Ruling — Duel of Meloch

← Duel of Meloch

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Duel of Melochbg-473061-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

Shared Components Setup

1. Place the playmat (either side) on the table so the popularity/power track is facing the Scythe player.[1]

2. Place the resources, coins, and workers in a supply near the board.[1]

3. Randomize the 9 map tokens and place 1 face down on each of the 6 indicated locations (icon overlapping with the location number), then set the remaining map tokens aside face down.[1]

4. Randomize the 12 corruption tokens and stack 2 face up on each of the 6 locations that have a dotted square box.[1]

5. Place the Triumph Track (either side) near the board, with edge facing the Scythe player.[1]

6. Shuffle the combat cards and set the deck face down near the board (do not use original combat cards from Scythe).[1]

7. Shuffle the Factory cards and place 2 face down next to the board; return the rest to the box.[1]

8. Shuffle the encounter cards and place the deck face down near the board.[1]

9. Shuffle the discovery cards and place 1 card face up on each lake and place the deck face down near the board.[1]

10. Shuffle the Meloch cards and place the deck face down nearby, then reveal a card and place it between the players with a random orientation.[1]

Scythe Player Setup

1. Sit on the side of the board with the popularity/power track oriented toward you.[2]

2. Select and set up any faction mat and any player mat with their corresponding tokens (including all 6 stars) and miniatures, Power Dial, and all starting components indicated on those mats (except objective cards).[2]

3. Start with 2 workers on the locations adjacent to your home base (1 on each location).[2]

Expeditions Player Setup

1. Sit on the other side of the board.[2]

2. Select and set up any mech with its corresponding mat and card (from Gears of Corruption), any character/companion pair with their corresponding tokens, and a Power Dial.[2]

3. Gain all starting resources as indicated on the matching mech card (if using a mech from Expeditions without Gears of Corruption cards, start with 3 guile, 3 power, and 1 hero worker).[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook · p.4 · SHARED COMPONENTS

[2] RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook · p.5 · SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS

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 240 ms · ask 5348 ms · total 5591 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5591 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Place 1 worker on each of the two land-adjoined territories adjacent to the home base. 4. Place 4 mechs on the mech spaces on your faction mat. 5. Place your 6 star tokens on your faction mat. PLAYER MATS 1. Start with the popularity position ( ) and gain the number of coins ( ) shown on your mat. I", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "3 6 9 IF YOU ARE THE SCYTHE PLAYER, sit on the side of the board with the popularity/power track oriented toward you. Select and set up any faction mat and any player mat with their corresponding tokens (including all 6 stars) and miniatures, Power Dial, and all starting components indicated on thos", "headingPath": "SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "To initiate combat, either (a) the Expeditions player gains the Vanquish benefit on a location with a Scythe mech/character and chooses to Vanquish them instead of corruption or (b) the Scythe player ends a movement action with at least 1 mech/character on the Expeditions mech's location (whether or", "headingPath": "COMBAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Place the playmat (either side) on the table so the popularity/power track is facing the Scythe player. 1 Place the resources, coins, and workers in a supply near the board. It is fine to include additional coins and resource tokens from Scythe and Expeditions. 2 Randomize the 9 map tokens and place", "headingPath": "SHARED COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "2 SCYTHE PLAYER 1 rule summary guide 20 resource tokens (5 each of food, oil, metal, and wood) 3 Factory cards 60 combat cards (new design) 6 encounter cards 5 miniatures (4 mechs and 1 character) 31 wooden tokens (6 stars, 1 action token, 1 popularity token, 1 power token, 4 structures, 4 recruits,", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "On your turn, do ONE of the following: If the action token is on “Refresh,” shift it along the red arrow to the blank square and take all 3 actions (MOVE, PLAY, and GATHER) in any order. If the action token is on the blank square next to “Refresh” or within the box GATHERMOVE PLAY REFRESH TATANKATAT", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "TRIUMPH TRACK The Scythe player places a star on an empty space on the Triumph track immediately when they meet its requirement printed on their side of the track. The Expeditions player must gain a Boast benefit in order to place a star on one completed requirement (except when winning combat, they", "headingPath": "COMBAT CARDS · PLACING STARS, MELOCH CARDS, AND END OF GAME · CONTROL 7+ LOCATIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "6 Duel of Meloch is a clash of Scythe versus Expeditions, just on a smaller map, with multiple ways to disrupt the other player, and without endof-game scoring. The winner is the first player to place 4 stars on the new Triumph Track, where only 1 star can be placed on each category. EXPERIENCE DISP", "headingPath": "PLAYER COMPONENTS · GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW · HOW TO PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SHARED COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 201}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 201 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 201 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 0.90719 of 1724 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 12, 2026 04:29 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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	0.032787 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.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))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	COMBAT	p.8	0.031746 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS	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
#5	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	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
#6	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	0.030303 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	COMBAT CARDS · PLACING STARS, MELOCH CARDS, AND END OF GAME · CONTROL 7+ LOCATIONS	p.10	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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	PLAYER COMPONENTS · GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW · HOW TO PLAY	p.6	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 28 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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.5	#2	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
#2	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	VARIANTS · NEW BENEFITS IN STANDARD SCYTHE GAMES:	p.11	#9	0.028893 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	#10	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
#4	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	COMBAT	p.8	#3	0.031746 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	COMBAT CARDS · PLACING STARS, MELOCH CARDS, AND END OF GAME · CONTROL 7+ LOCATIONS	p.10	#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
#6	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS	p.4	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	#6	0.030303 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)		p.2	#1	0.032787 (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 Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Duel of Meloch — Rulebook (corpus doc 201)	SHARED COMPONENTS · SCYTHE PLAYER · PLAYER COMPONENTS	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 240 ms · first delta 2910 ms · total 5591 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 240 ms · ask 5348 ms · gateway work 5591 ms · total 5591 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4048
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 516
tok/sec: 200.7 tok/sec — 516 output tokens in 2.571 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 32s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s 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 126), 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.