RuleSage cited table rulings
← The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earthbg-421006-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:
1. Choose, or randomly determine, who will play as the Fellowship and who will play as Sauron, and place your respective Unit and Fortress pawns in front of you.[1]
2. Place the central board between you and your opponent, next to the central play area.[1]
3. On the central board, place 2 Fellowship Units on Arnor and 2 Sauron Units on Mordor.[1]
4. Assemble the Quest of the Ring track as shown in the diagram and place it below the central board.[1]
5. The Fellowship player takes 3 Coins while the Sauron player takes 2 Coins, then make a reserve with the remaining Coins.[1]
6. Sort the Alliance tokens according to their backs to make one stack per Race, shuffle each stack separately, and place them facedown above the central board in the dedicated notches.[1]
7. Shuffle the Landmark tiles and place 3 faceup on the table, then make a facedown stack with the remaining tiles.[1]
8. Sort the Chapter cards into 3 decks according to the runes on their backs (1), (2) and (3), then shuffle each deck separately.[1]
9. At the start of each chapter (1, 2, then 3), place cards from the corresponding chapter in the central play area following the provided diagram, being careful as certain cards are placed faceup and others facedown.[2]
10. Place the 3 remaining cards from the chapter facedown in the discard.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook · p.2 · CONTENTS
[2] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook · p.3 · Preparing a chapter · Turn overview · A. Take a Chapter card · Play the card in front of you · Discard the card · B. Take a Landmark tile · …
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 231 ms · ask 4833 ms · total 5076 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 5076 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 3, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "At the start of each chapter (1, 2, then 3), place cards from the corresponding chapter in the central play area , following the diagram below ( reminder on the sides of the box ). Be careful, since certain cards are placed faceup and others facedown. Place the 3 remaining cards, facedown, in the di", "headingPath": "Preparing a chapter · Turn overview · A. Take a Chapter card · Play the card in front of you · Discard the card · B. Take a Landmark tile · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Central play area 1 Choose, or randomly determine, who will play as the Fellowship and who will play as Sauron. Place your respective Unit and Fortress pawns in front of you. 2 Place the central board between you and your opponent, next to the central play area. 3 On the central board, place 2 Fello", "headingPath": "CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When you place or move one or more Units, two situations are possible: If no enemy Unit is present: nothing happens. If one or more enemy Units are present: trigger a conflict . Each player removes one of their Units and places it back in front of them. Repeat this until at least one player has no m", "headingPath": "CONQUERING MIDDLE-EARTH", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "In order to play them, certain cards have a Coin cost that you must pay to the reserve. In order to play them, tiles and the majority of cards require you to have one or more Skills ( see page 5 ) in your play area. If you do not have the required Skills, you may pay 1 Coin to the reserve per missin", "headingPath": "Coins · Skills · Notes: · Chaining · Example:", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "1 Will you play as the Fellowship of the Ring to defend the free races and destroy the One Ring? Or will you play as Sauron and pursue Frodo and Sam while deploying your hordes to the gates of the enemy cities? The destiny of Middle-earth is in your hands! OVERVIEW AND GOAL CONTENTS A game plays ove", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Watch the rules video! Will you play as the Fellowship of the Ring to defend the free races and destroy the One Ring? Or will you play as Sauron and pursue Frodo and Sam while deploying your hordes to the gates of the enemy cities? The destiny of Middle-earth is in your hands! A game plays over 3 su", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW AND GOAL", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "There are three immediate victory conditions: For the Fellowship: If Frodo and Sam reach Mount Doom , they destroy the One Ring and you immediately win the game. For Sauron: If the Nazgûl catch Frodo and Sam , they seize the One Ring and you immediately win the game. If you gather 6 different Race s", "headingPath": "END OF THE GAME · Quest of the Ring · Support of the Races · Conquering Middle-earth · CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "When you advance on the Quest of the Ring track, slide your character ( Frodo and Sam for the Fellowship or the Nazgûl for Sauron) from space to space. When you reach or pass a Bonus space, you may immediately benefit from its effect ( see the Player Aid ). Note: The piece that represents the Nazgûl", "headingPath": "QUEST OF THE RING · RACE ALLIANCES · 2 matching Race symbols · Notes: · 3 different Race symbols", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Preparing a chapter · Turn overview · A. Take a Chapter card · Play the card in front of you · Discard the card · B. Take a Landmark tile · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 205}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 205 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 205 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)
debug row retained until
Nov 3, 2026 03:59

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) Preparing a chapter · Turn overview · A. Take a Chapter card · Play the card in front of you · Discard the card · B. Take a Landmark tile · … p.3 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 300
#2 RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) CONTENTS p.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)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) CONQUERING MIDDLE-EARTH p.7 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 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) Coins · Skills · Notes: · Chaining · Example: 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 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) p.1 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 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) OVERVIEW AND GOAL p.1 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 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) END OF THE GAME · Quest of the Ring · Support of the Races · Conquering Middle-earth · CREDITS p.8 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 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) QUEST OF THE RING · RACE ALLIANCES · 2 matching Race symbols · Notes: · 3 different Race symbols 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 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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) CONTENTS p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 205) Preparing a chapter · Turn overview · A. Take a Chapter card · Play the card in front of you · Discard the card · B. Take a Landmark tile · … p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 231 ms · first delta 2610 ms · total 5076 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 231 ms · ask 4833 ms · gateway work 5076 ms · total 5076 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2924
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
332
tok/sec
137.2 tok/sec — 332 output tokens in 2.419 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 49s ago)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 130), 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.