Ruling — A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition)

← A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition)

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition)bg-169255-en-1e

For a tutorial game, follow these steps:

1. Select decks: One player selects the House Stark starter deck and the other selects the House Lannister starter deck.[1]

2. Determine first player: Randomly determine a player to be the first player and place the first player token in front of them.[1]

3. Place factions: Each player places their faction card faceup in their play area.[1]

4. Create treasury: Place all gold tokens, power counters, and influence tokens in a pile within reach of each player.[1]

5. Place plot deck: Each player places seven plot cards facedown in a stack next to their faction card.[1]

6. Shuffle draw decks: Each player shuffles their draw deck.[1]

For a standard Joust game, follow these steps:

1. Place all gold tokens, power counters, and influence tokens in a pile within reach of each player (the treasury).[2]

2. Place plot deck.[2]

3. Each player places seven plot cards facedown in a stack next to their faction card.[2]

4. Shuffle draw decks.[2]

5. Draw setup hands: Each player draws seven cards from their draw deck, with the option to take a single mulligan by shuffling those seven cards back and drawing seven new cards.[2]

6. Place setup cards: In player order, each player may place up to 8 total cost worth of character, location, and attachment cards from their hand facedown in their play area, observing restrictions regarding the 'Limited' keyword and attachment targets.[2]

7. Reveal setup cards: All players turn their setup cards faceup, and if necessary, each player attaches their attachment cards in player order.[2]

8. Replenish opening hand: Each player draws cards until they have seven cards in their hand.[2]

For a melee game (three to six players), follow these additional steps:

1. Place the six title cards (numbered 206-211) in a title pool near the treasury, within reach of all players.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · Tutorial Joust Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · Tutorial Joust Game Setup

[3] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.12 · Melee Rules · Title Cards · Melee Plot Phase · Melee Taxation Phase · Melee Taxation Phase, Step 3. Return Titles: · Title Abilities · …

🔧 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 387 ms · ask 9259 ms · total 9658 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 9658 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Place all the gold tokens, power counters, and influence tokens in a pile within reach of each player. This area is known as the treasury . Place plot deck. Each player places the seven plot cards (listed in step one) facedown and in a stack next to his or her faction card. Shuffle draw decks. Each ", "headingPath": "Tutorial Joust Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "To setup the tutorial game, players perform the following steps, in order. (Setup rules for all other formats are in the RR under the heading 'setup.') Select decks. The tutorial is a joust (two player) game using a Stark starter deck and a Lannister starter deck. Each player selects one of the deck", "headingPath": "Tutorial Joust Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "The three to six player-or melee -game follows the same basic round structure and rules as the joust game. In addition to that basic structure, it also introduces the title cards to the game. Each of the six title cards represents a position on the Small Council at King's Landing. During each round ", "headingPath": "Melee Rules · Title Cards · Melee Plot Phase · Melee Taxation Phase · Melee Taxation Phase, Step 3. Return Titles: · Title Abilities · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "This Learn to Play book is written as an introduction to A Game of Thrones: The Card Game for new players. We recommend that new players learn the basics of the game using the joust (two-player) format-this format has the fewest steps and components, making it ideal for first time players. Games wit", "headingPath": "Using this Book", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Each player simultaneously draws two cards from his or her draw deck. During the marshaling phase, each player (in player order) becomes the active player. The active player has the opportunity to marshal (bring into play) character, location, and attachment cards from his or her hand. When a player", "headingPath": "Phase 2: Draw · Phase 3: Marshaling · Event Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each player simultaneously counts the total combined STR of his or her standing characters, and adds 1 to this total for each gold token in his or her gold pool. The player with the highest total wins dominance for the round, and gains 1 power for his or her faction. If there is a tie for the highes", "headingPath": "Phase 5: Dominance · Phase 6: Standing · Phase 7: Taxation · What's Next?", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "The A Game of Thrones: The Card Game core set is designed to be a complete game experience with significant replayability. After learning the basics of the game, players may wish to explore building original decks. The deckbuilding rules are presented here. Deckbuilding is a process by which a playe", "headingPath": "Deckbuilding · Why Build a Custom Deck? · Custom Deckbuilding · Goyalty", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "During the challenges phase, each player (in player order) becomes the active player, and as the active player has the opportunity to initiate challenges against his or her opponent(s). There are three types of challenges in the game. Each type follows the same general rules of initiation and resolu", "headingPath": "Phase 4: Challenges · Initiating and Resolving a Challenge", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tutorial Joust Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tutorial Joust Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Melee Rules · Title Cards · Melee Plot Phase · Melee Taxation Phase · Melee Taxation Phase, Step 3. Return Titles: · Title Abilities · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 749}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 749 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 749 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 10:15

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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Tutorial Joust Game Setup	p.4	0.048916 (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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Tutorial Joust Game Setup	p.4	0.048652 (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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Melee Rules · Title Cards · Melee Plot Phase · Melee Taxation Phase · Melee Taxation Phase, Step 3. Return Titles: · Title Abilities · …	p.12	0.045928 (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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Using this Book	p.2	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
#5	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Phase 2: Draw · Phase 3: Marshaling · Event Cards	p.8	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
#6	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Phase 5: Dominance · Phase 6: Standing · Phase 7: Taxation · What's Next?	p.10	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
#7	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Deckbuilding · Why Build a Custom Deck? · Custom Deckbuilding · Goyalty	p.14	0.029958 (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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Phase 4: Challenges · Initiating and Resolving a Challenge	p.9	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

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 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Tutorial Joust Game Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Tutorial Joust Game Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 749)	Melee Rules · Title Cards · Melee Plot Phase · Melee Taxation Phase · Melee Taxation Phase, Step 3. Return Titles: · Title Abilities · …	p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 387 ms · first delta 6591 ms · total 9658 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 387 ms · ask 9259 ms · gateway work 9658 ms · total 9658 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4255
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 441
tok/sec: 146.6 tok/sec — 441 output tokens in 3.008 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s 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 683), 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.