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

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

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition)bg-103343-en-1e

To setup the game, perform the following steps in order:

1. Unfold the game board and place it in the center of the play area.[1]

2. Shuffle the Wildling cards to form a deck.[1]

3. Place the Wildling deck on the space provided at the top of the game board.[1]

4. Place the Wildling Threat token on the '2' position of the Wildlings track.[1]

5. Separate the Westeros cards into decks according to their roman numeral (I, II, or III).[1]

6. Shuffle each Westeros deck and place them separately facedown next to the game board.[1]

7. Collect the Neutral Force tokens marked with the correct range of players.[1]

8. Place those tokens on the areas of the game board matching the name on each token, ensuring they are placed with the correct player range face up.[1][2]

* For a three-player game: place the 14 Neutral Force tokens marked with the '3' player range.[2]

* For a four-player game: place all 12 Neutral Force tokens marked with the '4-6', '4-5', and '4' player ranges.[2]

* For a five-player game: place the nine Neutral Force tokens marked with the '4-6' and '4-5' player ranges.[2]

9. If playing a three or four-player game, place the King's Court Overlay on top of the King's Court Influence track, covering the first four positions.[2]

10. Return any unused Neutral Force tokens to the box.[1]

11. (If using the optional Tides of Battle module) Shuffle the Tides of Battle cards into a single deck and place it near the game board.[3]

12. Each player places all of his starting units on the game board according to the instructions on his player screen.[4]

13. Each player places his Garrison token on his home area (matching the area name on the token).[4]

14. Place all Power tokens (for all Houses) in a central pile called the 'Power Pool'.[4]

15. Each player takes five Power tokens matching his House from the Power Pool.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · GAme seTUp

[2] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.28 · hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S

[3] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.29 · Tides of bATTLe

[4] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · E  C P

🔧 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 227 ms · ask 11718 ms · total 11955 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 11955 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "Before playing the game, perform the following steps in order: P  G B: Unfold the game board and place it in the center of the play area. P  W D  W T T: Shuffle the Wildling cards to form a deck. Place this deck on the space provided at the top o", "headingPath": "GAme seTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "A G A m e o f T h r o n e s In a five-player game, House Martell cannot be chosen as a player House. During setup for a five-player game, place the nine Neutral Force tokens marked with the '4-6' and '4-5' player ranges on the game board, matching the name on each Neutral Force token to its correspo", "headingPath": "hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "Each House is provided a limited number of units, tokens, and cards. If a player is using all his components of a particular type, he may not bring additional components of that type into play. Units that are destroyed in combat (or removed from the board for any other reason) are available to be mu", "headingPath": "E  C P", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "P U: Each player then places all of his starting units on the game board according to the instructions on his player screen. P G T : Each player places his Garrison token on his home area (matching the area name on the token). G P T: Place all Power tokens (for ", "headingPath": "E  C P", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "During this phase, players secretly issue orders to areas on the game board. /The Planning Phase consists of the following steps: A O R O U M R During this step, each player must place exactly one Order token facedown (i.e., secretly, his house insignia facing up) o", "headingPath": "The pLAnninG phAse · 1. Assign Orders", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Each player is provided with a player screen to keep certain elements of the game hidden from the other players. From the very beginning of the game, players should always keep their unused Order tokens behind their player screens. Except just prior to any bidding, each player's available power toke", "headingPath": "hidden informATion", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A Game of /Thrones: /The Board Game ends in one of two ways: /end3 /The game reaches the end of the 10th game round. /end3 Immediately after a player controls his seventh area containing a Castle or Stronghold. Each player must, at all times, record the number of areas he controls containing a Castl", "headingPath": "winninG The GAme · C P O E", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.02967, "snippet": "Each player takes the player screen that represents his House. /The player screen provides reference information, setup information, and enables players to sort and store components (such as Order tokens) privately during the game. Order token reference Starting units information Starting position o", "headingPath": "T P S · T H  W · H L 'Hear Me Roar'", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAme seTUp", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 28, "quote": null, "headingPath": "hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 29, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tides of bATTLe", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "E  C P", "sharpsignalDocId": 373}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 373 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 373 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 11, 2026 00:51

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. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

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 Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	GAme seTUp	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S	p.28	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
#3	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	E  C P	p.4	0.046175 (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 Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	E  C P	p.4	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 A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	The pLAnninG phAse · 1. Assign Orders	p.12	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 A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	hidden informATion	p.27	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 A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	winninG The GAme · C P O E	p.16	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 A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	T P S · T H  W · H L 'Hear Me Roar'	p.6	0.02967 (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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 59 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	GAme seTUp	p.4	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	E  C P	p.4	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	Tides of bATTLe	p.29	#10	0.028665 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	winninG The GAme · C P O E	p.16	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)		p.32	#14	0.024676 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	The pLAnninG phAse · 1. Assign Orders	p.12	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	T P S · T H  W · H L 'Hear Me Roar'	p.6	#8	0.02967 (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))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S	p.28	#2	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	GAme seTUp	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	hidden informATion · Five-Player Games · Four-Player Games · Three-Player Games · T-P G S	p.28	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	Tides of bATTLe	p.29	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 373)	E  C P	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 227 ms · first delta 8417 ms · total 11955 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 227 ms · ask 11718 ms · gateway work 11955 ms · total 11955 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4340
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 491
tok/sec: 140.6 tok/sec — 491 output tokens in 3.493 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s 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 301), 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.