Ruling — Inferno

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Infernobg-393165-en-1e

The game is played in turns over successive rounds.[1] Each turn consists of two phases:

1. Hell phase:[1]

* Move a Soul in Hell from its current shield to another one in a lower circle.[1]

* If the Soul is moved to the circle matching its color, you earn Infamy points.[1] The lower the circle, the more points received.[1]

2. Florence phase:[1]

* Take an action using a family member by choosing one of the following options:

* Move a family member to a location in the city and perform that location's action.[1]

* Accuse a sinner: Use a family member at a location to accuse a sinner there.[1] Sinners are executed and their Souls are placed in the Graveyard.[1] Whenever a player accuses a sinner, Dante moves to the next stop along his path.[1]

* Call a family council: This is required if you cannot perform either of the previous actions, such as when you have no family members at any location, no free space in your Tower, or do not have the appropriate Guest.[2]

Playing Fraud Cards:[3][4]

* To play a card, you may choose 1 of the 2 in your hand, 1 of the 3 visible in the Fraud card market, or the top card from the Fraud deck.[3]

* Playing a card from anywhere other than your hand requires paying 1 Drachma in addition to the action's cost.[3]

* When a card is played, its left-half instant effect is resolved.[3][4]

* After playing, place the card to the right of your board so the leftmost section is hidden under the board or the previous card.[3]

* If you played a card from your hand, draw a new card at no cost; you may select 1 of the 3 cards in the market or the top card from the deck.[3] If any of the 3 market cards are missing, replace them with cards from the top of the deck.[3]

* The right half of a Fraud card activates at the end of the game if its endgame requirement is met.[4]

End of the Game:[1]

* The game ends when Dante reaches his final stop after a player accuses a sinner.[1]

* Final Scoring: Tally Infamy points from cards, Diplomas, and achieved Reputation in Florence.[1] Diplomas are worth more points the further you have advanced on their matching Sin Track.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.6 · 1. Hell phase: · 2. Florence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring

[2] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.15

[3] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.9 · Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:

[4] RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook · p.9 · INFAMY POINTS: · ADVANCING ON THE SIN TRACKS: · THE GRAVEYARD AND PLAGUE CARDS: · PLAYING FRAUD CARDS: · Card Requirements

The sage rests. The game continues.

🔧 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 95 ms · ask 5963 ms · total 6061 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6061 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Some location or bonus will allow you to play a card. To do so, you must choose 1 of the 2 in your hand, OR 1 of the 3 visible in the Fraud card market, OR the top card from the Fraud deck. To play a card from anywhere other than your hand, you must pay 1 Drachma in addition to the cost of the actio", "headingPath": "Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046676, "snippet": "If the selected Guardians include Medusa, Geryon, or Cerberus, add their respective elements to the supply, within everyone's reach. Place an individual player board in front of you, with one floor of each Tower level (1-4). This is your personal play area. Choose a player color. Take all player com", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045445, "snippet": "Move Dante to his next step (shortcuts must be bypassed) and receive the reward that matches one of the icons below: » Place a cream-colored Soul in the Graveyard. It belongs to a pagan. Like any other Soul, it will score points when taken to its corresponding circle (the first one). Additionally, y", "headingPath": "5.\t Move Dante :", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "The game ends when a player accuses a sinner and makes Dante advance to his final stop, where the ice blue Diploma is awarded. That will be that player's last turn. The remaining players will then each take one last turn, in order. If any other player uses that turn to accuse a sinner Dante will not", "headingPath": "ENDGAME · 1.\t Scoring of Fraud Cards: · 2.\t Adjust the River Phlegethon score: · 3.\t Gain additional Diplomas: · 4.\t Scoring Diplomas: · 5.\t Repayment of Charon's loans:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.043756, "snippet": "- 2 - COMPONENTS ................................................................... 3 GAME SETUP ....................................................................... 4 HOW TO PLAY ..................................................................... 6 GAME BOARDS ................................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.043496, "snippet": "Move a Soul in Hell from its current shield to another one in a lower circle. If you move the Soul to the circle matching its color, you will earn Infamy points. The lower the circle, the more points you will receive. The shield where you place the Soul during the Hell Phase determines the locations", "headingPath": "1.\tHell phase: · 2.\tFlorence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "If this is your first game, we recommend implementing a few adjustments to the standard setup. They are indicated by this symbol: Place the board on the side matching the number of players: Or Regardless of the number of players, place the board on the side matching the icon: Randomly place the 8 lo", "headingPath": "INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Use these setup variants to increase player interaction in your games: Before placing Guests at the PALACE , randomly remove from the game as many Guests as there are players. Example: In a 3-player game you would pick 12 Guests (3 of each color), and then randomly remove 3 of any color(s). Leave th", "headingPath": "VARIANTS · DIPLOMATIC CRISIS · TIME OF THIEVES · DANTE'S RUSH · CHANGES TO SETUP · RULE CHANGES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1.\tHell phase: · 2.\tFlorence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INFAMY POINTS: · ADVANCING ON THE SIN TRACKS: · THE GRAVEYARD AND PLAGUE CARDS: · PLAYING FRAUD CARDS: · Card Requirements", "sharpsignalDocId": 1019}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1019 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1019 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 0.90334 of 1738 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 12:57 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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:	p.9	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
#2	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	SETUP	p.5	0.046676 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	5. Move Dante :	p.14	0.045445 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	ENDGAME · 1. Scoring of Fraud Cards: · 2. Adjust the River Phlegethon score: · 3. Gain additional Diplomas: · 4. Scoring Diplomas: · 5. Repayment of Charon's loans:	p.16	0.045228 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)		p.2	0.043756 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	1. Hell phase: · 2. Florence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring	p.6	0.043496 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME	p.4	0.03125 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	VARIANTS · DIPLOMATIC CRISIS · TIME OF THIEVES · DANTE'S RUSH · CHANGES TO SETUP · RULE CHANGES	p.18	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 48 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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:	p.9	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	RED GUARDIANS	p.22	#13	0.028324 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	SETUP	p.5	#2	0.046676 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)		p.15	#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
#5	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFINITE COMPONENTS · GAME	p.4	#7	0.03125 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFAMY POINTS: · ADVANCING ON THE SIN TRACKS: · THE GRAVEYARD AND PLAGUE CARDS: · PLAYING FRAUD CARDS: · Card Requirements	p.9	#12	0.028778 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	1. Hell phase: · 2. Florence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring	p.6	#6	0.043496 (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 Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	BLACK GUARDIANS	p.23	#9	0.029214 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	1. Hell phase: · 2. Florence phase: · OR · HOW TO PLAY · Endgame: · Diploma scoring	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)		p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	Playing Fraud cards · THE RIVER STYX:	p.9	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Inferno — Rulebook (corpus doc 1019)	INFAMY POINTS: · ADVANCING ON THE SIN TRACKS: · THE GRAVEYARD AND PLAGUE CARDS: · PLAYING FRAUD CARDS: · Card Requirements	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 95 ms · first delta 3209 ms · total 6061 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 95 ms · ask 5963 ms · gateway work 6061 ms · total 6061 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4355
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 548
tok/sec: 200.1 tok/sec — 548 output tokens in 2.739 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 26s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, 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 949), 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.