Ruling — BattleLore: Second Edition

You asked

Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: BattleLore: Second Editionbg-146439-en-1e

To set up the game before anyone takes a turn, follow these steps:

1. Place the game board in the center of the game area.[1]

2. Each player chooses a faction (Daqan or Uthuk).[1]

3. Each player takes their faction's plastic figures, unit reference cards, and deployment cards and places them in their play area.[1]

4. Create the supply by separating all tokens and markers by type into piles.[1]

5. Shuffle all command cards into a deck and place it near the game board within reach of both players.[1]

6. Each player takes their faction's lore cards and scenario cards, shuffles them into two separate decks, and places the decks facedown in their play area.[1]

7. Each player draws three scenario cards from their scenario deck, chooses one, and returns all others to the game box.[2]

8. Both players simultaneously reveal and resolve their chosen scenario cards by reading the text, determining the first player, placing terrain tiles and banner markers, and placing fords.[2][3]

9. Players place terrain tiles and banner markers on the appropriate hexes based on their scenario cards; if water hexes are adjacent, the first player replaces them with river tiles to connect them (replacing river tiles with lake tiles if an open river is created away from a board edge).[3]

10. Starting with the first player, each player places one ford token on any water hex shown on their scenario card that does not already contain a ford or bridge token.[3]

11. Each player musters their army by spending muster points to purchase deployment cards [2] (this involves adding 11 decoy cards to the faction's deployment cards, choosing cards until the player has exactly 18 cards totaling no more than 50 muster points, and optionally adding one command tent).[4]

12. Each player places their 18 deployment cards facedown on the shaded deployment hexes indicated on their scenario card (terrain deployment cards must be placed on hexes that do not already contain terrain).[4]

13. Both players simultaneously reveal their deployment cards by flipping them faceup, then immediately remove all revealed decoys from the board and return them to the game box.[4]

14. Each player receives one lore token (to a maximum of five) for each unspent muster point.[4]

15. The first player places the first player token in their play area.[2]

16. Each player draws six command cards from the command deck and three lore cards from their faction's lore deck.[2]

17. Both players secretly and simultaneously choose two of their command cards and one of their lore cards to place on the bottom of the appropriate decks.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.14

[2] RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.15 · Complete Setup · Scenario building · Resolving Scenario Cards · REad SCEnaRiO CaRd tExt

[3] RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.16 · dEtERMinE FiRSt PLaYER · PLaCE tERRain tiLES and bannER MaRkERS · PLaCE FORdS · Mustering an army · deployment Cards · Mustering Units

[4] RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.17 · CHOOSE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Command tents · PLaCE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · REvEaL dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Lore tokens · How to Muster an army

🔧 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 273 ms · ask 12611 ms · total 12895 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 12895 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 14, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "14 The setup for BattleLore Second Edition is not only a process of gathering and placing game components, but also a strategic exercise in building the battlefield and constructing and deploying an army of units. Before playing each game, players perform the following steps instead of those found o", "headingPath": "iMPaSSabLE tERRain · Complete Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each scenario card has an initiative indicator containing both a letter and number. The player who revealed the scenario card with an initiative letter that is alphabetically first is the first player and takes the first turn when the game begins. If both players revealed a scenario card with the sa", "headingPath": "dEtERMinE FiRSt PLaYER · PLaCE tERRain tiLES and bannER MaRkERS · PLaCE FORdS · Mustering an army · deployment Cards · Mustering Units", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Draw, Reveal, and Resolve Scenario Cards: Each player draws three scenario cards from his scenario deck, chooses one, and returns all other scenario cards to the game box. Then, both players simultaneously reveal and resolve their chosen scenario cards (see 'Resolving Scenario Cards' to the right). ", "headingPath": "Complete Setup · Scenario building · Resolving Scenario Cards · REad SCEnaRiO CaRd tExt", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Complete Setup The setup for BattleLore Second Edition is not only a process of gathering and placing game components, but also a strategic exercise in building the battlefield and constructing and deploying an army of units. Before playing each game, players perform the following steps instead of t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "BattleLore Second Edition is played over a series of turns. The active player is the player currently taking his turn. Each turn is divided into two phases that the active player performs in the following order: Main Phase Upkeep Phase After the active player completes his turn, his opponent becomes", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · Main Phase · COMMand StEP · ORdER StEP", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "If a player does not want to spend time mustering their own army, army cards provide players with preconstructed armies valued at 50 muster points. When using an army card, the player takes a deployment card for each unit listed on the army card, a lore token for each lore listed on the army card, a", "headingPath": "aRMY CaRdS · PLaCE UnitS and tERRain", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The Uthuk player has chosen the 'Treasures of the Shadow Peaks' scenario card. The Daqan player has chosen the 'Crossing the River of Sleep' scenario card. The Uthuk player's initiative indicator ('B2') is first in alphabetical order compared to the Daqan player's ('C1'). The Uthuk player is the fir", "headingPath": "PLaCE UnitS and tERRain", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Scenario Card Resolution Example 1. The Uthuk player has chosen the “Treasures of the Shadow Peaks” scenario card. The Daqan player has chosen the “Crossing the River of Sleep” scenario card. 2. The Uthuk player’s initiative indicator (“B2”) is first in alphabetical order compared to the Daqan playe", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Complete Setup · Scenario building · Resolving Scenario Cards · REad SCEnaRiO CaRd tExt", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "dEtERMinE FiRSt PLaYER · PLaCE tERRain tiLES and bannER MaRkERS · PLaCE FORdS · Mustering an army · deployment Cards · Mustering Units", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}, {"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CHOOSE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Command tents · PLaCE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · REvEaL dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Lore tokens · How to Muster an army", "sharpsignalDocId": 500}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 500 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 500 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 06:07

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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	iMPaSSabLE tERRain · Complete Setup	p.14	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	dEtERMinE FiRSt PLaYER · PLaCE tERRain tiLES and bannER MaRkERS · PLaCE FORdS · Mustering an army · deployment Cards · Mustering Units	p.16	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	Complete Setup · Scenario building · Resolving Scenario Cards · REad SCEnaRiO CaRd tExt	p.15	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)		p.14	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	Playing the Game · Main Phase · COMMand StEP · ORdER StEP	p.6	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	aRMY CaRdS · PLaCE UnitS and tERRain	p.17	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	PLaCE UnitS and tERRain	p.18	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)		p.18	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 BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)		p.14	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	Complete Setup · Scenario building · Resolving Scenario Cards · REad SCEnaRiO CaRd tExt	p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	dEtERMinE FiRSt PLaYER · PLaCE tERRain tiLES and bannER MaRkERS · PLaCE FORdS · Mustering an army · deployment Cards · Mustering Units	p.16	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK BattleLore: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 500)	CHOOSE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Command tents · PLaCE dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · REvEaL dEPLOYMEnt CaRdS · Lore tokens · How to Muster an army	p.17	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 273 ms · first delta 8441 ms · total 12895 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 273 ms · ask 12611 ms · gateway work 12895 ms · total 12895 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4382
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 590
tok/sec: 134.2 tok/sec — 590 output tokens in 4.396 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s 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: BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question): before anyone

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 431), 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.