Ruling — Imhotep: The Duel

← Imhotep: The Duel

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Imhotep: The Duelbg-255674-en-1e

To play Imhotep: The Duel, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Place the harbor board between the two players.[1]

2. Place the six boat tokens in the six moorings of the harbor board.[1]

3. Both players choose a color (black or white) and receive four meeples of that color and one set of site boards (obelisk, temple, pyramid, and tomb) placed in front of them.[1]

4. Ensure both players use the same side (A-side or B-side) for each location board.[1]

5. Shuffle all cargo tokens face down and create a face-down pile of supplies.[1]

6. Place three randomly chosen cargo tokens face up on the cargo spaces of each of the six boats, starting with the 1st cargo space, then the 2nd, and lastly the 3rd.[1]

7. Place three randomly chosen cargo tokens face down on the reserve space on the harbor board.[1]

Gameplay

1. Players take turns alternately, with the younger player beginning.[2]

2. On your turn, you must choose exactly one of the following three actions:[2][3]

* Place one meeple: Take one of your meeples from your repository and place it on an unoccupied harbor space (only one meeple per space is allowed).[2] If all your meeples are already placed, you cannot choose this action.[2]

* Unload one boat: Choose a boat moored at the end of a row or column that contains at least two meeples of any color.[2] Each meeple in that row or column unloads one cargo token from the boat.[2] The meeple closest to the boat unloads the cargo space farthest from the harbor.[2] The owner of the meeple returns the meeple to their repository and takes the corresponding cargo token.[2] If a harbor space in that row or column is unoccupied, it is ignored.[2] After unloading, the boat is loaded with three randomly chosen cargo tokens from the supply; if the supply is empty, the boat is removed from the game.[2]

* Play one action token: If you possess an action token, you may play it and use its function.[4] The played token is then removed from the game and returned to the box.[4] You may only use one action token per turn.[4]

3. The game continues until the end is triggered.[2]

End of Game and Scoring

1. The game ends immediately when the second to last boat is removed from the game, leaving only one boat remaining.[5] The last boat cannot be unloaded, and players do not receive its cargo tokens.[5]

2. The player with the most points wins.[3] In the event of a tie, the player who did not start the game wins.[6]

3. Scoring (using A-sides) includes:

* Obelisk: Every token yields one point; the player with more tokens receives six additional points.[5]

* Temple: Each circle symbol on all your temple tokens yields one point.[5]

* Pyramids: Points are awarded based on the number of tokens used to build the light and dark pyramids (1/3/6/10/15/21 points for 1/2/3/4/5/6 tokens respectively).[5]

* Tomb: Points are awarded for groups of connected tomb tokens (1/4/9/16/25 points for 1/2/3/4/5+ tokens).[5]

* Additional points: Each unused action token and each meeple remaining on a harbor field yields one point.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.3 · Game prepAration

[2] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.4 · Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:

[3] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.1 · Game Story · Game objective

[4] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.5 · The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:

[5] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.6 · End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:

[6] RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook · p.6 · Advice:

One rule clearer, zero feelings hurt.

🔧 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 78 ms · ask 5279 ms · total 51563 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 46204 ms · generation 5359 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "The players take turns alternately until the end of the game is triggered. The younger player begins. The player whose turn it is, must choose exactly one of the following three actions: Take one of your meeples from your repository and place it on an unoccupied harbor space. (There may only be one ", "headingPath": "Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "The competition of master builders continues! In Imhotep: The Duel, you play the roles of Nefertiti and Akhenaten - one of the most popular royal couples of ancient Egypt. Place your meeples tactically to unload the most valuable tokens from the six boats. Little by little you build your four monume", "headingPath": "Game Story · Game objective", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Received tokens are instantly placed next to the corresponding site boards: \u0007 Obelisk tokens are placed in a column above the obelisk board. \u0007 Temple tokens are placed face down in a stack on the temple board. \u0007 Pyramid tokens are placed above the correspondingly colored base on the pyramid board. T", "headingPath": "The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "Since childhood, Phil Walker-Harding has loved playing and inventing board games. He particularly likes games that bring together people of different ages and personality types. Phil is also interested in theology, classic Hollywood films, and the myths of ancient Egypt. He lives with his wife Mered", "headingPath": "Author:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Place the harbor board between the two players. Place the six boat tokens in the six moorings of the harbor board. Both players choose a color (black or white) and receive the four meeples of your color as well as one set of site boards (obelisk, temple, pyramid, and tomb), which you place in front ", "headingPath": "Game prepAration", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Players take turns alternately until the second to last boat is removed from the game and thus only one boat remains in the game. The game ends immediately and you determine who scored most points. Remember to remove boats from the game when their cargo spaces cannot be refilled. The last boat canno", "headingPath": "End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "For a more challenging game, you can turn over some or all site boards to their B-sides. The rules of the game remain the same - only the scoring for the different site boards changes: \u0007 Obelisk: Whoever is the first to receive their fifth obelisk token places it face down and receives 12 additional", "headingPath": "Variant B-Sides", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "60 Cargo tokens 12 Obelisk tokens 12 Temple tokens (with 1, 2, 3, or 4 symbols on them) 12 Pyramid tokens (6 dark and 6 light) 12 Tomb tokens (with the numbers 1-12) 12 Action tokens (3 for each of the 4 different actions) 8 Site boards 2 Obelisk boards 2 Temple boards 2 Pyramid boards 2 Tomb boards", "headingPath": "Game materials", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game prepAration", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Story · Game objective", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Advice:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1268}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1268 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1268 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 0.88286 of 2544 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:12 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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:	p.4	0.048412 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game Story · Game objective	p.1	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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:	p.5	0.047643 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Author:	p.8	0.046176 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game prepAration	p.3	0.032258 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:	p.6	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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Variant B-Sides	p.7	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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game materials	p.2	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 10 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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:	p.4	#1	0.048412 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game Story · Game objective	p.1	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:	p.5	#3	0.047643 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Advice:	p.6	#9	0.014493 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Author:	p.8	#4	0.046176 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Variant B-Sides	p.7	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:	p.6	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game prepAration	p.3	#5	0.032258 (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 Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game prepAration	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Course of Play · Place One Meeple · Unload One Boat · The following rule applies:	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Game Story · Game objective	p.1	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	The following rule applies: · Play One Action Token · Overview of Action Tokens:	p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	End of Game · End Scoring · Scoring using the A-Sides:	p.6	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Imhotep: The Duel — Rulebook (corpus doc 1268)	Advice:	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 78 ms · first delta 1267 ms · total 51563 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 46204 ms · retrieval 78 ms · ask 5279 ms · gateway work 5359 ms · total 51563 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3156
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 801
tok/sec: 198.8 tok/sec — 801 output tokens in 4.029 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 3s 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 1198), 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.