Ruling — Trickerion: Legends of Illusion

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trickerion: Arcane Artsbg-441341-en-1e

1. Place the Arcanist board near the Main Game Board, using the side with the Academy icon if playing with the Dahlgaard's Academy expansion.[1]

2. Randomly select one of the following using a player's Permanent Assignment cards: the Downtown, the Market Row, the Dark Alley, or the Academy (if playing with that expansion).[1]

3. Place the Wagon marker near the selected Location.[1]

4. Shuffle all 12 Enchantments and place them into one of the provided cloth bags.[1]

5. Draw 3 Enchantments and place them on the offer beneath the Arcanist board, leaving the middle slot empty if playing with 2 players.[1]

6. Place the 4 Arcane Workers and their Unique Assignment/reminder cards next to the Arcanist board to create their supply.[1]

7. If playing with 2, 3, or 4 players, place 4, 6, or 8 Arcane Shards, respectively, into the supply.[1]

8. Place the two Arcane dice next to the Arcanist board.[1]

9. Remove the original Prophecies and add the new Arcane Prophecies before setting up the Dark Alley.[2]

10. If an Arcane Worker remains on the Arcanist board, return it to the supply, then randomly select one Arcane Worker from the supply and place it on the Arcanist board (skip this step if none remain).[2][3]

[1] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook · p.2 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook · p.3 · ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E

So says the rulebook. So plays 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 221 ms · ask 5271 ms · total 5494 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5494 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "1 Place the Arcanist board near the Main Game Board. Use the side with the Academy icon when playing with the Dahlgaard's Academy expansion. 2 Using a player's Permanent Assignment cards, randomly select one of the following: the Downtown, the Market Row, the Dark Alley, or the Academy (if playing w", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031258, "snippet": "• For 1 Action Point: spend 3 or 4 Coins (as indicated above its slot) to buy an Enchantment from the Arcanist board. Move the Enchantment from the Arcanist board to your Player Game Board using the same rules as described in the core game rules for regular Components. • Enchantments of the same typ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031054, "snippet": "For each of your Tricks in any Classroom that matches the Enchantment shown on the Arcane Enchantment die, receive the benefit shown on the Arcane Reward die, using the same rules as explained in the 'Performance' phase. See 'The Arcane Workers' section for salary considerations. Slide any Enchantme", "headingPath": "CL A S S R O O M P H A S E ( A C A D E M Y E X P A N S I O N ) · PAY WAGES · ORDERS ARRIVE · NEW STEP: MOVE WAGON · F I N A L S C O R I N G · ARCANE PROPHECIES · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031054, "snippet": "Roll the two Arcane dice along with the existing dice. Place them next to the Arcanist board. If there is an Arcane Worker remaining on the Arcanist board, return it to the supply. Randomly select one of the Arcane Workers in the supply, and place it on the Arcanist board. If none remain, skip this ", "headingPath": "ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "4 5 GOLEM It can only be sent as the first or the last Character during the ‘Place Characters’ phase.It has no Specialist Bonus in the Theater.It has a wage of 1 . If you cannot pay it, lose 4 . SHAPESHIFTER Specialist Bonus in the Theater: 1 / 2 / 3 / The Shapesifter can be considered an Apprentice", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029857, "snippet": "When resolving the Heir's Actions in the Location where the Wagon marker is, resolve the normal effects as if the Heir had 1 Action Point fewer (minimum of 1). Then, it does the first two (or one if playing on easy difficulty, three if playing on hard) possible options from the priority list below: ", "headingPath": "T H E H E I R A N D T H E A R C A N I S T ( S O L O P L A Y ) · T H E H E I R ' S P R I O R I T Y · T R I C K E R I O N · ARCANE ARTS EXPANSION DESIGN: · DEVELOPMENT: · I L L U S T R A T I O N A N D G R A P H I C D E S I G N : · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029572, "snippet": "For decades, the rival illusionists of the fabled city have dazzled audiences with their spectacles. In their hands, sleight of hand became science, and science became legend. Yet beneath the gaslit streets and opulent theaters, whispers of a forgotten power linger: the Arcanist, a wanderer cloaked ", "headingPath": "I N T R O D U C T I O N", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Assignment phase: The Golem must be assigned its own Unique Assignment card each turn. Place Character phase: The Golem can be sent to any Location (as shown on its Unique Assignment card), and it must be either the very first OR the very last Character you send during the 'Place Characters' phase.", "headingPath": "T H E G O L E M", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E", "sharpsignalDocId": 876}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
no base-rulebook boost — this ask EXCLUDED the base book, so its rulebook was never resolved and no id for it went on the wire (boosting it would have put that book back into a scope the reader took it out of)
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 0.90396 of 1010 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 14:05 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 TWO-ARM fuse (full-text + vector), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.03279 — both arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). Measured healthy band on this fuse: 0.016–0.033. 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 Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	0.032787 (at the 2-arm ceiling (0.03279) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	0.031258 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#3	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	CL A S S R O O M P H A S E ( A C A D E M Y E X P A N S I O N ) · PAY WAGES · ORDERS ARRIVE · NEW STEP: MOVE WAGON · F I N A L S C O R I N G · ARCANE PROPHECIES · …	p.7	0.031054 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#4	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E	p.3	0.031054 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#5	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	0.030777 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#6	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	T H E H E I R A N D T H E A R C A N I S T ( S O L O P L A Y ) · T H E H E I R ' S P R I O R I T Y · T R I C K E R I O N · ARCANE ARTS EXPANSION DESIGN: · DEVELOPMENT: · I L L U S T R A T I O N A N D G R A P H I C D E S I G N : · …	p.8	0.029857 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#7	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	I N T R O D U C T I O N	p.2	0.029572 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	300
#8	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	T H E G O L E M	p.4	0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse)	299

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 14 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 — not 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. 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 Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	#1	0.032787 (at the 2-arm ceiling (0.03279) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	#2	0.031258 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	EXAMPLE · P E R F O R M A N C E P H A S E	p.6	#10	0.014493 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse)	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	#5	0.030777 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	CL A S S R O O M P H A S E ( A C A D E M Y E X P A N S I O N ) · PAY WAGES · ORDERS ARRIVE · NEW STEP: MOVE WAGON · F I N A L S C O R I N G · ARCANE PROPHECIES · …	p.7	#3	0.031054 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	T H E H E I R A N D T H E A R C A N I S T ( S O L O P L A Y ) · T H E H E I R ' S P R I O R I T Y · T R I C K E R I O N · ARCANE ARTS EXPANSION DESIGN: · DEVELOPMENT: · I L L U S T R A T I O N A N D G R A P H I C D E S I G N : · …	p.8	#6	0.029857 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E · USING ARCANE SHARDS · T H E A R C A N E W O R K E R S · T H E S P E C T E R	p.4	#9	0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse)	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E	p.3	#4	0.031054 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033)	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	GAME SETUP	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trickerion: Arcane Arts — Rulebook (corpus doc 876)	ROLL DICE · P L A C E C H A R A C T E R S P H A S E	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 221 ms · first delta 2995 ms · total 5494 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 221 ms · ask 5271 ms · gateway work 5494 ms · total 5494 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4625
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 323
tok/sec: 132.4 tok/sec — 323 output tokens in 2.440 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 31s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 0s 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 229), 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.