Ruling — War of the Ring: Second Edition

You asked

How do I set up War of the Ring: Second Edition for 2 players?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: War of the Ring: Second Editionbg-115746-en-1e

To set up War of the Ring: Second Edition for 2 players, follow these steps:

1. Decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow.[1]

2. Place the game board on a suitable surface, possibly large enough to leave some room along the sides of the board (to place discarded cards and eliminated pieces and to roll dice).[1]

3. Place the Ring-bearers figure on Rivendell, its starting point.[1]

4. Place the Fellowship Progress Counter on Step 0 of the Fellowship Track, with the “Hidden” side up, and place the Corruption Counter on Step 0 of the same track.[1]

5. Place all Companion Cards in the Guide of the Fellowship Box, with the Gandalf the Grey Character Card on top; set aside the cards for Aragorn – Heir to Isildur, Gandalf the White, and Gollum for later use.[1]

6. Place all the Companion figures and their counters in The Fellowship of the Ring Box, setting aside the Gollum figure for later use.[1]

7. Place the three Elven Ring counters in the Free Peoples’ Elven Rings Box of the game board with the “Ring” side up.[1]

8. Set aside all Shadow Minion Cards (the Witch-king, Saruman, and the Mouth of Sauron) and the corresponding figures for later use.[1]

9. Separate the Free Peoples and Shadow Event Cards into Character and Strategy Decks according to the back of each card, shuffle them separately, and place them on the corresponding areas of the game board.[1]

10. Put the Standard Hunt Tiles (beige) in a cup or other opaque container to create the Hunt Pool, and set aside the Special Hunt Tiles (blue and red) for later use.[1]

11. Give seven red Shadow Action Dice to the Shadow player and four blue Free Peoples Action Dice to the Free Peoples player; set aside the remaining Action Dice and the five Combat Dice for later use.[1]

12. Place the Political Counter for each Free Peoples Nation on its starting point on the Political Track, placing all except the Elves with the “Passive” side up, and placing the Elves' counters and all Shadow Army Nations' counters with the “Active” side up.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.5

🔧 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 72 ms · ask 6821 ms · total 6895 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6895 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "4 • War of the Ring — Second Edition COMPONENT OVERVIEW COMPONENT OVERVIEW 14 • War of the Ring — Second Edition CHAPTER III:CHAPTER III: SETTING UPSETTING UP THE GAMETHE GAME B efore you start playing, you should decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow. Then, get the game", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "War of the Ring is a game for 2 to 4 players. The forces involved in the conflict are divided into two sides: the Free Peoples and the Shadow. When playing with three players, one player controls the Free Peoples and the remaining two control the Shadow, sharing tasks. When playing with four players", "headingPath": "NUMBER OF PLAYERS · NOTES ON THE SECOND EDITION", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 47, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "46 • War of the Ring — Second Edition SUMMARYSUMMARY CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 3 NUMBER OF PLAYERS 3 NOTES ON THE SECOND EDITION 3 CHAPTER II: GAME COMPONENTS 4 COMPONENT LIST 4 GAME PIECES 8 PLASTIC FIGURES 8 Armies 8 Free Peoples Leaders 8 Nazgûl 8 Char acters 8 THE GAME BOARD 9 REGIONS 10 Free Regi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "PLAYER AIDPLAYER AID War of the Ring — Second Edition CHARACTER The Character die result can be used to execute one of the following actions: — Leader Moves/Attacks with Armies. Move an Army with a Leader to an adjacent region, which must be free for the purposes of Army movement; or attack an enemy", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 45, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "44 • War of the Ring — Second Edition CHAPTER XI: CHAPTER XI: MULTIPLAYER MULTIPLAYER RULESRULES I n a three- or four-player game, each player represents one of the major powers in The Lord of the Rings and controls some of the Nations and certain Characters. FOUR-PLAYER GAME In a four-player game, ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 46, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "46 • War of the Ring — Second Edition Shadow Armies — The W itch-king player controls the Sauron Nation, the Witch-king, and the Mouth of Sauron. — The Sar uman and Sauron Allies player controls the Isengard and Southron & Easterling Nations, as well as Saruman. — Any player may hunt the Fellowship.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "12 • War of the Ring — Second Edition THE GAME BOARDTHE GAME BOARD 7 1 2 3 5 5 4 6 1 Free Peoples Character Event Cards Box 2 Free Peoples Strategy Event Cards Box 3 Elven Rings Box (controlled by the Free Peoples player) 4 Army Boxes 5 5 Stronghold Boxes 6 Hunt Box 7 Victory Points Track 8 Elven Ri", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "B efore you start playing, you should decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow. Then, get the game ready to play by following these steps. Place the game board on a suitable surface, possibly large enough to leave some room along the sides of the board (to place discarded c", "headingPath": "S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 250 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 250 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 13:13

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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	0.04866 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	NUMBER OF PLAYERS · NOTES ON THE SECOND EDITION	p.3	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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.47	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
#4	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		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
#5	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.45	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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.46	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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.12	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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.14	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.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 80 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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	#1	0.04866 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.45	#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
#4	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	W elcome to the War of the Ring strategy board game.	p.3	#10	0.014493 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.25	#13	0.013889 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.16	#28	0.011364 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.47	#3	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	NUMBER OF PLAYERS · NOTES ON THE SECOND EDITION	p.3	#2	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))	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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 72 ms · first delta 3281 ms · total 6895 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 72 ms · ask 6821 ms · gateway work 6895 ms · total 6895 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4962
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 485
tok/sec: 137.2 tok/sec — 485 output tokens in 3.535 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 50s 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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 176), 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.