About the Rules Desk

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial fan site. It is not produced, endorsed or supported by, or affiliated with, Fantasy Flight Games or Asmodee. Twilight Imperium, its expansions, and all game text, card names and rules are © Fantasy Flight Games / Asmodee. Rules and card text are reproduced so players can look things up quickly at the table — please support the game and get the official documents from Fantasy Flight Games. All artwork, icons, faction sigils and tile diagrams on this site are original; no card art is copied or hotlinked.

What's in here

• Living Rules Reference v2.0 (September 22, 2020): all 101 glossary topics and 491 numbered paragraphs with every sub-point and related-topic link, Complete Setup, 69 FAQ entries and 11 errata. Extracted from the official PDF with a font- and layout-aware parser so wording is exact; text printed in red in v2.0 is marked.
• Thunder's Edge rulebook: expansion integration, setup, expedition, breakthroughs, fracture, new rules, alliance variant, map appendix and the 17 official clarifications — each attached to the LRR topic it updates.
• Twilight's Fall rulebook: the alternate mode's components, setup and rules.
• Learn to Play (2020 web edition): the full beginner booklet text, 56 sections, with worked examples.
• Twilight Codex I–IV and 4.5: Ω reworks, Ixthian Artifacts, the Codex I rules updates, the Ordinian scenario, the original Alliance variant and the full Liberation of Ordinian scenario with a redrawn galaxy map. 34 cards show their printing history (base → Codex → Thunder's Edge).
• 1,278 components and 30 factions: 102 technologies, 169 units, 99 leaders, 40 promissory notes, 151 action cards, 73 agendas, 80 objectives, 18 strategy cards, 160 planets, 141 system tiles, 36 exploration cards, 23 relics, 19 legendary planet abilities, 31 breakthroughs, 20 galactic events, 5 plot cards, 89 twilight's fall abilities, 14 twilight's fall genomes, 8 twilight's fall kings.

Not included: the rulebooks' own diagrams and illustrations (replaced by our original diagrams on key rule pages, labelled as such), the Codex I Ordinian scenario map, and Codex narrative fiction. Where the component data's wording was wrong or paraphrased, a curated fix records its source on the card page.

How the search works

Every rule paragraph, FAQ answer, clarification, setup step and component is a searchable passage. Questions are matched instantly with BM25 ranking (title and heading boosts, phrase bonuses), a hand-built alias table — PDS → space cannon, AFB, grav drive, tac action, faction nicknames like Hacan or Jol-Nar — and an entity resolver, so “Hacan agent” goes straight to the card. A small embedding model (Snowflake Arctic Embed XS, 8-bit, about 23 MB) then re-ranks by meaning: it downloads once on demand, runs in a Web Worker and is cached for offline use. Passage embeddings are computed at build time. If the model can't load, keyword results still work.

Search quality is checked against 50 real player questions plus three held-out sets (72 questions) written without looking at the results.

Sources

• Fantasy Flight Games official PDFs: Living Rules Reference v2.0, Thunder's Edge rulebook, Twilight's Fall rulebook, and Codex I–IV documents.
• Component data: the open-source AsyncTI4 map generator bot data files (official sources only; homebrew excluded), merged with flavor text from surewht/ti4-mcp (MIT).
• Cross-checked against the Twilight Imperium fandom wiki card lists.

Card text agreement with the wiki

Most mismatches are cards reprinted with new wording in the Codices or Thunder's Edge, where this site shows the newer text.

Offline & install

The site is an installable Progressive Web App. Pages you visit and the search index are cached, so the Rules Desk keeps working at the table without signal.