Ruling — Massive Darkness

← Massive Darkness

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Massive Darknessbg-197070-en-1e

To play Massive Darkness, follow these procedures:

Setup

1. Choose a Quest.[1][2]

2. Place the tiles and tokens as indicated by the Quest.[1][2]

3. Sort the game cards by type and Level, then shuffle each pile and place it facedown near the board.[1][2]

4. Set aside the Starting Equipment cards.[1][2]

5. Set aside the Artifact cards.[1][2]

Game Round Sequence

A Game Round is split into 5 Phases, resolved in the following order:[3][4]

1. Heroes' Phase [4]

2. Enemies' Phase [4]

3. Experience Phase [4]

4. Event Phase [4]

5. End Phase [4]

Phase Details

* Heroes' Phase: Players activate their Heroes one by one, starting with the First Player and moving clockwise.[4] A Hero can initially perform up to 3 Actions per Activation.[3][4] Actions can include moving, battling Enemies, taking objectives, finding treasure, or exchanging equipment.[3] Specific actions include:

* Melee, Ranged, or Magic Action: Uses an equipped weapon to attack Enemies.[4]

* Do Nothing: The Hero ends their Activation prematurely and loses all remaining Actions.[4]

* Get Up: A Stunned Hero spends 1 Action to shake off the Stun effect.[4]

After a Hero finishes their Actions, any surviving Enemies they attacked may immediately attempt a Counter-Attack.[3][4] The phase ends when all players have completed their Turn.[3]

* Enemies' Phase: All Enemies on the board are activated one after the other in an order decided by the players.[5] When an Enemy is Activated, they follow these steps:[5]

1. Try to Attack a Hero (using Melee, Ranged, or Magic Combat if available).[5]

2. If unable to attack, move 1 Zone towards their target.[5]

3. Try to Attack a Hero.[5]

4. If unable to attack, move 1 Zone towards their target.[5]

If an Enemy successfully performs an Attack, their Activation immediately ends.[5]

* Experience Phase: Players spend Experience Points to get new Skills.[6]

* Event Phase: The First Player draws and resolves an Event card.[3][6]

* End Phase: The next player receives the First Player token in clockwise order.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.6 · MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES

[2] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.6

[3] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.11 · GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE

[4] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.25 · PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up

[5] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.28 · ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack

[6] RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook · p.56 · 3. EXPERIENCE PHASE: · 4. EVENT PHASE: · 5. END PHASE:

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 127 ms · ask 7404 ms · total 22998 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 15465 ms · generation 7533 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "1. Choose a Quest. If this is your first game, we recommend choosing the tutorial (P. 40), then playing the Quests in the indicated order to follow the story. Experienced players can play a past Quest again with different conditions or create a Quest on their own using the modular tiles and various ", "headingPath": "MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "SETUP 1. Choose a Quest. If this is your first game, we recommend choosing the tutorial (P. 40), then playing the Quests in the indicated order to follow the story. Experienced players can play a past Quest again with different conditions or create a Quest on their own using the modular tiles and va", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.046343, "snippet": "A Game Round is split into 5 Phases, resolved in the order below: 1- Heroes' Phase 2- Enemies' Phase 3- Experience Phase 4- Event Phase 5- End Phase Each player activates his Hero, starting with the First Player and going clockwise. Once a player has resolved his Hero's Activation, any surviving Ene", "headingPath": "PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Choose a Hero Card, and set it here on your Hero Dashboard. Meet Owen! The Micro-Experience Point section is used in Story Mode only (see P. 38). If you play with this mode, place a peg on the '0' slot. Place the Leather Armor in the 'Body' slot. Your Hero starts the game with Health 5. Place a peg ", "headingPath": "HERO SETUP EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.044192, "snippet": "Heroes have done all they could, but now it's time for fiends to come out. Enemies play by their own rules. When they are Activated, they act as follows: Step 1 - Try to Attack a Hero. If they're unable to, they continue to Step 2. Step 2 - Move 1 Zone towards their target. Step 3 - Try to Attack ", "headingPath": "ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "If the Enemy was unable to Attack (because there were no Heroes in Range of any of its Combat Actions), it will then Move 1 Zone towards its target in the same way as Heroes Move (see P. 26). The Enemy's target is determined in this order: 1. The Enemy Moves to get within Range of the Hero in Line o", "headingPath": "Step 2 - Move · Step 3 - Attack · Step 4 - Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Heroes earn Experience Points by defeating Enemies or picking up Objective tokens (the amount can vary). Experience can be spent during the Experience Phase to acquire new Skills and get your party 1 step closer to greatness! Skills are acquired following each Skill Line's progress. A Hero acquires ", "headingPath": "EXPERIENCE PHASE · MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029828, "snippet": "Massive Darkness is played over a series of Game Rounds, which go as follows: The First Player takes his Turn, activating his Hero. A Hero can initially perform up to 3 Actions per Activation. Each can be used to execute various tasks toward the Quest's completion: moving around the board, battling ", "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 25, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 28, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}, {"page": 56, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. EXPERIENCE PHASE: · 4. EVENT PHASE: · 5. END PHASE:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1237}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1237 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1237 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 0.85196 of 1736 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:10 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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES	p.6	0.04866 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)		p.6	0.046875 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up	p.25	0.046343 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	HERO SETUP EXAMPLE	p.10	0.046032 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack	p.28	0.044192 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	Step 2 - Move · Step 3 - Attack · Step 4 - Move	p.28	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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	EXPERIENCE PHASE · MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES	p.31	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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE	p.11	0.029828 (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 80 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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack	p.28	#5	0.044192 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	HERO SETUP EXAMPLE	p.10	#4	0.046032 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	STORY MODE · Experience and Level	p.38	#10	0.029274 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE	p.11	#8	0.029828 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	3. EXPERIENCE PHASE: · 4. EVENT PHASE: · 5. END PHASE:	p.56	#19	0.014085 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up	p.25	#3	0.046343 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES	p.6	#1	0.04866 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)		p.6	#2	0.046875 (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 Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	MASSIVE DARKNESS - RULES	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)		p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	GAME OVERVIEW · HEROES' PHASE · ENEMIES' PHASE · EXPERIENCE PHASE · EVENT PHASE	p.11	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	PLAYING A GAME ROUND · HEROES' PHASE · Combat Actions · Do Nothing · Get Up	p.25	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	ENEMIES' PHASE · Step 1 - Attack	p.28	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Massive Darkness — Rulebook (corpus doc 1237)	3. EXPERIENCE PHASE: · 4. EVENT PHASE: · 5. END PHASE:	p.56	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 127 ms · first delta 4607 ms · total 22998 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 15465 ms · retrieval 127 ms · ask 7404 ms · gateway work 7533 ms · total 22998 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3289
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 559
tok/sec: 195.2 tok/sec — 559 output tokens in 2.864 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 24h, 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: 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 1167), 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.