Ruling — A Game of Thrones

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

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

The game is played over 10 whole game turns.[1] Each turn consists of three phases played in the following order:

1. The Westeros Phase (this phase is skipped on Game Turn 1) [1]

2. The Planning Phase [1]

3. The Action Phase [1]

**The Westeros Phase** [1]

This phase represents special events and mundane activities and involves these steps:

1. Advance the Turn Order token [1]

2. Reveal the top card on each of the three Westeros decks [1]

3. Resolve the top card on deck I [1]

4. Resolve the top card on deck II [1]

5. Resolve the top card on deck III [1]

6. Place the three resolved Westeros cards on the bottom of their respective decks [1]

**The Planning Phase** [2][1]

During this step, players simultaneously and secretly choose their orders and place them face-down (house symbol side up) on the board in areas containing their units.[2] To receive an order, an area must contain at least one unit (Footman, Knight, or Ship).[2] Each house has 10 normal orders (two of each type: March [-1 or 0], Raid, Support, Consolidate Power, and Defense [+1 or +1]) and may use additional special orders (marked with a star) based on their position on the King's Court Influence track.[2]

**The Action Phase** [1]

While the specific steps for the Action Phase are not fully detailed in the provided text, the sources describe the resolution of certain orders:

* **Marching:** This is how you move units to attack enemy areas.[3] When an area has a March order, you may move all or some units to any one adjacent area, or split them into multiple adjacent areas, though ships cannot move into Land areas and Footmen/Knights cannot move into Sea areas.[3] Marches are resolved one at a time in the order of play.[3]

* **Combat/Battles:** Battles are resolved by comparing combat strength.[4] The steps for combat are:

1. The attacker and defender both call for support from adjacent areas showing a Support order.[4]

2. Both players count and announce their total Combat strength, including units, Defense/March order modifiers, and support.[4]

3. Each player secretly selects a House Card from their hand of 7 and reveals it simultaneously.[4]

**Winning the Game** [5][1]

The game ends in one of two ways:

1. If a House controls seven areas containing Cities and Strongholds at any time, they immediately win.[5]

2. At the end of turn 10, the player controlling the most areas containing Cities and Strongholds wins.[5][1] Ties are broken by highest placement on the Supply track, then by most available power; if still tied, it is a draw.[5]

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

[2] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.8 · Why give orders? · Step One: Assign Orders · What order tokens can I place?

[3] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.10 · Resolving Raid Orders

[4] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.11 · What is Combat Strength? · Step 1: Call for support · Step 2: Announce Combat Strength · Step 3: Play House Cards

[5] RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook · p.14 · Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games

🔧 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 74 ms · ask 7034 ms · total 7110 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7110 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.047643, "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": 14, "score": 0.046676, "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": 0.046244, "snippet": "Agame for 3-5 players designed by Christian T. Petersen, based on the bestselling A Song of Ice & Fire novels by George R.R. Martin. Playing time: 2-4 hours. King Robert Baratheon is dead, and the lands of Westeros brace for war. House Lannister, whose daughter Cersei was Robert's queen, claims the ", "headingPath": "A Game of Thrones: The Board Game · Welcome to Westeros · Introduction · Game Objective · Number of Players", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "Marching is the means by which you move your units on the board and attack enemy areas. When an area has been given a March order, you may elect to move all or some of your units in that area. Units in an area may move to any one adjacent area, or they may split up and move to multiple adjacent area", "headingPath": "Resolving Raid Orders", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045262, "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": 2, "score": 0.044904, "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": 10, "score": 0.030303, "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": 8, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "The map board is divided into many separate areas. Of these areas, there are two types -- the Land area and the Sea area . Land areas are completely surrounded by a white borders, and Sea areas (all in blue) are separated by red borders -- except where they border a coastal Land area (where they are", "headingPath": "Land and Sea Areas · The Action Phase · A) Resolve Raid Orders · Resolving Raid Orders", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Why give orders? · Step One: Assign Orders · What order tokens can I place?", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Resolving Raid Orders", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "What is Combat Strength? · Step 1: Call for support · Step 2: Announce Combat Strength · Step 3: Play House Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 661}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games", "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)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.89544 of 2104 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 11:18

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	0.047643 (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)	Winning the Game · Other Rules Neutral Forces (Kings Landing, The · Three and Four Player Games	p.14	0.046676 (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)	A Game of Thrones: The Board Game · Welcome to Westeros · Introduction · Game Objective · Number of Players	p.1	0.046244 (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)	Resolving Raid Orders	p.10	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
#5	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Establishing Control · Why establish control? · Battle	p.11	0.045262 (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)	The Iron Throne, Valyrian Steel Blade, and Messenger Raven tokens. · The Game Board · Game Setup	p.2	0.044904 (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)	Establishing Control	p.10	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
#8	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Land and Sea Areas · The Action Phase · A) Resolve Raid Orders · Resolving Raid Orders	p.8	0.030214 (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)	Resolving Raid Orders	p.10	#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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Why give orders? · Step One: Assign Orders · What order tokens can I place?	p.8	#29	0.013333 (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
#3	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	#2	0.046676 (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)	What is Combat Strength? · Step 1: Call for support · Step 2: Announce Combat Strength · Step 3: Play House Cards	p.11	#19	0.025603 (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)	Game Setup · The Turn Sequence · The Westeros Phase · The Westeros Cards	p.3	#1	0.047643 (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)	Mustering	p.4	#17	0.026145 (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
#7	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Third Bid: The King's Court	p.6	#24	0.023769 (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 — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	The Support Order · Example of Support:	p.12	#18	0.025709 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	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
[2]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Why give orders? · Step One: Assign Orders · What order tokens can I place?	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	Resolving Raid Orders	p.10	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK A Game of Thrones — Rulebook (corpus doc 661)	What is Combat Strength? · Step 1: Call for support · Step 2: Announce Combat Strength · Step 3: Play House Cards	p.11	no quote on the wire
[5]	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	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 74 ms · first delta 2459 ms · total 7110 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 74 ms · ask 7034 ms · gateway work 7110 ms · total 7110 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2822
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 638
tok/sec: 138.7 tok/sec — 638 output tokens in 4.601 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 10s 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: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

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.