Ruling — Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Gamebg-380135-en-1e

To play, follow these procedures:

Setup

1. Each player takes a Beheaded board of the Beheaded they would like to play and returns any unused Beheaded to the box.[1]

2. Take a Scroll marker in each colour (green, purple, red) and place each one on the first scroll space of their colour.[1]

3. Place the Maximum Health token on the 4th Heart from the left on the Health Track.[1]

4. Shuffle the Combat card deck for your Beheaded and deal yourself 3 cards, which you may look at but must keep hidden.[1]

5. Place the remaining cards to the left of the Beheaded board to form a Draw Pile.[1]

6. Give each player their associated Beheaded Aid card.[1]

7. Give the First Player token to the player of your choice.[1]

Moving Through Biomes

As the Group moves through Biomes, follow these three steps in order:

1. Progress through the Biome, one space at a time, by choosing a path, verifying correct Runes, performing any Checks, and placing the Group token in the new space.[2]

2. Collect items such as Gold Teeth, Potions, and Cells into your Bag.[2]

3. Reach an Exit door to finish a Biome.[2]

Combat Gameplay

1. Set up the Combat board according to the directions on the Encounter tile.[3]

2. Enter a brief Preparation Phase (less than one minute) to discuss priorities, such as which Enemies to focus on; players may not discuss icons on their cards.[3]

3. Starting with the First Player and proceeding clockwise, all players must:

* Choose one Combat card from their hand.[3]

* Announce ONE Action on that card (Do Damage, Perform a Skill Block, Loot, Assign a State, or Heal) and which Combat Round it will take place in.[3]

* Place the card face down on the Active Space on their Beheaded board.[3]

4. Once all 3 Combat cards have been played, players reveal their cards.[3]

5. If a player is the Passing Player, instead of playing a Combat card, they reveal the top card of their Combat deck; if it has a symbol, they advance the corresponding Scroll track, then discard the revealed card and may discard/re-draw cards from their hand.[4]

6. After the Combat rounds (I through IV) are complete, the Monsters take their turn.[5]

7. To begin a new turn (after reaching the end of round III or IV):

* Draw a new Combat Card to refill your hand to 3 cards.[6]

* Give the First Player token to the next player in turn order.[6]

* Play new Combat cards face-down in front of you.[6]

Ending the Game

A Run ends when either someone in the Group dies or a Boss is defeated.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD

[2] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.6 · GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …

[3] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.10 · COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game

[4] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.10 · THE PASSING PLAYER

[5] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.16 · 5. Biomes

[6] RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook · p.13 · THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING

Rule found, game 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 119 ms · ask 5882 ms · total 14348 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 8345 ms · generation 6003 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Once you've set up the Combat board according to the directions on the Encounter tile, you're ready to fight! Before each Combat, there is a brief Preparation Phase in which players outline their overall strategy . There are 3 rules for this discussion period: When we say this discussion should be b", "headingPath": "COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "1 Each player takes the Beheaded board of the Beheaded they would like to play. Return any unused Beheaded to the box. 2 Take a Scroll marker in each colour (green, purple, red) and place each one on the first scroll space of their colour, as indicated. 3 Place the Maximum Health token on the 4 th H", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "A Combat Round consists of all Beheaded and Enemies performing the Action indicated in that Round's space on their Combat/Monster card (or Equipment), beginning with Round I. For the Group, Actions are performed starting with the First Player and continuing clockwise around the table. For the Monste", "headingPath": "COMBAT ROUNDS I, II, III · GOLDEN RULE OF COMBAT: · ROUND 0 · RANGE · DAMAGE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045957, "snippet": "When it's the turn of the passing Player, instead of playing a Combat card, they reveal the top card of their Combat deck. If it has a , they advance the Scroll of that colour 1 space on their Beheaded board. If there are 2 symbols, you may choose which Scroll track to upgrade. The revealed card is ", "headingPath": "THE PASSING PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "You must now take down the Biome your Group just finished and set up the Biome (or Boss) indicated on the Exit your Group passed through. Return all Biome tiles , Monster cards (including Elite ), and Blueprints of the Biome you just finished to their section in the box. The Equipment cards remain w", "headingPath": "THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.043009, "snippet": "You don't know why you're here, but it doesn't really matter... You've got to get out! The only catch is that you won't be able to do this on your first try... It will take you a number of Runs before you succeed. You are now ready to begin a Run . A Run is a single play that ends when either someon", "headingPath": "GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "As soon as this icon is revealed, the First Player token passes to the next player in clockwise order. It is always the first action to take place. EITHER / OR You can't have it all, you know . When you see this line, you have to choose ONE of the items listed. If one of the choices is a Check, you ", "headingPath": "CHANGE FIRST PLAYER Long live me: The new King! · CELL · RUNE What a strange glow...", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "THE ROGUE-LITE BOARD GAME You've been here before. As you come to your senses and stand up, you... recognize this place. What are you doing here, how will you get out, and... what's that terrible smell?? This is no time to lose your head; you'll have to get to the bottom of all this. ...actually, yo", "headingPath": "RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE PASSING PLAYER", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "5. Biomes", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING", "sharpsignalDocId": 1293}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1293 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1293 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 0.90651 of 2043 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 15:11 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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game	p.10	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	0.047875 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT ROUNDS I, II, III · GOLDEN RULE OF COMBAT: · ROUND 0 · RANGE · DAMAGE	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
#4	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE PASSING PLAYER	p.10	0.045957 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING	p.13	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …	p.6	0.043009 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	CHANGE FIRST PLAYER Long live me: The new King! · CELL · RUNE What a strange glow...	p.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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	RULES	p.1	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 42 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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	#2	0.047875 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game	p.10	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE PASSING PLAYER	p.10	#4	0.045957 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING	p.13	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	SOLO MODE · SERENADE IN COMBAT · SERENADE BOARD · SERENADE'S COMBAT DECK	p.18	#10	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
#6	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	5. Biomes	p.16	#9	0.028814 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …	p.6	#6	0.043009 (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 Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	RULES	p.1	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	PLAYER SETUP · CHOOSING A BEHEADED · THE BEHEADED BOARD	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	GOAL OF THE GAME · Your goal is to beat the Hand of the King. · A RUN · EXAMPLES OF A RUN: · BIOMES · YOUR BAG · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	COMBAT GAMEPLAY · PREPARATION PHASE · PLAYING COMBAT CARDS · 2-Player Game : · 3-Player Game · 4-Player Game	p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE PASSING PLAYER	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	5. Biomes	p.16	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 1293)	THE NEXT BIOME · FIGHTING A BOSS · THE BOSS IS AN ENEMY · TURNS · PASSING	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 119 ms · first delta 2778 ms · total 14348 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 8345 ms · retrieval 119 ms · ask 5882 ms · gateway work 6003 ms · total 14348 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3358
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 636
tok/sec: 201.3 tok/sec — 636 output tokens in 3.159 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 2s 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 1223), 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.