Ruling — War of the Ring: Second Edition

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

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

I looked through War of the Ring: Second Edition's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.22 · PLAYING EVENT CARDS

Event cards can be played during the Action Resolution phase in two ways: by using an Event Action die result (the Palantir symbol), or by using an Action die result whose icon matches the symbol on the upper right corner of the card. Example: For the Free Peoples player to play the Strategy Card 'P

RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.14 · S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …

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

RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.20 · ACTION DICE REFERENCE CHART · CHARACTER · Free Peoples only · Shadow only · ARMY · MUSTER

This section provides a quick summary of the actions that each player can take using Action dice. This 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 move

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

The Shadow player must place at least one Action Die if the Free Peoples player retrieved at least 1 die from the Hunt Box during Phase 1. He may allocate only as many dice as the number of Companions remaining in the Fellowship. These dice are not rolled during the following Action Roll phase. Phas

RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.18 · CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · SUMMARY OF THE TURN · Phase 2) Fellowship Phase · Phase 3) Hunt Allocation · Phase 4) Action Roll · Phase 5) Action Resolution

W ar of the Ring is played over a series of turns , until either player wins the game. Each turn is divided into six phases . The phases of the turn are: Phase 1) Recover Action Dice and Draw Event Cards Each player recovers the Action dice he used in the previous turn, plus any dice which were adde

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 81 ms · ask 3593 ms · total 8127 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 4451 ms · generation 3676 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 22, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Event cards can be played during the Action Resolution phase in two ways: by using an Event Action die result (the Palantir symbol), or by using an Action die result whose icon matches the symbol on the upper right corner of the card. Example: For the Free Peoples player to play the Strategy Card 'P", "headingPath": "PLAYING EVENT CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.046486, "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}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "This section provides a quick summary of the actions that each player can take using Action dice. This 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 move", "headingPath": "ACTION DICE REFERENCE CHART · CHARACTER · Free Peoples only · Shadow only · ARMY · MUSTER", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.042744, "snippet": "The Shadow player must place at least one Action Die if the Free Peoples player retrieved at least 1 die from the Hunt Box during Phase 1. He may allocate only as many dice as the number of Companions remaining in the Fellowship. These dice are not rolled during the following Action Roll phase. Phas", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.041967, "snippet": "W ar of the Ring is played over a series of turns , until either player wins the game. Each turn is divided into six phases . The phases of the turn are: Phase 1) Recover Action Dice and Draw Event Cards Each player recovers the Action dice he used in the previous turn, plus any dice which were adde", "headingPath": "CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · SUMMARY OF THE TURN · Phase 2) Fellowship Phase · Phase 3) Hunt Allocation · Phase 4) Action Roll · Phase 5) Action Resolution", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.040612, "snippet": "RESOLVING A BA TTLE RESOLVING A BA TTLE A battle is resolved in a series of Combat Rounds. During each round, both players follow the steps below: 1) Play a Combat Card (optional) 2) Roll the Dice for the Combat Roll 3) Roll the Dice for the Leader Re-roll 4) Remove Casualties 5) Choose to Cease the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Starting with the Free Peoples, players alternate actions selecting one of their Action dice and immediately taking the action made available by the specific die result. Each Action die is printed with a set of distinctive icons, corresponding to different game actions. Each action is detailed later", "headingPath": "USING ACTION DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}, {"page": 45, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "The non-Leading Player on the Free Peoples team chooses an Action die and uses it for any of the Nations he controls or for any action relating to the Fellowship or any individual Companions, such as moving or hiding the Fellowship or moving Companions on the map. Then the non-Leading Player in the ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 250}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

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

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

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 14, 2026 14:32

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)	PLAYING EVENT CARDS	p.22	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
#2	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	0.046486 (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)	ACTION DICE REFERENCE CHART · CHARACTER · Free Peoples only · Shadow only · ARMY · MUSTER	p.20	0.044337 (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	0.042744 (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)	CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · SUMMARY OF THE TURN · Phase 2) Fellowship Phase · Phase 3) Hunt Allocation · Phase 4) Action Roll · Phase 5) Action Resolution	p.18	0.041967 (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.5	0.040612 (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)	USING ACTION DICE	p.19	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
#8	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.45	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

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)	S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.14	#2	0.046486 (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)	EVENT · MUSTER/ARMY · SPECIAL · EYE OF SAURON · WILL OF THE WEST	p.21	#18	0.024846 (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
#3	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	PLAYING EVENT CARDS	p.22	#1	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
#4	RULEBOOK War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	#10	0.029644 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	Characters	p.8	#28	0.022809 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)	Only for Nations 'At War' · Shadow only	p.20	#19	0.024184 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	#9	0.029762 (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 War of the Ring: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 250)		p.5	#12	0.026501 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 81 ms · first delta 3572 ms · total 8127 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 4451 ms · retrieval 81 ms · ask 3593 ms · gateway work 3676 ms · total 8127 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3807
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 204.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.044 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 6s 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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 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.