Ruling — Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legendsbg-146278-en-1e

The setup process depends on the specific game form being played:

General Setup

1. Each player chooses a school and takes the cards, pieces, and score board in that color.[1]

2. Take one heroic piece from each other player and place it on the zero space of your score board, ensuring they are heroic side up.[1]

3. Choose a starting player.[1][2][3]

4. For a first game, one player takes the Northern Empire (blue deck) and the other takes the Southern Empire (red deck).[2]

5. Players shuffle their decks, put them in front of themselves, and draw 3 cards.[2]

6. Each player draws 1 flare from the shared deck.[2]

7. Players keep their cards hidden from the opponent.[2]

Task Board Setup (High Form)

1. Put the two boards together to make the task board.[2]

2. For a first game, remove all cards with the specific watermark from the deck and return them to the box.[2]

3. Shuffle the remaining tasks and place 3 face up on the task board.[2]

4. (Recommended for first game) Adjust tasks so the first three are 1-point and 2-point tasks, and try to get three tasks with different symbols.[2]

5. Shuffle the task deck and place it face down on the task board.[2]

6. Turn up the top card of the task deck to be the NEXT TASK.[2]

7. (For High Form) Ensure there are no advanced tasks among the first three current tasks, and no three or more face-up tasks of the same type.[4] If necessary, discard and redraw to ensure 3 face-up non-advanced tasks of at least 2 different types.[4]

Initial Piece Placement

* Standard 3-player game: The player to the right of the starting player puts 1 common piece of each color on the game board, each on a square adjacent to a different symbol.[1]

* Standard 4-player game: The player to the right of the starting player puts 1 common piece of each color on the game board, each on a square adjacent to a different symbol, but the piece of the player who will play second is left out.[1]

* Deathmatch Duel (2 players/teams): The player to the right of the starting player puts 1 common piece of each color on the game board on the squares marked.[5][3]

* Deathmatch Duel (Score Board): Each player puts one common piece on the zero space of the score board.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.10 · PLAYERS · Game Play

[2] RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.3 · Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck

[3] RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.9 · PLAYERS · Game Play

[4] RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.8 · Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks

[5] RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook · p.8 · Ending the Game · DEATHMATCH DUEL (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · PLAYERS · Game Play · POINTS FOR DESTROYED PIECES

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 213 ms · ask 3977 ms · total 4195 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4195 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Teammates should sit opposite each other. Each player chooses a different deck, but use only two colors of pieces, one complete set for each team. (We recommend that the two Imperial decks be on different teams.) After you shuffle your deck, turn the six bottom cards sideways. (The end of the game i", "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "So far, we have presented a special version of the rules designed to introduce new players to the game. Even experienced players should consider using those rules when teaching the game to a new player. In this section, we will explain the differences between the new-player rules and the full versio", "headingPath": "RULES FOR A FULL GAME · Player Decks and Pieces · Legends · LEGEND CARDS BONE CATAPULT · SUMMONING A LEGENDARY BEING", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "All forms of Tash-Kalar use the rules for a full game that were explained in the previous chapter. They differ in the way they are scored, and each has a few special rules. After playing your first game, you already know most of the rules for the High Form of Tash-Kalar. The High Form is different f", "headingPath": "Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "And now that we have come to the end of our tour of Tash-Kalar, show me what you can do. There, in that central square, create a common piece of kalarite. ... Hm. Not bad. You have talent, my young mage-ling. Of course, that kalarite isn't stable enough to endure an entire match, but you show very g", "headingPath": "SCORE BOARDS · The Arena", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Players take turns. The STARTING PLAYER can take only 1 ACTION on his or her FIRST TURN. But for the remainder of the game, each player takes 2 ACTIONS PER TURN. An action can be either putting a common piece on the board or using pieces already on the board to summon a being. Players start with no ", "headingPath": "GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player chooses a school and takes the cards, pieces, and score board in that color. Take one heroic piece from each other player and place it on the zero space of your score board. Be sure these pieces are heroic side up. This will be important later. (During play, you will score points in your", "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "For your first game, one player takes the Northern Empire (blue deck) and the other player takes the Southern Empire (red deck). (The two Imperial decks have identical cards, while the Sylvan and Highland decks are unique. In later games, you will be able to test the various schools against each oth", "headingPath": "Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "(But you might be able to claim another one next turn.) To claim a task, take the card and keep it in front of you, next to your deck. The number in the lower right corner tells you how many points you earned. Take the top task from the deck and put it in the empty space. It becomes one of the curre", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYERS · Game Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Ending the Game · DEATHMATCH DUEL (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · PLAYERS · Game Play · POINTS FOR DESTROYED PIECES", "sharpsignalDocId": 766}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 766 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 766 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 0.89163 of 1827 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Oct 24, 2026 18:25 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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.9	0.047619 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	RULES FOR A FULL GAME · Player Decks and Pieces · Legends · LEGEND CARDS BONE CATAPULT · SUMMONING A LEGENDARY BEING	p.7	0.046898 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks	p.8	0.046244 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	SCORE BOARDS · The Arena	p.3	0.045037 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces	p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck	p.3	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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)		p.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))	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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	GAME PLAY · Placing the First Pieces	p.4	#5	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
#2	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks	p.8	#3	0.046244 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.10	#6	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
#4	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Ending the Game · DEATHMATCH DUEL (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · PLAYERS · Game Play · POINTS FOR DESTROYED PIECES	p.8	#13	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
#5	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck	p.3	#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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	FINISHING YOUR TURN · Ending the Game · Sideways Cards · Communication · Take Backs	p.10	#12	0.014286 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)		p.6	#8	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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.9	#1	0.047619 (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 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.10	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Player Decks · Tasks · Shared Deck	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	PLAYERS · Game Play	p.9	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Breaking Ties · THE HIGH FORM (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · Setting Up for the High Form · Tasks	p.8	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends — Rulebook (corpus doc 766)	Ending the Game · DEATHMATCH DUEL (2 PLAYERS OR TEAMS) · PLAYERS · Game Play · POINTS FOR DESTROYED PIECES	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 213 ms · first delta 1261 ms · total 4195 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 213 ms · ask 3977 ms · gateway work 4195 ms · total 4195 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3928
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 569
tok/sec: 200.8 tok/sec — 569 output tokens in 2.834 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 30s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 5h, checked 4s 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 700), 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.