Ruling — Star Realms: Frontiers

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Star Realms: Frontiersbg-230253-en-1e

Because the sources provide different setup instructions depending on the specific game mode or scenario being played, the setup depends on the chosen version:

Standard Setup

1. Place the 16 Explorer cards in their own pile face-up on the table.[1]

2. Shuffle the Trade Deck.[1]

3. Place the Trade Deck face-down on the table.[2]

4. Leave a space next to the Trade Deck for the Scrap Heap.[2]

5. Lay out the top five cards from the Trade Deck face-up on the table to create the Trade Row.[2]

6. Each player shuffles their Personal Deck and places it face down in front of them.[2]

7. Leave room next to each deck for a Discard Pile.[2]

8. Randomly determine which player will play first.[2]

9. In a standard two-player game, the first player draws three cards and the second player draws five cards.[2]

Two-Player Challenge Setup (with Patrol Boat and Federation Cruiser)

1. Add 1 Patrol Boat and 1 Federation Cruiser.[3]

2. Place the Transit Nexus card face down.[3]

3. Shuffle the remaining Acquisition Deck cards and place them face down on top to create the Acquisition Deck.[3]

4. Shuffle the remaining cards from Frontiers to make the Boss' Personal Deck.[3]

The Blob Assault Challenge Setup

1. Remove all cards from the Trade Deck.[4]

2. Put one Spike Cluster face up in the Blob's Discard Pile.[4]

3. Create a Blob deck with the following cards in order (top to bottom): Stinger, Spike Cluster, Burrower, Crusher, Nesting Ground, Pulveriser, Blob Alpha, Swarm Cluster, Infested Moon, Hive Queen.[4]

4. Set all other cards aside.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.5 · Overview · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.6 · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.41 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play

[4] RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook · p.29 · Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 108 ms · ask 3864 ms · total 3974 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 3974 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 33, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 40 Authority per player. Each player starts with a Personal Deck consisting of 7 Scouts and 1 Viper. Players start with 60 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players are a Hydra team (See page 17). After the Boss draws its cards on its turn, follow ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 35, "score": 0.047493, "snippet": "When playing with two or more players, for each player in the game, place one card from the top of the Trade Deck face down in front of the Boss. The Boss starts the game with 50 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 37, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "The Boss starts the game with 25 Authority per player. Note: The Boss has no hand, deck or Discard Pile. Each player starts with a standard Personal Deck (8 Scouts and 2 Vipers). Players start with 50 Authority each. When playing with more than one player, players have individual Authority and can b", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "In Star Realms, you start with a Personal Deck of cards representing your space armada. Each turn, you play all the cards in your hand to gain Trade, Combat, Authority and other effects. Trade ( ) is used to buy powerful Ships and Bases from the Trade Row and put them into your Discard Pile. Combat ", "headingPath": "Overview · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 41, "score": 0.045139, "snippet": "If playing with two players, add 1 Patrol Boat and 1 Federation Cruiser. Place the Transit Nexus card face down, then shuffle the remaining Acquisition Deck cards and place them face down on top to create the Acquisition Deck. Shuffle the remaining cards from Frontiers to make the Boss' Personal Dec", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "faction icons in the upper left hand corner) and place it face-down on the table. Leave a space next to the Trade Deck for the Scrap Heap (a place to put any cards that are removed from the game during play). Lay out the top five cards from the Trade Deck face-up on the table. This is the Trade Row.", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 29, "score": 0.044776, "snippet": "Remove all cards from the Trade Deck. Put one Spike Cluster face up in the Blob's Discard Pile. Then create a Blob deck with the following cards in order (top to bottom): Stinger, Spike Cluster, Burrower, Crusher, Nesting Ground, Pulveriser, Blob Alpha, Swarm Cluster, Infested Moon, Hive Queen. Set ", "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029437, "snippet": "The eight oversized Challenge Cards included in this set allow you to play by yourself, or on a team with your friends, against the game. In each challenge you will be fighting against a different bad guy (known as 'the Boss'). Typically, you'll use normal Star Realms rules for hand size, acquiring ", "headingPath": "Challenge Cards · Challenge Difficulty Levels", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Overview · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 41, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}, {"page": 29, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 416}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 416 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 416 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 0.89009 of 1292 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 26, 2026 00:07 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.33	0.047883 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.35	0.047493 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.37	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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Overview · Setup	p.5	0.046432 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.41	0.045139 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Setup	p.6	0.045055 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.29	0.044776 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Cards · Challenge Difficulty Levels	p.23	0.029437 (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 45 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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Overview · Setup	p.5	#4	0.046432 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.35	#2	0.047493 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.37	#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
#4	RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.41	#5	0.045139 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.27	#10	0.028986 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.29	#7	0.044776 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.33	#1	0.047883 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Setup	p.6	#6	0.045055 (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 Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Overview · Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Setup	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.41	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Star Realms: Frontiers — Rulebook (corpus doc 416)	Challenge Setup · Boss Order of Play	p.29	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 108 ms · first delta 1962 ms · total 3974 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 108 ms · ask 3864 ms · gateway work 3974 ms · total 3974 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2184
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 399
tok/sec: 203.0 tok/sec — 399 output tokens in 1.966 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 345), 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.