Ruling — Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formulabg-281442-en-1e

There are two primary ways to set up the game: the Introductory Game Setup and the standard Player Setup.

Introductory Game Setup

1. Determine the starting player randomly (or by choosing the most experienced player at the table) and give them the Duval Laboratory board, along with the Starting Experiment card, the Masterpiece Experiment card, the Publication card, and the Starting Artifact.[1]

2. That player places one of their larger discs on the 1st position of the Current Round Order track.[1]

3. The second player should receive the Newton Laboratory board, as well as the following cards and Artifact.[1]

4. That player places one of their larger discs on the 2nd position of the Current Round Order track and gains 1 Ethereal die token.[1]

5. The third player (if present) should receive the Agrippa Laboratory board, as well as the cards and the Artifact marked below.[1]

6. That player places one of their larger discs on the 3rd position of the Current Round Order track and gains 2 Ethereal die tokens.[1]

7. The fourth player (if present) should receive the Bacon Laboratory board, as well as the cards and the Artifact below.[2]

8. That player unfolds the main game board and places it in the middle of the table.[2]

9. Divide all cards into separate decks: Starting Experiments, Masterpiece Experiments, Level 1 Experiments, Level 2 Experiments, Level 3 Experiments, and Publications.[2]

10. Remove all cards which are only used with higher player counts (e.g., in a 2-player game, remove all '3+' and '4+' cards; in a 3-player game, remove all '4+' cards).[2]

11. Shuffle each deck separately and place all decks face down near the game board.[2]

12. Place the Level 1 Experiment deck on the current Experiment deck space on the board and fill each of the experiment spaces with one face-up Experiment card.[2]

13. Place the Publications deck on its dedicated space on the board.[2]

14. Divide all Artifact tiles into stacks according to their level: Starting, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3.[2]

15. Shuffle each stack separately and place all stacks face down near the board.[2]

16. Place the Level 1 Artifact stack on the current Artifact stack space on the board, and fill each of the six spaces of the Artifact market with one face-up Artifact.[2]

17. Each player should now place their Starting Artifact face up in the artifact space located on the right-most space at the bottom of their player boards.[2]

18. Return any unused Laboratory boards, Starting Experiments, Masterpiece Experiments, and Starting Artifacts to the game box.[2]

19. (Optional) Randomly place 1 Dominant Essence face-up token on each of the top spaces of the Mastery tracks.[2]

20. Shuffle all Bonus Tokens and then randomly place Bonus Tokens on the Bonus Spaces of each Mastery track, with each space holding one face-up token.[2]

21. Return any unused Bonus Tokens to the game box.[2]

22. Place the Essence tokens, Ethereal die tokens, Chameleon tokens, material cubes, and Reaction markers in their provided spaces on the main game board.[2]

23. Based on the number of players, remove the following dice from the game (returning them to the game box): with 4 players, do not remove any; with 2 players, remove 1 red and 1 black die; with 3 players, remove 1 black die.[3]

24. Place all remaining dice next to the main game board.[3]

Standard Player Setup

1. Each player chooses a color and takes all discs in that color.[4]

2. The player who has last performed an alchemical transmutation (or a player chosen at random) becomes the starting player and places one of their larger discs on the 1st space of the Current Round Order track on the main game board.[4]

3. The other players (in clockwise order) each place one of their larger discs on the leftmost empty space of the Current Round Order track.[4]

4. Starting with the last player and continuing counter-clockwise, each player chooses 1 Laboratory Board.[4]

5. Each player receives 2 Reaction tokens and places them on the ready (face-up) side.[4]

6. The second player receives an Ethereal Die; the third player (if present) receives two Ethereal Dice; and the fourth player (if present) receives two Ethereal Dice and an additional material.[4]

7. Each player places a small disc on the

[1] RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook · p.4 · Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook · p.5 · Introductory Game Setup · General Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook · p.5 · Dice Setup

[4] RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook · p.8 · Player Setup

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 211 ms · ask 7083 ms · total 7297 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7297 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To set up a game of T rismegistus, follow the steps below in order. If this is your first time playing T rismegistus, we recommend the following Introductory Game Setup. First, locate the following Laboratory boards: Claude Duval , Isaac Newton , Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa , and Roger Bacon . Alchem", "headingPath": "Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Each player chooses a color and takes all discs in the chosen color. 16 The player who has last performed an alchemical transmutation (or a player chosen at random) becomes the starting player and places one of their larger discs on the 1st space of the Current Round Order track on the main game boa", "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "The fourth player (if present) should receive the Bacon Laboratory board, as well as the cards and the Artifact below. That player Unfold the main game board and place it in the middle of the table. 1 Divide all cards into separate decks: Starting Experiments, Masterpiece Experiments, Level 1 Experi", "headingPath": "Introductory Game Setup · General Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "Then, each player places the chosen Artifact in one of the 6 Artifact Slots on their Laboratory board (player's choice which one). The chosen Publication and the Masterpiece Experiment should be kept secret. Return the unselected Masterpieces, Starting Experiments and Starting Artifacts to the game ", "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "Based on the number of players, remove the following dice from the game (returning them to the game box): With 4 players, do not remove any dice. ~ With 2 players, remove 1 red, and 1 black die. ~ With 3 players, remove 1 black die. ~ Place all remaining dice next to the main game board.", "headingPath": "Dice Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "In order to fill in the Alchemical Bowls on the main game board, follow these steps: Roll all the dice (preferably off-board), and place each in the Alchemical Bowl with the corresponding symbol. 13 If any of the bowls contain more than 5 dice, take all of the dice from that bowl and reroll them, as", "headingPath": "Rolling Dice and Filling Bowls", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each player should look at the dice available on the main game board and choose their Starting Experiment, Masterpiece Experiment, Publication, and Artifact at the same time. However, any player may request that (after all players have made their choices) Artifacts are placed on Laboratory boards in", "headingPath": "Important:", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.029437, "snippet": "Botmegistus is a virtual opponent that allows a player to play T rismegistus solo, playing against the virtual opponent. 'You' refers to the lone human player throughout these rules. Set up the main game board, and your components, for a 2-player game, with you being first player; ~ Put the 4 specia", "headingPath": "Botmegistus, the solo opponent · Setup for solo play · Gameplay Changes", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Introductory Game Setup · General Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Dice Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 776}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 776 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 776 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 0.91058 of 3545 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 29, 2026 12:22 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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup	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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Player Setup	p.8	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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Introductory Game Setup · General Setup	p.5	0.047619 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Player Setup	p.8	0.045928 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Dice Setup	p.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))	288
#6	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Rolling Dice and Filling Bowls	p.8	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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Important:	p.8	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
#8	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Botmegistus, the solo opponent · Setup for solo play · Gameplay Changes	p.22	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 41 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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Introductory Game Setup · General Setup	p.5	#3	0.047619 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup	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
#3	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Player Setup	p.8	#4	0.045928 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Botmegistus, the solo opponent · Setup for solo play · Gameplay Changes	p.22	#8	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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Variant module: Achievements · Setting up Achievements · Unlocking Achievements · Important: · Board & Dice T eam · Special Thanks	p.21	#11	0.02712 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	End of the Round	p.14	#10	0.029083 (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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Dice Setup	p.5	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Player Setup	p.8	#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 Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Game Setup · Introductory Game Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Introductory Game Setup · General Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Dice Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula — Rulebook (corpus doc 776)	Player Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 211 ms · first delta 2161 ms · total 7297 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 211 ms · ask 7083 ms · gateway work 7297 ms · total 7297 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3570
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 201.6 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.079 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, 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 712), 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.