Ruling — War of the Ring: Second Edition

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: War of the Ring: Second Editionbg-115746-en-1e

1. Decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow.[1][2]

2. Place the game board on a suitable surface, possibly large enough to leave some room along the sides of the board (to place discarded cards and eliminated pieces and to roll dice).[1][2]

3. Place the Ring-bearers figure on Rivendell, its starting point.[1][2]

4. Place the Fellowship Progress Counter on Step 0 of the Fellowship Track, with the “Hidden” side up, and place the Corruption Counter on Step 0 of the same track.[1][2]

5. Place all Companion Cards in the Guide of the Fellowship Box, with the Gandalf the Grey Character Card on top; set aside the cards for Aragorn – Heir to Isildur, Gandalf the White, and Gollum for later use.[1][2]

6. Place all the Companion figures and their counters in The Fellowship of the Ring Box, setting aside the Gollum figure for later use.[1][2]

7. Place the three Elven Ring counters in the Free Peoples’ Elven Rings Box of the game board with the “Ring” side up.[1][2]

8. Set aside all Shadow Minion Cards (the Witch-king, Saruman, and the Mouth of Sauron) and the corresponding figures for later use.[1][2]

9. Separate the Free Peoples and Shadow Event Cards into Character and Strategy Decks according to the back of each card, shuffle them separately, and place them on the corresponding areas of the game board.[1][2]

10. Put the Standard Hunt Tiles (beige) in a cup or other opaque container (the Hunt Pool) and set aside the Special Hunt Tiles (blue and red) for later use.[1][2]

11. Give seven red Shadow Action Dice to the Shadow player and four blue Free Peoples Action Dice to the Free Peoples player; set aside the remaining Action Dice and the five Combat Dice for later use.[1][2]

12. Place the Political Counter for each Free Peoples Nation on its starting point on the Political Track: place the Rohan, the North, the Elven, and the Dwarven Nations’ Political Counters in the top box; place the Gondor and Southron/Easterling Political Counters in the second box from the top; and place the Sauron and Isengard Political Counters in the third box from the top (immediately above the “At War” box).[1][3] All Free Peoples Nations’ Political Counters except for that of the Elves are placed with the “Passive” side up, while the Political Counters of the Elves and all the Shadow Army Nations are placed with the “Active” side up.[1][3]

13. Sort all plastic figures by color and type and follow the Army Setup diagram on pages 16-17 to place each Nation’s initial Army units and Leaders, setting aside any remaining figures for reinforcements and setting aside the Army counters for later use.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.5

[2] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.14 · S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …

[3] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.5

🔧 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 266 ms · ask 19652 ms · total 181396 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 161466 ms · generation 19930 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "4 • War of the Ring — Second Edition COMPONENT OVERVIEW COMPONENT OVERVIEW 14 • War of the Ring — Second Edition CHAPTER III:CHAPTER III: SETTING UPSETTING UP THE GAMETHE GAME B efore you start playing, you should decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow. Then, get the game", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "B efore you start playing, you should decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow. Then, get the game ready to play by following these steps. Place the game board on a suitable surface, possibly large enough to leave some room along the sides of the board (to place discarded c", "headingPath": "S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.044904, "snippet": "W ar of the Ring is played over a series of turns , until either player wins the game. Each turn is divided into six phases . The phases of the turn are: Phase 1) Recover Action Dice and Draw Event Cards Each player recovers the Action dice he used in the previous turn, plus any dice which were adde", "headingPath": "CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · SUMMARY OF THE TURN · Phase 2) Fellowship Phase · Phase 3) Hunt Allocation · Phase 4) Action Roll · Phase 5) Action Resolution", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044557, "snippet": "The game board is a view of western Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. In addition to the playing area proper, the game board also includes several spaces and tracks used to help the players keep track of various elements and components of the game. The diagram of the game board (see pages 12", "headingPath": "THE GAME BOARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.044283, "snippet": "The Shadow player must place at least one Action Die if the Free Peoples player retrieved at least 1 die from the Hunt Box during Phase 1. He may allocate only as many dice as the number of Companions remaining in the Fellowship. These dice are not rolled during the following Action Roll phase. Phas", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "RESOLVING A BA TTLE RESOLVING A BA TTLE A battle is resolved in a series of Combat Rounds. During each round, both players follow the steps below: 1) Play a Combat Card (optional) 2) Roll the Dice for the Combat Roll 3) Roll the Dice for the Leader Re-roll 4) Remove Casualties 5) Choose to Cease the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030679, "snippet": "STEP 11 Place the Political Counter for each Free Peoples Nation on its starting point on the Political Track. All of the Free Peoples Nations’ Political Counters except for that of the Elves are placed with the “Passive” side up. The Political Counters of the Elves and all the Shadow Army Nations a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Character Action* Character Action Army Action* Army Action Muster Action Muster Action Event Action Event Action Muster/Army Action Muster/Army Action Special Actions Special Actions * Note: the Free Peoples Action dice have two faces which show the Character action. On these dice, the 'Army' actio", "headingPath": "ACTION DICE POOL · Free Peoples · HUNT ALLOCATION AND ACTION ROLL", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 250 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 250 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 6, 2026 14:10

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. 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 rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	0.048131 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.14	0.047712 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · SUMMARY OF THE TURN · Phase 2) Fellowship Phase · Phase 3) Hunt Allocation · Phase 4) Action Roll · Phase 5) Action Resolution	p.18	0.044904 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	THE GAME BOARD	p.9	0.044557 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	0.044283 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	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
#7	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	0.030679 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	ACTION DICE POOL · Free Peoples · HUNT ALLOCATION AND ACTION ROLL	p.19	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.

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.

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.14	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 266 ms · first delta 15130 ms · total 181396 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 161466 ms · retrieval 266 ms · ask 19652 ms · gateway work 19930 ms · total 181396 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4489
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 647
tok/sec: 136.4 tok/sec — 647 output tokens in 4.742 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 13s 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.

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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 176), 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.