You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Spirit Islandbg-162886-en-1e
1. Select any Adversary or Scenario first, as they can change how the game is set up [1]. 2. Arrange the Island Boards by randomly picking one per player and arranging them to form the Island [2]. (For 1 Player, use Northeast; for 2 Players, use West and East touching on the side opposite the Ocean; for 3 Players, use West, East, and Northeast above East; for 4 Players, use West, East, Northwest, and Northeast) [3]. 3. Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight as indicated by the icons in each land [2]. 4. Shuffle the Minor and Major Power Decks and put them near the board with room for a discard pile [2]. 5. Put the Energy, Cities, Towns, Explorers, and the Dahan near the board [2]. 6. Place the Invader Board on one side of the play area [4]. 7. Put 4 Fear Markers per player into the Fear Pool [4]. 8. Shuffle the Fear Cards and put 9 on the Fear Deck space [4]. 9. Place the 'Terror Level 3' divider 3 cards from the bottom and the 'Terror Level 2' divider 3 cards above that, so the deck is divided into 3 groups of 3 cards each [4]. 10. Make the Invader Deck (consisting of 3 Stage I cards on top, 4 Stage II cards, and 5 Stage III cards on the bottom) and put it on the Invader Board on the Explore Action Space [4][1]. 11. Take a random Blight Card and place it on top of the Blight Space on the board, 'Healthy Island' side up, without looking at the back (if not using a Blight Card, use the pre-printed Blight instructions on the Invader Board instead) [4][5]. 12. Place the shown amount of Blight onto the card [4]. 13. Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color [6]. 14. Each player chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards as their starting hand [6]. 15. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card [6]. 16. Each player starts on a different Island Board and follows Setup instructions on the back of their Spirit Panel, which includes putting Presence into one or more lands on their starting board [6]. 17. Players flip their Spirit Panels and place all remaining Presence onto the dashed circles on their Presence Tracks, leaving the leftmost numbers with solid circles uncovered [6].
Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings
🔧 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 254 ms · ask 11646 ms · total 254471 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 242562 ms · generation 11909 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 3, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Set aside all the Minor and Major Powers listed on the card. During the game, when you gain a new Power Card, add the next Power Card on the list to your hand instead of using the standard method. If everyone is playing the game for the first time, also: Don't use a Blight Card. Instead, use the pre", "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045945, "snippet": "Each player takes all Spirit Presence and Single-Turn Effect Markers of one color, then chooses a Spirit by taking a Spirit Panel and its four Unique Power Cards, which is their starting hand. New players should choose a low-complexity Spirit and take its Power Progression Card, as described on page", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "If you're getting crushed and it's no fun: For a slightly easier game, give all Spirits a bonus Growth at the end of Setup. For a moderately easier game, omit the Invaders' initial Explore at the end of Setup. For a much easier game, do both. Note: Two Blight rules can make the game extremely punish", "headingPath": "GAME TOO HARD?", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.044071, "snippet": "As you play Power Cards, put the required Energy on top of them. This will help you remember to pay for them. When you resolve a Power Card, you can push it forward or turn it sideways to note that it has been used. Don't discard it until end of turn, because you may be making use of its Elements fo", "headingPath": "STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.043549, "snippet": "The Thematic Boards have a fixed layout relative to each other. Y ou can use any of them that you want - but for the definitive geography at each player count: 1 Player: Use Northeast. 2 Players: Use West and East, touching on the side opposite the Ocean. 3 Players: Use West and East as above, plus ", "headingPath": "THEMATIC BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "To set up the Island: Randomly pick one Island Board per player and arrange them to form the Island (see sidebar). Populate the Island Boards with Invaders, Dahan, and Blight (from the box, not the Blight Card) as indicated by the icons in each land. To set up the Supply: Shuffle the Minor and Major", "headingPath": "THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "To set up the Invader Board: Place the Invader Board on one side of the play area. Put 4 Fear Markers per player into the Fear Pool. Shuffle the Fear Cards and put 9 on the Fear Deck space. Place the 'Terror Level 3' divider 3 cards from the bottom and the 'Terror Level 2' divider 3 cards above that", "headingPath": "INVADER BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "To finalize the Setup, the Invaders take an initial Action. Reveal the top card of the Invader Deck. The Invaders Explore in that land type (see Explore, page 10). Then place that card face-up in the 'Build' Action Space.", "headingPath": "INVADERS' STARTING ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MAKING THE INVADER DECK", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 23, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THEMATIC BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INVADER BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 58}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 58 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 58 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 14:12
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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | TABLE OF CONTENTS | p.3 | 0.046032 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | PLAYER SETUP | p.6 | 0.045945 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | GAME TOO HARD? | p.21 | 0.044563 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | STREAMLINING GAMEPLAY | p.20 | 0.044071 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THEMATIC BOARD SETUP | p.23 | 0.043549 (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 Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY | p.6 | 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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADER BOARD | p.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)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADERS' STARTING ACTION | p.6 | 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)) | 221 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | MAKING THE INVADER DECK | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THE ISLAND AND SUPPLY | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | THEMATIC BOARD SETUP | p.23 | no quote on the wire |
| [4] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | INVADER BOARD | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
| [5] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | TABLE OF CONTENTS | p.3 | no quote on the wire |
| [6] | RULEBOOK Spirit Island — Rulebook (corpus doc 58) | PLAYER SETUP | p.6 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 254 ms · first delta 8029 ms · total 254471 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 242562 ms · retrieval 254 ms · ask 11646 ms · gateway work 11909 ms · total 254471 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 1762
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 572
- tok/sec
- 149.2 tok/sec — 572 output tokens in 3.834 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s 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
- SERVED — setup-shaped and this game's approved setup checklist is offered above
- 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 7), 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.