Ruling — Alchemists

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Alchemistsbg-161970-en-1e · Alchemists: The King's Golembg-204650-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Shuffle the adventurer tiles face down and randomly remove one from the game.[1][2]

2. Turn up the top adventurer and set the stack by the adventurer space.[1][2]

3. Place the conference tiles into the adventurer stack: the one marked with a specific symbol goes under the top two adventurers, and the one marked with another symbol goes above the bottom adventurer.[1][2]

4. Use the side of the board designated for the apprentice or master variant.[1][2]

5. For a 4-player game, use the side of the board indicated for four players; for 2 or 3 players, use the other side.[1][2]

6. Shuffle the Royal Signet and the Mahogany Bookcase into their appropriate decks, and shuffle the Replicator into the artifact deck if using the Startup Funding expansion.[3][4]

7. When preparing artifacts, draw 1 extra from each deck to be the under-the-counter artifact; place one on the under-the-counter artifact board and set the other two aside face up nearby.[4]

8. Each player should put one of their flasks on the lowest progress space.[4]

9. Shuffle the 4 Courtier cards into the deck.[4]

10. Place approval tokens near the Research Golem action space and book tokens near the Visit Library action space.[4]

11. If using The Golem Project, set up The Royal Encyclopedia as explained on page 4, using the side marked with the golem.[4]

12. For the king's mood tiles, leave two in the box; for 3 players, remove the two tiles marked with a specific symbol, and for 4 players, remove the two tiles marked with another specific symbol.[4]

13. Shuffle the remaining stack of six tiles and place them face down next to the Research Golem action space.[4]

14. Turn up the top tile and place the indicated number of approval tokens on the Research Golem action space, then discard that tile.[4]

15. Set up the game boards, including all initial cards and tiles, and choose the starting player.[3]

16. Shuffle the deck of startup cards and deal 4 to each player.[3]

17. Each player chooses 2 startup cards and discards the other 2, then reveals their chosen cards simultaneously before the start of the first round.[3]

18. Begin the game with the resources depicted on the chosen startup cards: take the indicated gold pieces, draw the indicated number of ingredients randomly from the top of the deck, and draw all favor cards provided by both startup cards plus one more (deciding which to keep and discarding the extra).[3]

19. Take a book token and use it immediately as described under The Palace Library.[3]

20. Count the points gained and lost from both startup cards to adjust the reputation marker.[3]

21. If a "Secret Artifact" was chosen, look through the artifacts from the deck that were not selected for the game, keep one, and return the rest to the box.[3][5]

22. If a "Starting Artifact" was chosen, choose one artifact from the deck that was not selected for the game and place it face up on the table in front of you.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook · p.4 · Web-Based Card Reader · adventurer tiles · conference tiles · Master or Apprentice? · Two, Three, or Four Players?

[2] RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook · p.2 · Setup

[4] RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook · p.7 · Setup · Artifacts · Conference Tiles · Favor Cards · Tokens · The Royal Encyclopedia · …

[5] RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook · p.2 · Setup

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 176 ms · ask 8170 ms · total 8350 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8350 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.046452, "snippet": "4 SetupSetup Master or Master or Apprentice? Apprentice? You can play Alchemists either as masters or apprentices. For your first game, we recommend you play the apprentice variant. A few of the rules are simpler, and the academic conferences are more forgiving. Even so, it offers the full range of ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.042867, "snippet": "To be a successful alchemist, you need to keep an orderly notebook. The results triangle is for recording the results of your experiment. Take a token and put it at the intersection of mushroom and toad. The deduction grid is for recording what your experiment tells you. Your experiment eliminates 4", "headingPath": "Deduction · The Gamemaster Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Shuffle the Replicator into artifact deck so it has a chance of being one of the artifacts available at the beginning of the game. Set up the game boards - including all initial cards and tiles - and choose the starting player. Players should know the initial state of the game before choosing their ", "headingPath": "Setup\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.032018, "snippet": "Arrange them as shown. Each player puts one flask on the 10 space to mark initial reputation. Used only in the master variant. For the apprentice variant, leave these in the box. At the start of the game, launch the app, select the master or apprentice variant, and tap the button. The app will rando", "headingPath": "grants · reputation markers · alchemical tokens · Initializing the Card Reader · Starting Player Token", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.031514, "snippet": "If any ingredient cards are left in the ingredients row, remove them. Deal 5 new ingredients to the row. If the deck runs out (during setup or at any other time) shuffle the discard pile to make a new deck. Move all the order markers off the order spaces. (Except for any that were put on the paralys", "headingPath": "Setup For Next Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031281, "snippet": "some book tokens the new deduction grid 6 of the 18 order space boards An ambitious alchemist can get more done before breakfast than most people accomplish all day. When setting up the game board, create a stack of order space boards: \u0007 If you are not using The Golem Project , remove all order spac", "headingPath": "Components\b · Busy Days · Setup\b · Choosing Play Order\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "Two startup cards allow you to begin the game with an artifact: Secret Artifact: Look through all the artifacts from deck that were not selected to be in the game. Keep one and return the rest to the box. Your choice remains secret from the other players during the game. Reveal your secret artifact ", "headingPath": "Setup\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029911, "snippet": "The order space board changes at the end of every round. When you turn up the new adventurer, do exactly the same with the order space boards: Remove the old order space board from the game board. Set the top order space board on the game board. Turn up the new top board in the stack. 3", "headingPath": "End of the Round\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Web-Based Card Reader · adventurer tiles · conference tiles · Master or Apprentice? · Two, Three, or Four Players?", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 325}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup\b · Artifacts · Conference Tiles · Favor Cards · Tokens · The Royal Encyclopedia · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup\b", "sharpsignalDocId": 886}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 325 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 325 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 0.91164 of 2456 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 22, 2026 01:03 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 Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)		p.4	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
#2	RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Deduction · The Gamemaster Board	p.3	0.042867 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	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
#4	RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	grants · reputation markers · alchemical tokens · Initializing the Card Reader · Starting Player Token	p.7	0.032018 (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 Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Setup For Next Round	p.16	0.031514 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Components · Busy Days · Setup · Choosing Play Order	p.3	0.031281 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	0.029958 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	End of the Round	p.3	0.029911 (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))	287

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 80 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 — 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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	#3	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 + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	#7	0.029958 (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 Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Setup For Next Round	p.16	#5	0.031514 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup · Artifacts · Conference Tiles · Favor Cards · Tokens · The Royal Encyclopedia · …	p.7	#9	0.029644 (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 Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Setup For Next Round · Reputation Points and Victory Points	p.17	#22	0.024752 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Web-Based Card Reader · adventurer tiles · conference tiles · Master or Apprentice? · Two, Three, or Four Players?	p.4	#17	0.025653 (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 Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Components · Busy Days · Setup · Choosing Play Order	p.3	#6	0.031281 (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 Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)		p.4	#1	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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)	Web-Based Card Reader · adventurer tiles · conference tiles · Master or Apprentice? · Two, Three, or Four Players?	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Alchemists — Rulebook (corpus doc 325)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup · Artifacts · Conference Tiles · Favor Cards · Tokens · The Royal Encyclopedia · …	p.7	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Alchemists: The King's Golem — Rulebook (corpus doc 886)	Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 176 ms · first delta 4637 ms · total 8350 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 176 ms · ask 8170 ms · gateway work 8350 ms · total 8350 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4295
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 723
tok/sec: 200.2 tok/sec — 723 output tokens in 3.611 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 44s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 3s 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 253), 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.