Ruling — Lords of Hellas

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Lords of Hellasbg-222509-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

**Main Board Setup**

1. Place the first level of each assigned Monument in its appropriate Region and put its relevant God's Artifact Card underneath.[1]

2. Shuffle the Events Deck (Monster and Quest Cards), Monster Attack Deck, and Combat Cards Deck, then place each of them in their appropriate place on the board.[1]

3. Set aside the Artifact Cards assigned to their respective Monsters.[1]

4. Shuffle the remaining Neutral Artifact Cards and place the deck in its appropriate place on the board.[1]

5. Shuffle the Blessing Cards from the gods whose Monuments are present in the game into one deck then place these Blessing Cards on the map.[1]

6. Place the Monster Die, Monster Wound Markers, Glory Tokens, Quest Tokens, and Monster miniatures, Monument Parts, Monument Activation Cards and Monster Trays next to the main board.[1]

7. Choose one random Temple Card and put it in its place on the board.[1]

8. Place Temples and Oracles of Delphi stands on this Temple Card (place only the first 6 Temples for 3- and 2-player games).[1]

**Starting Events**

9. Draw 7 cards from the Events Deck and resolve them in the following order:

a. Place Quest Cards in the Quest Slots and place the Quest Token for each drawn Quest in its appropriate Region (once the third Quest Card has been placed, ignore subsequent Quest Cards drawn in preparation).[2][1]

b. After drawing a Monster Card, place its corresponding miniature in the Region indicated by the card, and place the Monster Tray (along with the Artifact assigned to it) next to the main board (if the drawn Monster Card shows a Monster already on the board, ignore this card and draw another instead).[2]

c. Shuffle all the Event Cards used in preparation back into the Events Deck (excluding Quests on the Quest Slots).[2]

**Player Setup**

10. Every player draws a Combat Card from the top of the deck.[3]

11. Every player takes a Help Tray (with God Powers described).[3]

12. Decide upon a starting player.[3]

13. The starting player chooses a Hero, takes his/her corresponding Hero Board, then chooses an Armies Board and takes all components of that color (Hoplites, Priest, Control Tokens, and colored ring).[3]

14. The starting player places the plastic colored ring on his/her Hero's base, takes 6 Used Action Tokens, and takes 3 Attribute Tokens, placing them on Leadership, Strength, and Speed at value 1.[3]

15. Resolve the chosen Hero's starting bonus.[4][3]

16. The starting player places the miniature of his/her chosen Hero, along with 2 Hoplites, in one Region; if the Population Strength in that Region is 2 or less, the player places his/her Control Token there (this completes the first player's setup).[4][3]

17. Moving counter-clockwise, the next player chooses one of the remaining Heroes and Armies and places them on the board following the same process, ensuring they do not place their Hero and Hoplites in a Region which already contains another Hero.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook · p.6 · Game Manual N

[2] RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook · p.6 · Game Manual N

[3] RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook · p.8 · Game Manual N

[4] RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook · p.8 · Game Manual N

🔧 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 355 ms · ask 13192 ms · total 13559 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13559 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "3 6 8 5 card - Quest Put Quest card on next Quest Slot and place appropri- ate Quest Token in Macedonia. SET UP THE MAIN BOARD PLACE MONUMENT FOUNDATIONS Place the first level of each assigned Monument in its appropriate Region and put its relevant God's Artifact Card underneath. The level of the Mo", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Resolve the chosen Hero's starting bonus. 5. The starting player places the miniature of his/her chosen Hero , along with 2 Hoplites , in one Region . If the Population Strength in that Region is 2 or less, the player places his/her Control Token there. This completes the first player's setup. 6. Mo", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "There are four Heroes and Armies to choose from in the Core Box: Helen, Achilles, Heracles and Perseus. Heroes are asymmetric (they have a different starting bonus and special ability). Starting Bonus: special perk that should be added when placing the Hero on the board. Special Ability: passive ski", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "9 N PRAYER Players can send a Priest from their Priest Pool (Note: players start without any Priests ) to any chosen Monument . After placing the Priest , a player should immediately raise related Hero Attribute by 1 and use the God Power corresponding to its stated level. The Hero Attribute increas", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "PREPARE STARTING EVENTS Draw 7 cards from the Events Deck and resolve them in the following order: a) Place Quest Cards in the Quest Slots and place the Quest Token for each drawn Quest in its appropriate Region . Once the third Quest Card has been placed on the slot, ignore subsequent Quest Cards d", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "N SPECIAL ACTIONS Following the completion of their Regular Actions , a player must perform one of the available Special Actions . Mark a used Special Action with a Used Action Token . That action remains unavailable until the token is removed from it. RECRUIT A player can Recruit up to 2 Hoplites i", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "N QUESTS Just like monster hunts, quests are longer affairs that may take several turns to complete if you fail to prepare properly. The rewards, however, make them well worth your time. For example, a successful mission immediately brings you a glory token, that can be used to usurp power in nearby", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Recruit one Hoplite in the Region in which your Hero is present. A player cannot perform this action if his/her Hero is outside the Map , e.g. on a Quest , or when they are in a Region also occupied by another player's Hoplites . However, you can do so in an empty Region controlled by an enemy and t", "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Manual N", "sharpsignalDocId": 569}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 569 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 569 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 8, 2026 09:46

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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.6	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.8	0.048387 (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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.8	0.047371 (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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.9	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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.14	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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.10	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 Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Lords of Hellas — Rulebook (corpus doc 569)	Game Manual N	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 355 ms · first delta 8284 ms · total 13559 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 355 ms · ask 13192 ms · gateway work 13559 ms · total 13559 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4458
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 709
tok/sec: 136.0 tok/sec — 709 output tokens in 5.212 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 49s 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): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 501), 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.