Ruling — Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

You asked

how long does a game take?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

I looked through Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.12 · Running Out of Cards

Given enough rounds, characters will run out of cards to play because they have lost too many through resting. If a character is unable to play two cards at the start of a round because they do not have at least two cards in their hand, that character becomes exhausted, as described at the top of th

RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.6 · Playing the Game

Now that the game has been set up properly, we can start playing! Gameplay within a scenario is broken up into a series of rounds. In each round, all players will select which ability cards they would like to play. The chosen cards will determine the "initiative order", which is the sequence in whic

RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.3 · Playing by Yourself?

If you are playing the game by yourself, you will need to control two separate characters. Take note that this is a more complex experience. If there are two to four players, it is highly recommended that each player only controls a single character. To choose which character to play, find the large

RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.25 · Element Board

Now, retrieve the element board from the game box and place the six element tokens from the tray on the "Inert" column. This board will be discussed further on the following page.

RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.12 · End of Round

Once the end of the initiative order is reached and all figures have taken their turn in a round, the round will end. At this time, if any attack modifier deck has flipped over a card with a shuffle icon , shuffle its discard pile back into the deck. Go ahead and play the next two rounds (card selec

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:12b think:false 4eb23ef187e2

timings

search 224 ms · ask 8385 ms · total 8620 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 8620 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 12, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Given enough rounds, characters will run out of cards to play because they have lost too many through resting. If a character is unable to play two cards at the start of a round because they do not have at least two cards in their hand, that character becomes exhausted, as described at the top of th", "headingPath": "Running Out of Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Now that the game has been set up properly, we can start playing! Gameplay within a scenario is broken up into a series of rounds. In each round, all players will select which ability cards they would like to play. The chosen cards will determine the \"initiative order\", which is the sequence in whic", "headingPath": "Playing the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "If you are playing the game by yourself, you will need to control two separate characters. Take note that this is a more complex experience. If there are two to four players, it is highly recommended that each player only controls a single character. To choose which character to play, find the large", "headingPath": "Playing by Yourself?", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Now, retrieve the element board from the game box and place the six element tokens from the tray on the \"Inert\" column. This board will be discussed further on the following page.", "headingPath": "Element Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Once the end of the initiative order is reached and all figures have taken their turn in a round, the round will end. At this time, if any attack modifier deck has flipped over a card with a shuffle icon , shuffle its discard pile back into the deck. Go ahead and play the next two rounds (card selec", "headingPath": "End of Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Each character should now note their experience total, tracked during the scenario on their experience dial each time they gained experience through an action. From now on, you will also gain additional experience for completing a scenario. Completing this and all other scenarios covered in this boo", "headingPath": "Recording Experience Rewards", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "Characters now have a new type of turn. Instead of selecting two ability cards to play at the beginning of a round, they can declare they will be performing a long rest. The long rest will constitute the character's entire turn for the round, which will occur on initiative 99. performs a \"Heal 2, Se", "headingPath": "Long Rest", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Any time a character suffers damage, they reduce their current hit point value by that amount by rotating their hit point dial. If a character ever reaches \"O\" on their hit point dial, they are immediately exhausted. Their figure is removed from the map, and they can no longer participate in the gam", "headingPath": "Character Damage and Exhaustion", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)

no registered errata card matched this query; base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it); rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base-rulebook boost: not recorded (this ruling predates it)

answered-before recall

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

debug row retained until

Oct 19, 2026 10:31

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. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Running Out of Cards	p.12	0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Playing the Game	p.6	0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Playing by Yourself?	p.3	0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#4	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Element Board	p.25	0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	179
#5	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	End of Round	p.12	0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#6	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Recording Experience Rewards	p.23	0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#7	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Long Rest	p.22	0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	300
#8	RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61)	Character Damage and Exhaustion	p.12	0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded)	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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 224 ms · first delta n/a · total 8620 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 224 ms · ask 8385 ms · gateway work 8620 ms · total 8620 ms
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 18s ago)
stream path: not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 9), 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.