AND REVEAL · TREASURE AND CURSED TREASURE TILES: · MERCHANT TILES: · ENCOUNTER AND ELITE ENCOUNTER TILES · DOOR TILE · TELEPORTATION TILE · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Once you have flipped the Encounter tile, follow the icons on it from top to bottom. 1 Place Enemies Draw a card from the Monster (or Elite Monster) deck for each icon of that type on the Encounter tile. Place the cards face up, one at a time, onto the Combat board in the same order as they appear o", "headingPath": "COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Never shuffle any decks showing the symbol. These cards must stay in the same order. If they do get mixed up, they are all identified with a letter and a number so that they can be replaced in the correct order. Set up the 1a Mutation board , the 1b Annexe board , the 1c Combat board and the 1d Biom", "headingPath": "IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Place the items listed below in their designated spaces.", "headingPath": "FIRST-TIME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "As soon as this icon is revealed, the First Player token passes to the next player in clockwise order. It is always the first action to take place. EITHER / OR You can't have it all, you know . When you see this line, you have to choose ONE of the items listed. If one of the choices is a Check, you ", "headingPath": "CHANGE FIRST PLAYER Long live me: The new King! · CELL · RUNE What a strange glow...", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Mutation Board is where you will put cards bought with Cells at the end of your Run. It is also the way the Group's progress is saved from one Run to another. Cards here are permanent and are not lost when your Group dies at the end of a Run. 5 Your Group may gain Runes over the course of a Run.", "headingPath": "THE MUTATION BOARD · Runes · Start of Game · During Game · Skill · Boss Cells · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1293 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1293 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 0.90837 of 2150 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 28, 2026 21:07 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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game	p.10	0.047643 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	2. FLIP AND REVEAL · TREASURE AND CURSED TREASURE TILES: · MERCHANT TILES: · ENCOUNTER AND ELITE ENCOUNTER TILES · DOOR TILE · TELEPORTATION TILE · …	p.7	0.045285 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)	p.8	0.032787 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD	p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	FIRST-TIME SETUP	p.3	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))	56
#7	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	CHANGE FIRST PLAYER Long live me: The new King! · CELL · RUNE What a strange glow...	p.7	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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE MUTATION BOARD · Runes · Start of Game · During Game · Skill · Boss Cells · …	p.14	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

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 42 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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)	p.8	#4	0.032787 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING	p.13	#9	0.029274 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game	p.10	#2	0.047643 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	2. FLIP AND REVEAL · TREASURE AND CURSED TREASURE TILES: · MERCHANT TILES: · ENCOUNTER AND ELITE ENCOUNTER TILES · DOOR TILE · TELEPORTATION TILE · …	p.7	#3	0.045285 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	EQUIPMENT CARDS · Equipping Yourself: · EQUIPMENT IN COMBAT · TIMED EQUIPMENT · +: More!! · ALWAYS ACTIVE EQUIPMENT · …	p.12	#11	0.014493 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD	p.4	#5	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
#7	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	FIRST-TIME SETUP	p.3	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	IMPORTANT · BIOME SETUP · THE ANNEXE BOARD · THE BIOME BOARD	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT SETUP · Place Loot (if present on tile)	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 198 ms · first delta 2711 ms · total 6145 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 198 ms · ask 5945 ms · gateway work 6145 ms · total 6145 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3269
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 670
tok/sec: 201.0 tok/sec — 670 output tokens in 3.333 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 54s 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 9s 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 1223), 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.