RuleSage cited table rulings
← Commands & Colors: Napoleonics

You asked

What needs to be placed on the table before the first round begins?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Commands & Colors: Napoleonicsbg-62222-en-1e

Before the first round begins, the following items need to be placed on the table:
1. The board in the center of the table.[1]
2. Terrain hexes onto the battlefield as indicated by the scenario map.[1]
3. French forces (dark blue) and British/Portuguese forces (red and brown blocks).[1]
4. The remainder of the Command card deck face down, alongside the battlefield.[1]
5. Eight battle dice within reach of both players.[1]
6. Victory Banner counters within reach of both players.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook · p.5 · 3. SETTING UP A GAME
🔧 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 225 ms · ask 9920 ms · total 157819 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 147663 ms · generation 10156 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "At the start of your turn, play a Command card from your hand. Place it face up in front of you, and read it aloud. A Command card usually dictates the number of units or leaders ordered for the turn, as well as the section(s) of the battlefield to which they must belong. Hexes with a dotted line ru", "headingPath": "Phase 1. PLAY A COMMAND CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "When a cavalry unit is Battling Back. When an infantry unit is attacking a cavalry unit in melee and the cavalry unit plays a First Strike Command card. When all spaces on a player's square track are filled with Command cards. If the infantry unit does not choose to form square, the cavalry melee at", "headingPath": "Forming Square and Combat · French Player's Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "After playing a Command card, announce which corresponding units and leaders you choose to order. Only those units and leaders that are issued an order may move, battle, or take a special action during your turn. You may only give one order to each unit or leader during the course of a single game t", "headingPath": "Phase 2. ORDER YOUR UNITS & LEADERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Your opponent will always roll for your Leader Casualty check. When a leader is hit, remove the leader block from the battlefield and collect a Victory Banner. the leader may also be hit. Make a leader casualty check by roll -rolled. Attached Leader: When a leader is attached to a unit and the unit ", "headingPath": "LEADER CASUALTY CHECK", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Creation and Development: Richard Borg Art Director, Cover Art & Package Design: Rodger B. MacGowan Sticker Art: Pascal Da Silva Card Design and Layout: Donal Hegarty Rules Layout, Map and Tile Art: Mark Simonitch Playtesting: Joe Abrisz, Dave Arneson, Brad Bell, Jeff Borg, George Carson, Kevin Fran", "headingPath": "CREDITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "All units may engage in melee combat. An unattached leader may not engage in melee combat. A unit attacking an adjacent enemy unit is said to be engaging that enemy unit in melee. Targets engaged in melee are always considered within range and in line of sight of their attacker. A unit adjacent to a", "headingPath": "MELEE COMBAT · Melee Combat Procedure", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The battlefield game board (hereafter referred to as the battlefield) is a hex grid, 13 hexes wide by 9 hexes deep. The battlefield is divided into three sections by two dotted lines, giving each player a Left Flank Section, a Center Section and a Right Flank Section. Where the dotted line cuts thro", "headingPath": "Battlefield Game Board · Terrain Tiles · Command Cards · Battle Dice", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "(2 cards) ELAN Roll battle dice equal to command (the number of cards held in your hand including this card). For each symbol rolled, 1 unit of this type is ordered. One unit or leader of your choice may be ordered for each Flag symbol rolled. Sabers order no units or leaders. Ordered units battle w", "headingPath": "Tactic Cards (22)", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. SETTING UP A GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 555}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 555 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 555 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 08:05

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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) Phase 1. PLAY A COMMAND CARD 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) Forming Square and Combat · French Player's Turn p.17 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) Phase 2. ORDER YOUR UNITS & LEADERS p.6 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) LEADER CASUALTY CHECK p.12 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) CREDITS p.24 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) MELEE COMBAT · Melee Combat Procedure p.10 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) Battlefield Game Board · Terrain Tiles · Command Cards · Battle Dice p.2 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) Tactic Cards (22) p.23 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 Commands & Colors: Napoleonics — Rulebook (corpus doc 555) 3. SETTING UP A GAME p.5 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 225 ms · first delta 9231 ms · total 157819 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 147663 ms · retrieval 225 ms · ask 9920 ms · gateway work 10156 ms · total 157819 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3968
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
120
tok/sec
136.4 tok/sec — 120 output tokens in 0.880 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 1s 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 round

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 487), 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.