Ruling — Imperium: Classics

← Imperium: Classics

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Imperium: Classicsbg-318184-en-1e

The game is played in a series of rounds.[1] The sequence of play is as follows:

Setup

1. Choose a nation and take all associated cards based on the color in the bottom left corner.[2]

2. Place your power card in front of you, to the left of your play area.[2]

3. Place any additional cards below your power card (only for Arthurians and Utopians).[2]

4. Place your journey card face up above the power card.[2]

5. Place your accession card (or zenith/nadir card depending on nation) face up.[2]

6. Shuffle the market cards into a face-down deck and place it on top of the accession card, perpendicular to it, to create your nation deck.[2]

7. Place all cards from your development area face up to the left of your nation deck.[2]

8. Place a state card with the side up to the left of your card area (or side up if playing as Atlanteans).[2]

9. Add any required cards to the commons cards.[2]

10. Shuffle all remaining cards into a face-down deck and place it to the right of your power card to create your draw deck.[2]

11. Draw five cards from your draw deck to form your starting hand.[2]

Turn Order and Gameplay

1. Each round starts with the player to the left of the solstice card taking their turn, and turn order proceeds clockwise.[1]

2. On each turn, you will ACTIVATE, INNOVATE, REVOLT, or OR.[1]

3. When activating, you can take actions and use exhaust abilities in any order and any combination.[1]

4. To take an action, remove one token from your state card (if you have no tokens, you may not take an action).[1]

5. Play a card from your hand into your play area and resolve its effect.[1]

6. Place the card in your discard pile, unless the card indicates otherwise (cards with specific icons remain in your play area).[1]

7. You can only play certain cards if your state card shows the matching icon.[1][3]

8. When you cannot or no longer want to take actions or use exhaust abilities, move to clean up.[1]

9. During clean up:

a. Add 1 token from the supply to any card in the market (or 1 or 2 if playing as Carthaginians, or 1 if playing as Qin).[4]

b. Remove all tokens from your state card and from all cards in your play area, nation deck, development area, and power card.[4]

c. Place 3 and 5 tokens on your state card.[4]

d. You may discard any number of cards from your hand into your discard pile.[4]

e. Draw cards from your draw deck up to a hand size of five.[4]

10. After cleaning up, the player to your left takes their turn.[1]

11. If the solstice card is between you and the player to your left, the round ends and all players must resolve the solstice keyword before the next round begins.[1]

Ending the Game

1. Play continues until either scoring or collapse is triggered, which ends the game.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook · p.6 · How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords

[2] RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook · p.4 · Each player takes the following steps:

[3] RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook · p.8 · Draw Card(s) · Empire

[4] RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook · p.6 · Clean Up

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 196 ms · ask 8347 ms · total 8548 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8548 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "The game is played in a series of rounds. Each round starts with the player to the left of the solstice card taking their turn and then turn order proceeds clockwise. Play continues until either scoring or collapse is triggered, which ends the game. On each turn, you will: ACTIVATE INNOVATE REVOLT O", "headingPath": "How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Choose a nation and take all the associated cards, as indicated by the colour in the bottom left corner. Before choosing a nation, you should look at the 'Nations' section on page 20 for an overview of the different decks. Place your card in front of you, to the left of your play area. You can place", "headingPath": "Each player takes the following steps:", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Place all the , , , , and tokens on the table, easily accessible to all players. This is the supply . Give each player 3 , 2 , 1 , 5 , and 3 tokens. Each player should place their and tokens on their state card. If there is a Utopian player, only give them 3 tokens instead of 5. Place the market boa", "headingPath": "Each player takes the following steps:", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "Do not remove an token from your state card to play this card. You can take an action to play this card even if you have no tokens left on your state card. Place an token on your state card. This can take you above 3 tokens. Take the indicated number of tokens of the specified type from the supply. ", "headingPath": "Free Play · Gain Action · Gain / / · Garrison · History · Knight · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "Draw the indicated number of cards from your draw deck. If you need to draw more cards than you have left in your draw deck, draw as many as you can. Then reshuffle your draw deck (following the procedure on page 12) and continue drawing cards. Some cards state 'draw the top card of the deck if able", "headingPath": "Draw Card(s) · Empire", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "Cards that refer to 'all players' or 'each player' include you as well. Cards that refer to 'all other players' or 'each other player' do not include you. Only cards in play can be abandoned. To abandon a card, place it in your discard pile. If the card has a garrisoned card underneath it, the garri", "headingPath": "All Players / All Other Players · Abandon · Acquire / / / · Action · Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "You don't need to read this section to learn how to play, but reading your nation's entry will give you a sense of the key cards in your deck. When you play with a nation for the first time, take a moment before completing the player setup to look through its pool of cards. Each nation is unique, so", "headingPath": ". Nations · Carthaginians · Celts · Greeks · Macedonians", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.04374, "snippet": "When scoring is triggered, complete the current round as normal. Then, play one final round, including resolving the solstice keyword after all players have taken their turn. Then, all players add up their victory points. Leave cards where they were when the game ended as you score, as some and V P ", "headingPath": "Scoring · Collapse", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Each player takes the following steps:", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Draw Card(s) · Empire", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Clean Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 409}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 409 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 409 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 0.89955 of 2240 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 27, 2026 16:08 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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords	p.6	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Each player takes the following steps:	p.4	0.048131 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Each player takes the following steps:	p.5	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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Free Play · Gain Action · Gain / / · Garrison · History · Knight · …	p.9	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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Draw Card(s) · Empire	p.8	0.045743 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	All Players / All Other Players · Abandon · Acquire / / / · Action · Attack	p.8	0.045475 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	. Nations · Carthaginians · Celts · Greeks · Macedonians	p.11	0.044337 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Scoring · Collapse	p.7	0.04374 (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 29 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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords	p.6	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Combining Classics and Legends	p.4	#11	0.027032 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	. Nations · Carthaginians · Celts · Greeks · Macedonians	p.11	#7	0.044337 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Barbarian · City · Choose · Develop · Discard	p.8	#14	0.026709 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Draw Card(s) · Empire	p.8	#5	0.045743 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Clean Up	p.6	#9	0.028577 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Free Play · Gain Action · Gain / / · Garrison · History · Knight · …	p.9	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Each player takes the following steps:	p.4	#2	0.048131 (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 Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	How to Play · Activate · Taking Actions · Common Keywords	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Each player takes the following steps:	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Draw Card(s) · Empire	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Imperium: Classics — Rulebook (corpus doc 409)	Clean Up	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 196 ms · first delta 2930 ms · total 8548 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 196 ms · ask 8347 ms · gateway work 8548 ms · total 8548 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3586
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 721
tok/sec: 130.2 tok/sec — 721 output tokens in 5.536 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 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 338), 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.