Ruling — The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth

← The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earthbg-269385-en-1e

To set up your first campaign of Journeys in Middle-earth, follow these steps:

1. Select Campaign and Difficulty: Select the 'New Game' button on the app's title screen; the app will then guide players through screens for selecting a campaign, difficulty, and save slot.[1][2]

2. Create Party and Select Heroes: Each player selects a hero in the app, takes their corresponding figure and hero card, and places them in their play area.[1][2] Single-player players choose two heroes to control.[1]

3. Gather Starting Items: Find the item cards that match the name and tier displayed in the app for each hero and place them near their hero card.[1] Players may select different starting items in the app if they wish.[1]

4. Create Damage, Fear, and Weakness Decks: Shuffle damage cards, fear cards, and weakness skill cards (only weakness skill cards) into separate decks and place them in the center of the play area where all players can reach them.[1][2][3]

5. Create Supply: Separate exploration/inspiration, search/threat, person, and enemy banner tokens, as well as the three types of boon cards, into separate piles to create the supply.[1][3] Set aside all map tiles and enemy figures; return battle map tiles and terrain tokens to the box.[1][3]

6. Begin Campaign: Players input a group name, select 'Begin' in the app, and watch the introductory cutscene.[1][3]

7. Choose Role: Each player selects a role in the app for their hero's first adventure.[1][3]

8. Gather Skill Cards: Each hero gathers 15 skill cards: one copy of each "Basic" skill card numbered 1–6; skill cards numbered 1–5 with the hero's name on them; skill cards numbered 1–3 with their role on them; and one weakness card from the top of the weakness deck.[4][5]

9. Prepare Role Card and Create Skill Decks: Each hero finds their starting skill card (identified by a "1" after the role name and stars next to the name) and places it faceup below their hero card.[4][5] Players then shuffle their remaining 14 cards together to create a skill deck and place it facedown in their play area.[4][5]

10. Place Starting Tiles and Tokens: Select “Embark” in the app and follow its instructions to place map tiles and tokens in the play area to create the game map.[4][5]

[1] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook · p.4 · FirST cAmpAign SeTUp

[2] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook · p.4

[3] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook · p.4

[4] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook · p.5

[5] RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook · p.5 · FirST cAmpAign SeTUp

🔧 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 297 ms · ask 11988 ms · total 1411811 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1399516 ms · generation 12295 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To set up their first campaign of Journeys in Middle-earth , players follow the steps presented in this section. Select Campaign and Difficulty: Select the 'New Game' button on the app's title screen. Then, the app will guide the players through a series of screens for selecting a campaign, a diffic", "headingPath": "FirST cAmpAign SeTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Gather Skill Cards: Each hero gathers the following 15 skill cards: \u0003 one copy of each skill card numbered 1-6 that has the word 'Basic' on the bottom of the card \u0003 the skill cards numbered 1-5 that have the name of their hero on the bottom of the card \u0003 the skill cards numbered 1-3 that have their ", "headingPath": "FirST cAmpAign SeTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "This section describes additional details related to the app. During an adventure, the heroes may be rewarded with lore and experience. These resources are tracked in the app and allow the heroes to upgrade items and purchase new skills between adventures. Players can ignore lore and experience for ", "headingPath": "App elemenTS · lore And experience · Fog · whAT now?", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Hidden If you are attacked, before you test, prevent all  and discard this boon. When you attack, you may discard this boon to add 1 . At the end of your turn, if there are no nearby enemies, discard this boon. If you suffer  or , discard this boon. When you attack, add 2 hits. Emboldened When y", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Players may select different starting items in the app if they wish. 4. C reate Damage, Fear, and Weakness Decks: Shuffle the damage cards, fear cards, and weakness skill cards (only weakness skill cards, not other skill cards) into separate decks and place them in the center of the play area where ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "A game of Journeys in Middle-earth is played over a series of rounds. Each round has three phases that players resolve in the following order: Action Phase: During this phase, the heroes move around the map, interact with the world, and attack enemies. Shadow Phase: During this phase, the enemies mo", "headingPath": "plAying The gAme · AcTion phASe · TrAvel AcTion", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Sprint 1 (During your turn, discard to move 1 space.) Trailblazer TM Lic. SZC to FFG Pathfinder 1 Before you sprint, gain 1 inspiration. Sprint 1 (During your turn, discard to move 1 space.) Trailblazer TM Lic. SZC to FFG 5 8. G ather Skill Cards: Each hero gathers the following 15 skill cards: \u0003 on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The app instructs players to place new map tiles when certain conditions are met-these conditions include exploring and interacting with tokens, defeating enemies, etc. When the app instructs the players to place a tile, it highlights the alphanumeric code on that tile. The players should use this h", "headingPath": "Adding mAp TileS", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FirST cAmpAign SeTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FirST cAmpAign SeTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 312}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 312 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 312 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 14:32

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 The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	FirST cAmpAign SeTUp	p.4	0.048916 (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 The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	FirST cAmpAign SeTUp	p.5	0.047883 (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: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	App elemenTS · lore And experience · Fog · whAT now?	p.15	0.047643 (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: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.4	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
#5	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.4	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: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	plAying The gAme · AcTion phASe · TrAvel AcTion	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
#7	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.5	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: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	Adding mAp TileS	p.7	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 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 The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	FirST cAmpAign SeTUp	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 312)	FirST cAmpAign SeTUp	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 297 ms · first delta 8122 ms · total 1411811 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1399516 ms · retrieval 297 ms · ask 11988 ms · gateway work 12295 ms · total 1411811 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4560
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 556
tok/sec: 135.2 tok/sec — 556 output tokens in 4.113 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 7s 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 240), 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.