Ruling — Chaos in the Old World

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Chaos in the Old Worldbg-43111-en-1e

To set up a game of chaoS in The old World, follow these steps:

1. Place the game board in the center of the play area.[1]

2. Assemble the Threat dials if the set has never been used before, setting each Ruinous Power's Threat dial so its 'start' text is visible in its main window (just above the three o'clock position).[1]

3. Distribute one Power sheet to each player by consensus or randomly; return unused sheets to the box if there are fewer than four players.[1]

4. Arrange seating order around the table in clockwise order: Khorne sits first, with Nurgle to his left, Tzeentch to Nurgle's left, and Slaanesh to Tzeentch's left (skipping any Chaos Powers not being played).[1]

5. Distribute power markers, victory point markers, corruption tokens, Chaos cards, upgrade cards, and plastic followers to the appropriate players; return unused components to the box if there are fewer than four players.[1]

6. Each player places his power marker on the highlighted starting space of the power point track on his Power sheet, and places his victory point marker on the '0' space of the game board's victory point track.[1]

7. Separate dial advancement counters and Old World tokens into piles by type, placing each pile near the board where it can be easily reached by all players.[1]

8. Place the dice near the game board in easy reach of all players.[1]

9. Sort the ruination cards into an ordered stack with the '1' card on top and the '5' card on the bottom, and place this stack on the game board where indicated.[1]

10. Shuffle all Old World cards together, then deal out a facedown Old World deck of seven cards for a four-player game or eight cards for a three-player game, placing it on the game board where indicated.[2][3] Return unused cards to the box.[2][3]

11. Separate two Noble tokens, three Warpstone tokens, and four Peasant tokens; mix these nine tokens together, then randomly choose tokens from this pool one at a time, placing each on the board (one per map region) in standard region order until there is one token in each region.[2][3]

12. Each player shuffles his Chaos cards to form a Chaos deck, draws a hand of three cards, and places the remainder of the deck near his Power sheet and as-yet-unused upgrade cards.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook · p.32 · SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS

[3] RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook · p.9 · Setup · The Game Round

🔧 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 89 ms · ask 6584 ms · total 6675 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6675 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "To prepare a game of chaoS in The old World , players carry out the following steps. Place Game Board 1. : Place the game board in the center of the play area. Assemble the Threat dials (see page 3) if this game set has never been used before. Set each Ruinous Power's Threat dial so its 'start' text", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "create old world Deck 6. : Shuffle all of the Old World cards together. Then deal cards facedown from the top of this stack to form the Old World deck. Deal seven cards for a four-player game, or eight cards for a three-player game. Place this deck facedown on the game board where indicated. Return ", "headingPath": "Setup · The Game Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "Place Game Board 1. . Distribute Sheets and arrange Seating. 2. Assign Power sheets randomly, or by concensus. Sit in Power order. Distribute Powers' cards, tokens, and Figures 3. . Place Power Markers and Victory Point Markers. 4. Prepare common tokens, ready Dice, and Place 5. ruination cards. Sor", "headingPath": "SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "To place one of his followers on the board during the summoning phase (i.e., to Summon a figure), a player simply does the following: Chooses one of his available figures. Pays the selected figure's cost. Places the figure on a legal board region. When choosing a figure, the player may either select", "headingPath": "SuMMoninG Follower FiGureS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "To play a Chaos card, a player simply does the following: Chooses a card from his hand of Chaos cards. Pays the selected card's cost. Places the card on an empty card space on any of the board's nine regions and carries out its effects. To pay a card's cost, the player simply adjusts his power point", "headingPath": "PlayinG chaoS carDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "During the Summoning PhaSe , the players summon followers and play Chaos cards to the board's nine regions. In each summoning phase, most players will summon a number of figures and play several cards. In the summoning phase, the players take turns acting, following the standard order (Khorne, Nurgl", "headingPath": "Summoning Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "In the baTTle PhaSe , the Chaos Powers' followers in each region fight against one another, as well as against Peasant tokens. Battle is carried out region by region in the standard region order (see 'Region Order' on page 25). It occurs in every region where one player is entitled to roll battle di", "headingPath": "The Battle Phase · calculatinG Battle Dice · aSSiGninG hitS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Each of the instructions that can be revealed on the four Ruinous Powers' Threat dials is explained below. Carrying out an instruction when it is revealed is not optional, unless conditions are insufficient to allow it. For example, the only way a player who reveals a 'Remove 2 Old World Tokens' ins", "headingPath": "Dial inStructionS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 32, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · The Game Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 347}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 347 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 347 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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.92469 of 1859 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 12, 2026 21:03

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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup	p.8	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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup · The Game Round	p.9	0.047123 (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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS	p.32	0.046696 (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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SuMMoninG Follower FiGureS	p.11	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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	PlayinG chaoS carDS	p.12	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
#6	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Summoning Phase	p.11	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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	The Battle Phase · calculatinG Battle Dice · aSSiGninG hitS	p.15	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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Dial inStructionS	p.23	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 58 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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup	p.8	#1	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS	p.32	#3	0.046696 (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
#3	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Designer's Notes	p.27	#31	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
#4	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	PlacinG corruPtion tokenS	p.19	#15	0.014085 (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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	aDVance threat DialS	p.21	#21	0.012987 (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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SuMMoninG Follower FiGureS	p.11	#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
#7	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SlaaneSh StrateGy · oPPoSinG khorne · oPPoSinG nurGle · oPPoSinG tzeentch	p.29	#36	0.010753 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup · The Game Round	p.9	#2	0.047123 (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 Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	SetuP StePS · when a reGion iS ruineD… · GaMe enD conDitionS	p.32	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Chaos in the Old World — Rulebook (corpus doc 347)	Setup · The Game Round	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 89 ms · first delta 2925 ms · total 6675 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 89 ms · ask 6584 ms · gateway work 6675 ms · total 6675 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3622
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 549
tok/sec: 149.4 tok/sec — 549 output tokens in 3.675 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): set up

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 275), 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.