Ruling — Dune: Imperium

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dune: Imperiumbg-316554-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:

1. Setup the game board by placing the Mentat on its side in the Mentat space and placing four Alliance tokens on the marked areas of the Faction's Influence tracks.[1]

2. Create a Conflict Deck by separating Conflict cards by their backs, shuffling the four Conflict III cards and placing them face down in the marked area of the game board, shuffling the 10 Conflict II cards and dealing five face down on top of the Conflict III cards, and shuffling the four Conflict I cards and dealing one face down on top of the Conflict II cards.[1]

3. Prepare the Intrigue and Imperium decks by shuffling them and placing them face down, then deal five cards face up from the Imperium Deck to form an Imperium Row.[1]

4. Place the Reserve cards in three stacks: one for Arrakis Liaison, one for The Spice Must Flow, and one for Foldspace.[1]

5. Each player takes a Leader and places it in front of them.[1]

6. Players take turns one at a time, starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise.[2]

7. On a turn, a player takes either an Agent turn or a Reveal turn.[2]

8. During an Agent turn, a player plays one card from their hand face up in front of them to send an Agent from their Leader to an unoccupied space on the game board that has an icon in its upper left corner matching one of the Agent icons on the card.[3] A player must choose only one Agent icon on their card.[3]

9. During an Agent turn, a player may also play any Plot Intrigue cards they have.[2]

10. Generally, players take Agent turns until they run out of Agents to place, then take a Reveal turn.[2]

11. If a player chooses to take a Reveal turn while they still have Agents, their turns are skipped for the rest of the phase while other players finish their turns.[2]

12. The phase ends once all players have taken a Reveal turn.[2]

13. In the Combat phase, starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise, each player with at least one troop in the Conflict may play any number of Combat Intrigue cards or may pass.[4]

14. Once all players involved in Combat pass consecutively, the Combat is resolved.[4]

15. If a card changes the number of troops a player has in the Conflict or alters their strength, they adjust their Combat marker on the Combat track.[4]

16. If a player wins a Conflict, they may play Combat Intrigue cards that specifically trigger "when you win a Conflict".[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.4 · GAme components

[2] RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.8 · phAse 2: plAyer turns

[3] RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.9 · plAyer turn - AGent turn

[4] RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook · p.12 · combAt IntrIGue cArds

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 110 ms · ask 7336 ms · total 7449 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7449 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 12, "score": 0.046671, "snippet": "Starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise, each player with at least one troop in the Conflict may play any number of Combat Intrigue cards, or may pass. You are not required to pass just because you passed earlier in the Combat phase. Once all players involve", "headingPath": "combAt IntrIGue cArds", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045133, "snippet": "You start the game with a 10-card deck containing the same cards as the other players. Adding to and changing that deck is the key element of play in a deck-building game. During each round, you may acquire new cards to add to your deck. Because cards do many different things, each player's deck and", "headingPath": "deck buIldInG", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.044468, "snippet": "In a Solo game, you face off against two Rivals who (again) don't use the normal rules of play. Neither builds a deck, but they have other powerful advantages and share your goal: gain favor with the most powerful factions of the Imperium and control the spice trade on Arrakis! If either reaches 10 ", "headingPath": "solo plAy", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.044408, "snippet": "Starting with the player who has the First Player marker and continuing clockwise, players take one turn at a time. On your turn, you will take either an Agent turn or a Reveal turn . These types of turns are detailed over the next three pages. Generally, you will take Agent turns until you run out ", "headingPath": "phAse 2: plAyer turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.044343, "snippet": "You start the game with two Agents (and can gain a third during play). You send Agents to spaces on the game board, sometimes gathering resources, sometimes paying resources to advance your strategy. (This is explained fully in Phase 2: Player Turns, while board spaces are described in detail in the", "headingPath": "AGents", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.044192, "snippet": "In a two-player game, a third, Rival player, House Hagal, competes against you and your opponent, serving a spoiler role. It operates by its own set of rules. It doesn't collect resources, build a deck, earn rewards, or score Victory Points. It does, however, use the House Hagal cards as described e", "headingPath": "two-plAyer GAmes", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.043247, "snippet": "In an Agent turn, you play one card from your hand face up in front of you, using it to send an Agent from your Leader to an unoccupied space on the game board. This board space must have an icon in its upper left corner matching one of the Agent icons on the card. You must choose only one Agent ico", "headingPath": "plAyer turn - AGent turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Want to enhance your DUNE: IMPERIUM experience? Check out the Dire Wolf Game Room companion app for your PC, smartphone or tablet. Each player takes 1 water and places it in their supply. Create a bank next to the game board containing the Solari, spice, and remaining water tokens. These are not mea", "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAme components", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "phAse 2: plAyer turns", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "plAyer turn - AGent turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "combAt IntrIGue cArds", "sharpsignalDocId": 87}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 87 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 87 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 0.93390 of 2012 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 10:30 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	combAt IntrIGue cArds	p.12	0.046671 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	deck buIldInG	p.6	0.045133 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	solo plAy	p.20	0.044468 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	phAse 2: plAyer turns	p.8	0.044408 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	AGents	p.6	0.044343 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	two-plAyer GAmes	p.19	0.044192 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	plAyer turn - AGent turn	p.9	0.043247 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	GAme components	p.5	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 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 — 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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	plAyer turn - AGent turn	p.9	#7	0.043247 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	GAme components	p.4	#21	0.025522 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	combAt IntrIGue cArds	p.12	#1	0.046671 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	solo plAy	p.20	#3	0.044468 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	AGents	p.6	#5	0.044343 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	phAse 2: plAyer turns	p.8	#4	0.044408 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	setup	p.20	#18	0.025894 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	deck buIldInG	p.6	#2	0.045133 (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 Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	GAme components	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	phAse 2: plAyer turns	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	plAyer turn - AGent turn	p.9	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Dune: Imperium — Rulebook (corpus doc 87)	combAt IntrIGue cArds	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 110 ms · first delta 3076 ms · total 7449 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 110 ms · ask 7336 ms · gateway work 7449 ms · total 7449 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1925
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 579
tok/sec: 133.4 tok/sec — 579 output tokens in 4.339 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 40s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 18), 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.