Ruling — Twilight Inscription

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Twilight Inscriptionbg-361545-en-1e

The game is played over a series of rounds.[1]

Setup

1. Prepare Player Sheets: Deal one random Navigation sheet, Expansion sheet, Industry sheet, and Warfare sheet to each player.[2][3] Players place these in front of them; using side A provides variety, while side B provides a symmetrical game.[2][3]

2. Choose Factions: Shuffle faction cards and deal three to each player; each player chooses one and places it next to their sheets, returning the rest to the box.[2][3] If the chosen faction card has "Setup:" text, resolve it immediately.[2][3]

3. Prepare Mecatol Rex Sheet: Place the Mecatol Rex sheet in the middle of the table.[2][3] Shuffle Stage II agenda cards (those with the Stage II back) and place one facedown below the Mecatol Rex sheet, returning the rest to the box; repeat this for Stage III and IV agenda cards.[2][3]

4. Prepare Event Deck: Separate event cards into ten piles by their backs (stage number and color) and shuffle each pile facedown.[4] Stack Stage V cards facedown, starting with a blue card on the bottom and alternating between blue and black cards, and construct other stages similarly.[4] Combine the stages into a single deck with Stage V on the bottom and Stage I on the top, then place it next to the Mecatol Rex sheet.[4]

5. Reveal Objectives: Separate objective cards by type (Navigation, Expansion, Industry, and Warfare), shuffle each type separately, and place one random card of each type above the Mecatol Rex sheet, ensuring the side with two victory point values is faceup.[4] Return remaining objectives to the box.[4]

6. Prepare Other Components: Shuffle the relic deck and place it and the dice next to the Mecatol Rex sheet.[4] Give each player one reference card and one dry-erase marker.[4]

7. Choose Speaker: Give the Speaker card to the most experienced player, who is responsible for helping run the game.[4]

A Round

1. The Speaker reveals the top card of the event deck, reads it aloud, and players follow the instructions.[1]

2. For strategy events, players perform the following steps together:

1. Choose an active sheet (one of the four sheets) to be active until the end of the round, and spend the resources provided by the event card to mark that sheet.[1]

2. The Speaker rolls all six dice.[1]

3. Each player spends the resources provided by the black dice to mark their active sheet; if a player has unlocked any focus dice on that sheet, they can spend those resources as well.[1]

3. Players can also spend claimed assets from any of their sheets to mark their active sheet during strategy events, though they cannot mark inactive sheets except to cross out a spent asset or if instructed by a game effect.[1]

4. Once players have finished marking their sheets, they cap their markers and place them on the table to notify the Speaker.[1] Players may use a marker next to a sheet as a reminder of which sheet is "active".[1]

5. The card is discarded near the deck, and a new round begins.[1]

Ending the Game

1. Play continues until players resolve the Stage V event "A Throne for the Taking," which ends the game.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook · p.7 · PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS

[2] RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook · p.4 · SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT

[4] RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook · p.5 · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 102 ms · ask 8858 ms · total 13869 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 4906 ms · generation 8963 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Cast Votes: Each player secretly casts their votes. 3. Announce Votes: Tally the votes for each outcome on the Mecatol Rex sheet. 4. Resolve Outcome: Resolve the outcome that received the most votes. If tied, roll a black die. On  result, resolve “Pass” outcome; on  or  result, resolve “Fail” out", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Perform the following steps to set up the game. If you want to play the game as you set up and learn the rules, close this rulebook and read the 'Play as You Learn' guide instead. Prepare Player Sheets: Deal one random Navigation sheet, Expansion sheet, Industry sheet, and Warfare sheet to each play", "headingPath": "SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "4 SETUPSETUP Perform the following steps to set up the game. If you want to play the game as you set up and learn the rules, close this rulebook and read the “Play as You Learn” guide instead. 1. Prepare Player Sheets: Deal one random Navigation sheet, Expansion sheet, Industry sheet, and Warfare sh", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "The game is played over a series of rounds. Each round, the Speaker reveals the top card of the event deck, reads it aloud, and the players follow the instructions on the card. Then, the card is discarded near the deck, and a new round begins. Play continues in this way until the players resolve the", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.044563, "snippet": "Twilight Inscription can be played with one or two players by simulating the progress of an AI faction. The AI faction is represented by the side of the Mecatol Rex sheet shown below. This side has six tracks that each correspond to a face on a focus die. The  track and the  track determine the AI", "headingPath": "STRATEGY EVENTS · GOAL TRACKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Home The game ends after the players resolve the 'A Throne for the Taking' event card, which is a Stage V event card. Then, the players score their sheets. For each sheet, the player adds up the values of the victory point (  ) assets they claimed on that sheet and writes the total above the 'Sheet", "headingPath": "WINNING THE GAME Home", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Set up the game as normal with the following changes: \" Prepare Mecatol Rex Sheet: Place the Mecatol Rex sheet so that the AI side is faceup. Shuffle each agenda deck and place each of those decks below the Mecatol Rex sheet (instead of just one card from each deck). \" Determine Neighbor (Two-player", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "6 FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTSFUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS This section contains the fundamental concepts for understanding and learning Twilight Inscription. PLAYER SHEETSPLAYER SHEETS Each player’s sheets represent their progress in becoming a dominant force in the galaxy. Each player decides which sheets to inve", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT", "sharpsignalDocId": 669}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 669 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 669 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 0.91757 of 2572 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 17:47 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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.3	0.04866 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT	p.4	0.048652 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.4	0.047131 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS	p.7	0.046875 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	STRATEGY EVENTS · GOAL TRACKS	p.18	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
#6	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	WINNING THE GAME Home	p.17	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
#7	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	SETUP	p.18	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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.6	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

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 56 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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.4	#3	0.047131 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS	p.7	#4	0.046875 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT	p.5	#17	0.014286 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	CLARIFICATIONS · ABILITIES/EFFECTS · ASSETS · COUNCIL EVENTS · EXPANSION · HIDDEN INFORMATION · …	p.20	#13	0.025678 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	COUNCIL EVENT CARDS to any marked space. Claim 1 unmarked space adjacent to a scrapped space. · ADDITIONAL RULES	p.15	#14	0.024289 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	SETUP	p.18	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.3	#1	0.04866 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT	p.4	#2	0.048652 (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 Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	PLAYING THE GAME · MARKERS DOWN · STRATEGY EVENT CARDS	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	SETUP · PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Twilight Inscription — Rulebook (corpus doc 669)	PLAYER SHEET LAYOUT	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 102 ms · first delta 3420 ms · total 13869 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 4906 ms · retrieval 102 ms · ask 8858 ms · gateway work 8963 ms · total 13869 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3775
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 726
tok/sec: 132.8 tok/sec — 726 output tokens in 5.466 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 7s 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 602), 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.