RuleSage cited table rulings
← The King Is Dead: Second Edition

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The King Is Dead: Second Editionbg-319966-en-1e

To prepare for the game, follow these steps:
1. Place the board in the middle of the table.[1]
2. If playing a two-player game, return two followers of each faction to the box.[1]
3. Place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex.[1]
4. Place all remaining followers in the cloth bag.[1]
5. Randomly give each player two followers to place in front of them to serve as their court.[1]
6. Randomly place followers in each region so that there are four followers per region (for Moray, Gwynedd, and Essex, this involves adding two more followers to those already placed).[1]
7. Place all remaining followers into the supply.[1]
8. Return the cloth bag to the box.[1]
9. Give each player a negotiation disc.[1]
10. Place all control discs in the supply.[1]
11. Place all instability discs in France.[1]
12. Deal each player eight specific action cards: Scottish Support, Welsh Support, English Support, Negotiate, Manoeuvre, Outmanoeuvre, and two copies of Assemble (do not use cunning action cards).[1]
13. Shuffle the region cards and deal one face up next to each numbered space on the board.[1]
14. Place the victory card near the board where it is easily accessible.[1]
15. The player who most recently visited a castle is the start player.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …
🔧 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 243 ms · ask 7627 ms · total 72565 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 64687 ms · generation 7878 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Beginning with the start player and moving clockwise, players either take an action or pass. Play keeps going around the table, occasionally interrupted by power struggles, until the game ends. When you take an action, you play a card from your hand and resolve its effect. After taking an action, yo", "headingPath": "Turns · Power struggles", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Place the board in the middle of the table. If you are playing a two-player game, first return two followers of each faction to the box. Place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex. Place all the remaining followers in the cloth bag. Rand", "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Resolve the effect of an action card that is face up on top of another player's discard pile. This action counts as an exact copy of the action you have chosen. The normal rules for partial actions apply. Place two Scottish followers from the supply into a region, then return a follower from that re", "headingPath": "SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Throughout the game, you will take actions to place, move, and remove followers across the board. By doing so, you can influence which faction gains control of each region during a power struggle, shifting the board so it is in your favour. To take an action, you must play a card from your hand and ", "headingPath": "Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The game ends with either a French invasion or the coronation of the new ruler. Who wins depends on how the game ends. If all three instability discs are on the board, the game ends immediately with an invasion . If all eight power struggles are resolved without an invasion, the game ends with a cor", "headingPath": "Trigger · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place two Scottish followers from the supply into a region that borders a region controlled by the Scots. If there is no control or instability disc in Moray, you may instead place the followers into a region bordering Moray. You must place both followers into the same region. If there are fewer tha", "headingPath": "SCOTTISH SUPPORT · WELSH SUPPORT · ENGLISH SUPPORT · ASSEMBLE · NEGOTIATE · MANOEUVRE", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "If you are playing with four players, you play in teams of two. The player sitting opposite you is your teammate. You are not allowed to discuss tactics or strategies with your teammate, and you must not show each other your action cards. The play is the same as normal, with all players summoning fo", "headingPath": "Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "OVERVIEW The King is Dead is a game of political upheaval in medieval Britain. Over the course of the game, you will resolve power struggles in the eight regions of the island to determine which faction will prevail and crown the new monarch. Become the preferred candidate of the victorious faction ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 400 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 400 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 7, 2026 05:07

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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) Turns · Power struggles p.6 0.032787 (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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · … p.4 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · … p.10 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS p.6 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) Trigger · Invasion · Coronation p.7 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) SCOTTISH SUPPORT · WELSH SUPPORT · ENGLISH SUPPORT · ASSEMBLE · NEGOTIATE · MANOEUVRE p.9 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) p.2 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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400) BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · … p.4 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 243 ms · first delta 3950 ms · total 72565 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 64687 ms · retrieval 243 ms · ask 7627 ms · gateway work 7878 ms · total 72565 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4155
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
331
tok/sec
85.1 tok/sec — 331 output tokens in 3.888 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 17s 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
BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question)
before the first turn

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 329), 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.