Ruling — Marvel United: X-Men

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Marvel United: X-Menbg-336382-en-1e

For the standard game setup:

1. Place the Mission Guide in the middle of the table and the standard 3 Mission cards on the slots at its bottom in any order.[1]

2. Choose a Villain to face and place its Villain Dashboard on the slot at the top of the Mission Guide.[1]

3. Follow any Special Setup instructions on the back of the Villain Dashboard first.[1]

4. Flip the Dashboard to its front side.[1]

5. Place the number of Health tokens on the Dashboard as indicated by the Villain Dashboard for the number of Heroes in the game.[1]

6. If the Villain Dashboard has a track, place the Villain Tracker on its 0 space.[1]

7. Randomly pick 6 Locations and place them around the Mission Guide.[1]

8. Fill any marked slots of each Location with either Civilian or Thug tokens, as indicated.[1]

9. Shuffle the Villain's Threat cards and place 1 faceup on the slot at the bottom of each Location, adding a Threat token to the slots next to them.[2]

10. Place all remaining tokens, separated into pools, within reach of all players.[2]

11. Shuffle the Villain's Master Plan deck, place it facedown next to a random Location, and place the Villain's game piece in that Location.[2]

12. Each player chooses a Hero and places their game piece on the Location opposite the Villain.[2]

13. Each player shuffles their corresponding Hero decks and places them facedown next to them, ensuring any "Starting Hand" cards are at the top of the deck.[2]

14. Each player draws 3 cards from the top of their deck into their hand.[2]

For Xavier Solo Mode setup:

1. Choose 3 Heroes and shuffle their decks together to create your Hero deck.[3]

2. You may only add Challenges that support singleplayer games.[3]

3. Set the Villain's Health at the 3-Heroes level.[3]

4. Draw 5 cards into your hand instead of 3, making sure any Starting Hand cards are in your hand.[3]

For Super Villain Mode setup:

1. The Hero players choose the Villain's starting Location.[4]

2. The Villain player shuffles the 12 Super Villain cards, draws 4 cards, chooses 3 (keeping them hidden), and removes the rest from the game.[4]

3. After shuffling the Master Plan deck (and placing any indicated starting card on top), the Villain player draws 2 cards from the top of the Master Plan deck to form their Villain hand.[4]

4. Before drawing their 3 Hero cards, each Hero player draws 2 random Super Hero cards, chooses 1 (keeping it hidden), and removes the rest from the game.[4]

5. The Hero players take the Action tokens indicated on the back of the Villain dashboard and distribute them among the Heroes as they see fit.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook · p.4 · components

[2] RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook · p.5 · components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN

[3] RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook · p.14 · XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:

[4] RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook · p.12 · SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 72 ms · ask 5504 ms · total 7670 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 2092 ms · generation 5578 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "2 Place the Mission Guide in the middle of the table and the standard 3 Mission cards on the slots at its bottom (in any order). Note that in this Core Set there is also an alternate Mission Card, Use Cerebro , which is only used when Magneto is the Villain. Choose a Villain to face and place its Vi", "headingPath": "components", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "The basic game is designed to introduce the game to new players and provide a reasonable challenge for families. Players can add Challenges to the game in order to up the difficulty and introduce new twists. There are 3 Challenges included in this set. Other expansions will provide players with addi", "headingPath": "Challenges", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "Marvel United may also be played by a single player. In this special mode, you act as Xavier, coordinating the efforts of multiple Heroes at once. The Solo Mode uses all the same rules as the regular game, with the following exceptions: Choose 3 Heroes and shuffle their decks together to create your", "headingPath": "XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "Marvel United may also be played with 1 player controlling the Villain going against the Heroes controlled by the other players, allowing up to 5 players in the game. The Villain is bolstered not only by the skill of the player, but also by Super Villain cards with nasty surprises to pull on the Her", "headingPath": "SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "At the start of each of their turns (including the start of the game) the Villain player draws the top card from the Master Plan deck, then chooses 1 card from their hand and plays it into the Storyline. (If the Master Plan deck is empty, the Villain simply plays a card from their hand. If they have", "headingPath": "Villain Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Once the Master Plan card is fully resolved, it's time for the Heroes to act! Players collectively choose which Hero will start the game. Then, they will take their turns in clockwise order until the end of the game. During their turn, players follow these steps in order: DRAW A CARD PLAY A CARD RES", "headingPath": "Hero Turn · 1. DRAW A CARD · 2. PLAY A CARD · 3. RESOLVE ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Shuffle the Villain's Threat cards and place 1 faceup on the slot at the bottom of each Location (covering the End of Turn effect), adding a Threat token to the slots next to them. Some Threat cards contain Henchmen, characters in the service of the Villain. Each of their cards indicate the number o", "headingPath": "components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Remember that Missions can be completed in any order. Once all the slots on a Mission card are filled, the Mission is complete! Remove its card from the game, returning its tokens to the pool. If necessary, move the remaining Missions to the right so that the leftmost slots are left empty, unlocking", "headingPath": "Completing Missions · SPECIAL MISSION: USE CEREBRO · Hero Damage", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "components", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing", "sharpsignalDocId": 516}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 516 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 516 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 0.90918 of 2125 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 26, 2026 07:37 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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components	p.4	0.048916 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Challenges	p.11	0.047123 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:	p.14	0.046696 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing	p.12	0.045476 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Villain Turn	p.12	0.032258 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Hero Turn · 1. DRAW A CARD · 2. PLAY A CARD · 3. RESOLVE ACTIONS	p.7	0.031746 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN	p.5	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
#8	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Completing Missions · SPECIAL MISSION: USE CEREBRO · Hero Damage	p.10	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 31 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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:	p.14	#3	0.046696 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)		p.2	#17	0.012987 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing	p.12	#4	0.045476 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Hero Turn · 1. DRAW A CARD · 2. PLAY A CARD · 3. RESOLVE ACTIONS	p.7	#6	0.031746 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Challenges	p.11	#2	0.047123 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN	p.5	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	Villain Turn	p.12	#5	0.032258 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components	p.4	#1	0.048916 (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 Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	components · WINNING & LOSING · Villain Turn · MOVE VILLAIN	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	XAVIER Solo Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · SPECIAL RULES · SUPER VILLAIN VS XAVIER SOLO MODE · Special setup:	p.14	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Marvel United: X-Men — Rulebook (corpus doc 516)	SUPER VILLAIN Mode · SPECIAL SETUP · Winning & Losing	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 72 ms · first delta 2369 ms · total 7670 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 2092 ms · retrieval 72 ms · ask 5504 ms · gateway work 5578 ms · total 7670 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3261
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 636
tok/sec: 202.1 tok/sec — 636 output tokens in 3.147 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 7s 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: 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 448), 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.