Ruling — Mage Knight Board Game

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Mage Knight Board Gamebg-96848-en-1e

To set up the game, follow these steps: 1. Choose scenario and variants [1]. 2. Players choose Heroes [1]. 3. Put one Shield token on the 0 space of the Fame track and one on the central 0 space of the Reputation track [2][3]. 4. Sort enemy (round) and ruin (hexagonal) tokens by the reverse side, and stack them in seven face down piles, leaving a space next to each pile for discarded tokens [2][3]. 5. Shuffle the Artifacts and put them in a face down deck [2]. 6. Stack all Wound cards in a face up pile [2]. 7. Shuffle the Spell cards and put them in a face down deck, then reveal the first three as the offer [2]. 8. Prepare the Advanced Action deck and offer in the same way as for Spells [2]. 9. Create an empty area for Common Skill tokens not chosen during Level up [2]. 10. Shuffle the Unit cards with silver and gold backs separately to create two face down decks [2]. 11. Form a Tile deck by picking Countryside tiles (green back) randomly, and separating Core tiles (brown back) into city and non-city tiles; shuffle the chosen brown tiles together, then put the shuffled green tiles on top of them [3]. 12. Place the starting tile (either A side or B side up, according to the scenario description) on the map [3]. 13. Reveal two tiles (if using starting tile A) or three (if using B) from the Tile deck and place them as depicted, orienting them in the same direction as the starting tile [3]. 14. Place Site Description cards and the Scoring card nearby [3]. 15. Put mana crystals and any unused mana dice in an accessible space (the Bank) [3]. 16. For each player, provide a pile of 11 Skill tokens in their color (removing competitive or interactive skills depending on whether the game is cooperative or competitive), and randomize the remaining 10 skills into a face down pile [3]. 17. Designate an area for Gained Skills (tokens gained during Level up) [3]. 18. Ensure each player has a play area to play cards during their turn [3].

[1] RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.23 · GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · …

[2] RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.3 · ~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~

[3] RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook · p.3 · ~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 234 ms · ask 19119 ms · total 76157 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 56794 ms · generation 19363 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Rounds are either Day or Night. Players take their turns within a Round. Prepare the Round (skip this step for the fi rst Round of the game, as it was completed during setup): Flip the Day/Night Board - If it was Day, fl ip the board to Night; if Night, fl ip to Day. Reset the Source - Reroll all ma", "headingPath": "~ One Round of the Game (Day or Night) ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Tile deck. The Scenario description says how many tiles of each type you should use to form this deck. For Countryside tiles (green back), pick them randomly. For Core tiles (brown back), separate them into city and non-city tiles (according to whether they have a City icon in the middle). Then rand", "headingPath": "~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Summary ...................................................................................................... 23 Icon Reference .............................................................................................24 Turn Sequence Overview ....................................................", "headingPath": "SUMMARY", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "Choose scenario and variants. Players choose Heroes. Setup the game. Play the Rounds, until Round limit or end conditions. Determine the game outcome. Prepare the Round (not on the fi rst Round): -Flip Day/Night board and refresh the Source. -Create a new Unit off er. -Refresh Advanced Action and Sp", "headingPath": "GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "Players put one of their Shield tokens on the 0 space of the Fame track and one on the central 0 space of the Reputation track. Enemy and Ruin token piles. Sort the enemy (round) and ruin (hexagonal) tokens by the reverse side, and stack them in seven face down piles. Next to each pile, there is a s", "headingPath": "~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "This book has two parts, the Rulebook and the Scenario Book. The Rulebook provides the complete rules for playing the Mage Knight Board Game. We strongly recommend that players start by reading the Game Walkthrough, where the rules are explained in a more natural order, with many pictures and exampl", "headingPath": "RULEBOOK", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.04257, "snippet": "You may forbid players attacking each other. If a player ends their movement on a space with another player's fi gure (except for cities or the portal), the Forced Withdrawal rule applies for them. Even if your group has a set of variant rules you usually use, you should abandon them temporarily whe", "headingPath": "No Player versus Player Combat · Darkness is Coming", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Units are separated into two decks, Regular (silver card back) and Elite (gold card back). The card back does not impact game play once Units are in the game. At the start of the game, players control no Units. Units gained (recruited) during the game are displayed in front of the player in the Unit", "headingPath": "USING UNITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~", "sharpsignalDocId": 260}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 260 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 260 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)
debug row retained until: Nov 6, 2026 14:09

retrieval — what the search arm returned

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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	~ One Round of the Game (Day or Night) ~	p.4	0.048412 (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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~	p.3	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
#3	RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	SUMMARY	p.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))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · …	p.23	0.046402 (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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~	p.3	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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	RULEBOOK	p.1	0.045475 (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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	No Player versus Player Combat · Darkness is Coming	p.16	0.04257 (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 Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	USING UNITS	p.5	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	GAME · ONE ROUND · Players choose Tactics · ONE TURN · Resting: no movement, no action. · Any turn: · …	p.23	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Mage Knight Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 260)	~ Game Setup for the Full Game ~	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 234 ms · first delta 15666 ms · total 76157 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 56794 ms · retrieval 234 ms · ask 19119 ms · gateway work 19363 ms · total 76157 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3248
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 494
tok/sec: 135.8 tok/sec — 494 output tokens in 3.639 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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: 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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 189), 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.