Ruling — A Game of Thrones

← A Game of Thrones

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: A Game of Thronesbg-6472-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Unfold the board and place it centrally on a large table.[1]

2. Place the Kings Landing, Eyrie, and Sunspear tokens on their respective areas on the board.[1]

3. Place the Wildling Attack token on the "0" space on the Wildling Attack track in the north of Westeros.[1]

4. Place the Turn Order token on "Turn 1".[1]

5. Place all the Power tokens (for all the Houses) in a large pile next to the game board, known as the Power Pool.[1]

6. Each player randomly draws a House Start Card to determine which house they will control.[1]

7. Each player takes the 7 House Cards that correspond to their House.[1]

8. Separate the three decks of Westeros Cards (I, II, and III), shuffle each deck, and place them separately face down next to the game board.[1]

9. Players set up starting units and tokens as instructed by their House Start Cards through these steps:

a. Each player places his octagon-shaped Influence tokens on his starting position on each of the three Areas of Influence.[1]

b. Each player places his starting units (Footmen, Knights, and Ships) in the areas indicated by his House Start Card.[2]

c. Each player receives 5 Power tokens from the Power Pool, ensuring they take tokens that represent their house.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.2 · The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup

[2] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.3 · Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 79 ms · ask 4757 ms · total 4839 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4839 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "c) Each player now places his starting units (Footmen, Knights, and Ships) in the areas indicated by his House Start Card. The game setup is now complete and the game is ready to commence. The A GAME OF THRONES board game is played over 10 whole game turns, with each game turn separated into three p", "headingPath": "Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "These three large cardboard tokens are awarded to the strongest player in each of the three Areas of Influence (The Iron Throne, The Fiefdoms, and the King's Court). These oversize tokens provide their owner with special powers in the game. The main feature of the A GAME OF THRONES board game is the", "headingPath": "The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.046642, "snippet": "House Greyjoy and House Tyrell are not available to players. The starting units (Ships, Knights, and Footmen) for Greyjoy and Tyrell are set up as normal on the board, and now represent neutral forces (like those of King's Landing, Sunspear, and The Eyrie) with a Footman representing 1 neutral stren", "headingPath": "Three Player Game · Four Player Game · Token Limits", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Armies require an enormous amount of supplies: food, water, steel, horses, clothing, etc. Even in the modern day, it is a fact that an army can only be as large as its supplies allow. Without adequate supply, an army will quickly deteriorate and its warriors scatter. In the A GAME OF THRONES board g", "headingPath": "Supply · Controlling a Location", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "If you leave a Land area with all of your Knights and Footmen, you lose control of that area unless you decide to establish control . To establish control over an area, simply place an available Power token on the Land area that you just vacat- ed. This Power token represents your house's dominance ", "headingPath": "Establishing Control", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Aretreating army may not retreat into an area that contains an opponents Power token. You can never establish control over a Sea area. Since you may need your Footmen and Knight units elsewhere, establishing control ensures that you control any Supply, Power, Cities, or Strongholds in that area. Sin", "headingPath": "Establishing Control · Why establish control? · Battle", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The A GAME OF THRONES board game is won in either of the two following ways: a) At the end of turn 10, the player who controls the most areas containing Cities and Strongholds wins the game. If two players are tied for the greatest number of areas containing Cities and Strongholds, the player with t", "headingPath": "Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.029514, "snippet": "Enclosed in this box you will find the following components: 75 cardboard order counters (15 per house). 100 cardboard Power tokens (20 per house) 15 cardboard Influence tokens (3 per house) 5 cardboard Supply tokens (1 per House) 35 House Cards (7 for each house) 5 House Start Cards (1 for each hou", "headingPath": "Components · The Order Counters · The Power Counters · The Footmen, Ships, and Knights · The House Cards · The Westeros Cards · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 661 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 661 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 11:10

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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards	p.3	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
#2	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup	p.2	0.047875 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Three Player Game · Four Player Game · Token Limits	p.14	0.046642 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Supply · Controlling a Location	p.3	0.045455 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Establishing Control	p.10	0.032787 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Establishing Control · Why establish control? · Battle	p.11	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
#7	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games	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 A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Components · The Order Counters · The Power Counters · The Footmen, Ships, and Knights · The House Cards · The Westeros Cards · …	p.1	0.029514 (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 38 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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards	p.3	#1	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Establishing Control	p.10	#5	0.032787 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Three Player Game · Four Player Game · Token Limits	p.14	#3	0.046642 (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
#4	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Components · The Order Counters · The Power Counters · The Footmen, Ships, and Knights · The House Cards · The Westeros Cards · …	p.1	#8	0.029514 (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
#5	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Supply · Controlling a Location	p.3	#4	0.045455 (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
#6	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games	p.14	#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
#7	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Why give orders? · Step One: Assign Orders · What order tokens can I place?	p.8	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup	p.2	#2	0.047875 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 79 ms · first delta 2470 ms · total 4839 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 79 ms · ask 4757 ms · gateway work 4839 ms · total 4839 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3509
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 317
tok/sec: 138.4 tok/sec — 317 output tokens in 2.290 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s 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 594), 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.