Ruling — The Great Wall

← The Great Wall

You asked

How do I set up The Great Wall?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Great Wallbg-292375-en-1e

To set up The Great Wall for a 3- or 4-player PVP game, follow these steps:

**Initial Component Removal (3- or 4-player PVP only)**

* Remove 'Reed Clan' cards.[1]

* Remove 'Teal Command cards' and the Solo General.[1]

* Remove cards depicting the Co-Op Symbol (General, Horde, Event, Emperor's Request, and Tactic).[1]

* Remove Time Token and Artifact Cards.[2]

**Board and Deck Setup**

1. Place the main board in the middle of the play area showing the player count (found on the Time track, in the top-left corner of the board).[2]

2. Place the Time token on the Time track's spot that matches the player count, blank-side up (in a 2-player game, place it on the 3-player icon).[2]

3. Shuffle all Artifact cards, then place 1 face up randomly above each Artifact spot found in the top left corner of the board, for a total of 3; return the rest to the box.[2]

4. Shuffle all Horde cards to create the Horde deck and place it face down above the Horde deck icon (at the top of the board).[2]

5. Place 1 Horde card, from the top of the Horde deck, face up in the bottom Horde spot of each Wall Section.[2]

6. In a 4-player game only, add a 4th Horde card by drawing the top card from the Horde deck and placing it face up in the Wall Section shown by the Invasion indicator on the top card of the Horde deck.[2]

7. Place 1 Barricade on each Barricade spot.[2]

8. Shuffle all Tactic cards together to create the Tactic deck; place it face down on its spot (in the right bottom half of the main board).[2]

**Player Setup**

1. Identify and collect all General and Advisor cards.[3]

2. Shuffle all General cards; deal 2 randomly face down to each player and return the rest to the box.[3]

3. Shuffle all Advisor cards together to form the Advisor deck; place it face down near the main board's bottom right corner.[3]

4. Deal 2 random face down Advisor cards to each player from the top of the Advisor deck.[3]

5. Each player looks at the 4 cards they receive and simultaneously chooses 1 General to place in front of themselves face up; the remaining General is returned to the box.[3]

6. Each player chooses 1 Advisor to place face up, to the right of their General, as their Active Advisor.[3]

7. The remaining Advisor is placed face down under their General card as their Supporting Advisor, with the Supporting Advisor icon showing.[3]

8. Set up the supply of the following components nearby:

* Add 10 Shame tokens per player (return the rest to the box).[4][3]

* Add all Wood, Stone, Gold, Chi, and Wound markers; and all Universal (cardboard) Honor tokens.[4][3]

* Add all Walls, organized by level.[4][3]

9. Each player takes the shown number of each resource from the supply and places them behind their screen.[4][3]

10. Each player draws the shown number of Tactic cards from the top of the Tactic deck and adds them to their hand.[4][3]

11. Deal 4 Advisors face up to create the Advisor display, from the top of the Advisor deck, 1 below each marked spot at the bottom of the main board.[4][3]

12. Each player places their Honor marker on the first space (showing a dragon) of the Honor (points) track found along the outer-edge of the mainboard.[4][3]

13. Each player stacks their Tea marker on the Tea track space according to the Tea value printed at the bottom of their General card; markers are stacked in numerical order, with the highest Tea value at the top and the lowest at the bottom.[4][3]

14. Each player chooses a Clan and takes all components of that color (e.g., 10 Spearmen, 8 Clerks, 4 Archers, 2 Horsemen, 1 Screen, 1 Honor marker, 1 Tea marker, 6 Command cards).[2]

[1] RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook · p.3 · INTRODUCTION · A hundred years later. · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game:

[2] RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook · p.4 · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game: · SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook · p.5 · SETUP

[4] RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook · p.5

🔧 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 262 ms · ask 16939 ms · total 17213 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 17213 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Great Wall is a fantasy board game inspired by the history of the Great Wall of China, Song Dynasty, and Genghis Khan's conquests. Most of the characters, events, and military inventions are historical, but some were slightly modified to better suit the game's theme. The Great Wall already stood the", "headingPath": "INTRODUCTION · A hundred years later. · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game:", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "13 BUILDERS’ ENCAMPMENT Build Walls and Barricades to defend against the Horde! Level-3 Wall Level-2 Wall Level-1 Wall Empty Wall Area When this Location Activates, in the T ea order, you may perform one of the following options, for each Clerk you have here: BUILD A BARRICADE 1. Pay 2 Wood/Stone/Go", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "8 SPRING Skip Spring during your /f_irst year! During Spring, new barbaric hordes invade the /f_ields in front of the Great Wall and prepare to launch an assault. /T_heir Invasion occurs as follows: 1. Advance Time track: Move the Time token to the next slot on the/uni00A0Time track. 2. Place new Ho", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "LEADER The Defense value of this W all Section is halved (round down). This effect is cumulative. 5 2 WARDEN /T_he safety of the wall is his honor. His purpose is to protect, his reason is to serve. Always vigilant, always focused, always aware of his duty. After your Activation step, you may Attack", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each player chooses 1 Advisor to place face up, to the right of their General, as their Active Advisor. 14. /T_he remaining Advisor is placed face down, under their General card, as their Supporting Advisor, with the Supporting Advisor icon showing (shown here). 15. Set up the supply of the followin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "She leads her people under the name of/uni00A0a/uni00A0Red/uni00A0Jade, her true name lost in the past. Breaking the chains of her own slavedom, she became a brave general who crushed a dangerous coup and earned the title of the Lady Protector of the Nation. of the Lady Protector of the Nation. SETU", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When this Location Activates, in the T ea order, you may perform the/uni00A0following action once, for each Clerk you have here: Move Soldiers 1. Choose one Wall Section. 2. Move any number of your Soldiers from that Wall Section’s Firing spots and/or Rest Zone to one other Wall Section (including b", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Deal 4 Advisors face up to create the Advisor display, from the top of the Advisor deck, 1 below each marked spot at the bottom of the main board . Each player places their Honor marker on the first space (showing a dragon) of the Honor (points) track, found along the outer-edge of the mainboard . E", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INTRODUCTION · A hundred years later. · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game:", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game: · SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 578}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 578 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 578 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 16:50

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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)	INTRODUCTION · A hundred years later. · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game:	p.3	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.13	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.8	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.4	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.5	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.13	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)	SETUP	p.5	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 Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)	INTRODUCTION · A hundred years later. · The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game:	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)	The following setup rules apply for a 3- or 4-player PVP game only. Remove the following components from the game: · SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)	SETUP	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Great Wall — Rulebook (corpus doc 578)		p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 262 ms · first delta 9884 ms · total 17213 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 262 ms · ask 16939 ms · gateway work 17213 ms · total 17213 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4810
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 985
tok/sec: 136.2 tok/sec — 985 output tokens in 7.233 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s 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 510), 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.