Ruling — Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

← Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixbornbg-167400-en-1e

To set up a game of Ashes, each player should do the following:

1. Choose a deck to play with (using suggested decks, building a deck, or drafting a deck).[1][2]

2. Place your Phoenixborn in your play area with the information side face up.[1][2]

3. Place your conjuration pile face down in your play area.[1][2]

4. Place the dice power reference cards that correspond to the dice you are using in your play area and take a phases of play reference card, if needed.[1][2]

5. Place all ten of your dice to the right of your dice power reference cards; this is your exhausted dice pool.[1][2]

6. Choose your First Five by taking five different cards of your choice from your deck (this is your starting hand and cannot include more than one copy of a card).[1][3][2]

7. Shuffle the rest of your deck and form a face down draw pile in your play area.[1][3][2]

8. Make sure you have easy access to wound, exhaustion and status tokens.[1][3][2]

[1] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.5 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.5

[3] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — 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 367 ms · ask 10399 ms · total 10777 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 10777 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "To set up a game of Ashes, each player should do the following: Choose a deck to play with (see pp. 18-19 for suggested decks). Or build a deck to play with (see p. 18 for deck building rules). Or draft a deck to play with (see pp. 20-21 for drafting rules). Place your Phoenixborn in your play area ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Instead of playing with a pre-built deck or bringing a custom built deck to a game of Ashes, you and your friends may draft your decks. 2 - 4 players can participate in a draft using this master set. By adding additional Ashes sets more players can join in on a draft. Gather each Phoenixborn in your", "headingPath": "DRAFTING · Set-Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "5 Phoenixborn of Rustwatch COAL ROARKWIN Slash: 1 : Choose a player. Deal 1 damage to a target unit they control, or deal 1 damage to their target Phoenixborn if they control no units. “You’re out of your depth.” Battlefield 6 Spellboard 4 Exhausted Dice Pool Reference Card CEREMONIAL MAGIC Active D", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "20 Set-Up 1. Gather each Phoenixborn in your collection and place each into a separate pile along with 3 copies of its corresponding Phoenixborn unique card. 2. Gather 10 copies of each die type in your collection and place them in separate piles. If drafting with 5 or more players you will either n", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Choose your First Five by taking five different cards of your choice from your deck. This is your starting hand. You cannot include more than one copy of a card in your First Five. Shuffle the rest of your deck and form a face down draw pile in your play area. 7. Make sure you have easy access to wo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Starting with the first player and continuing clockwise around the table, each player chooses 1 Phoenixborn along with its corresponding Phoenixborn unique cards. Then the first player passes the first player token to their left. Deal each player 9 cards from the draft deck. Each player will choose ", "headingPath": "Draft", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Roll Dice: Roll your exhausted dice and place them in your active pool. Discard Cards: You may discard any number of cards from your hand. Draw Cards: Draw cards until you have 5 cards in your hand. Fatigue Damage: Wound your Phoenixborn for cards not drawn. Players alternate taking turns until both", "headingPath": "1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Ashes is played over a series of rounds. Each round is divided into three phases that must be resolved in order. Most of the game takes place during the player turns phase. During the prepare phase each player simultaneously resolves the following three steps in order: Roll Dice: Roll all of the dic", "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 773 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 773 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 9, 2026 09:21

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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	GAME SETUP	p.5	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	DRAFTING · Set-Up	p.20	0.047131 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	0.046898 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.20	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
#5	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Draft	p.21	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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …	p.28	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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE	p.6	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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	GAME SETUP	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 367 ms · first delta 8862 ms · total 10777 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 367 ms · ask 10399 ms · gateway work 10777 ms · total 10777 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3371
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 255
tok/sec: 137.5 tok/sec — 255 output tokens in 1.855 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s 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 707), 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.