Ruling — Runewars

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Runewarsbg-59294-en-1e

To play Runewars, follow these steps:

**Setup**

1. Shuffle the Fate cards and deal one to each player; the player with the highest numbered card is the first player.[1]

2. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player chooses a faction and receives all corresponding components (faction sheet, plastic figures, home realm map tile, activation markers, and Order cards).[1]

3. Remove all Setup Quest cards from the Quest deck and shuffle them; deal two faceup to each player.[2]

4. Each player receives the map tiles matching their two Quest cards.[2]

5. The first player places one map tile in the center of the play area; then, proceeding clockwise, each player places one map tile until everyone has placed two, ensuring tiles touch at least two different areas of previously placed tiles and avoiding parallel mountain or water borders.[2]

6. The first player places home realm setup markers adjacent to the edge of the game board (one per player), ensuring each touches at least three noncolored borders and is at least four areas away from other markers (or three areas if necessary).[2]

7. Starting with the player to the left of the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player replaces a setup marker with their home realm map tile.[2]

8. Create the game board by placing required neutral units into areas as indicated by images on the board.[1]

9. Randomize city tokens and place one faceup on each city space.[1]

10. Remove Quest cards from the deck that refer to areas not part of the game board, add each player's Setup Quest cards to the deck, and shuffle.[1]

11. Each player sets resource dials on their faction sheet to starting resources and receives the amount of influence tokens and Tactics cards indicated on their faction sheet.[1]

12. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player places one stronghold token in an area of their home realm, recruits units using starting resources into areas of their home realm, and places one dragon rune token and one false rune token in each area of their home realm (limited to one rune per area).[1]

13. Each player receives two Quest cards in their hand and one random Hero card matching their faction's alignment, placing the matching figure in an area of their home realm.[1][3]

14. Shuffle all unassigned Hero cards to form a Hero deck.[3]

15. Shuffle the Fate, Quest, Reward, Tactics, Hero, both Objective, and all four Season decks separately and place them adjacent to the board; place the three Title cards faceup nearby.[3]

16. Place the battle marker, damage tokens, defeated hero markers, influence tokens, and training tokens in reachable piles; place rune tokens in two piles (false runes and dragon runes).[3]

17. Each player receives one random Objective card matching their faction's affiliation and places it facedown.[3]

**A Game Season**

Each season consists of the following steps:

1. Resolve a Season Card: The first player draws the top Season card of the current Season deck and resolves its text ability (primary ability) first, followed by its secondary ability (icons).[4]

2. Choose Order Cards.[4]

3. Resolve Order Cards.[4]

**Winning the Game**

* The first player to control six areas containing dragon runes immediately wins.[4][5]

* If no player controls six dragon runes by the end of the sixth winter, the player with the most dragon runes wins.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook · p.8 · Map Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[4] RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook · p.11 · Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown

[5] RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook · p.7 · Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup

🔧 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 88 ms · ask 7349 ms · total 7441 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7441 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 30, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "At the start of the game, each player receives one Objective card. Each Objective card lists criteria that a player can fulfill to obtain a dragon rune. Each Objective card is kept secret until a player discards it to receive a dragon rune (see 'Gaining Dragon Runes' on the left). Objective cards ar", "headingPath": "Objective Cards · Tactics Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 31, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "If players run out of activation tokens, damage tokens, defeated hero markers, influence tokens, or training tokens, they should use a suitable replacement (such as a coin or bead). All other cards, tokens, and figures are limited to those provided in the game. If a deck of cards runs out, players s", "headingPath": "Component L imitations · Player Elimination · Play Order and Ties", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.046871, "snippet": "When a player moves units into an enemy area, he must start a battle. The term battle refers to any time units are fighting each other. Each battle involves two groups of units attacking each other in an attempt to gain control of an area. Each battle is resolved as follows: Place Battle Marker: 1. ", "headingPath": "Battles", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.044306, "snippet": "Before playing each game, players perform the following steps in order: Choose First Player: 1. Shuffle the deck of Fate cards and deal one card to each player. The player with the highest numbered card (listed on the bottom center) is selected as the first player . This player chooses his faction f", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044118, "snippet": "Each game of Runewars is played over a number of game rounds known as seasons . Each season consists of the following three steps: Resolve a Season Card 1. Choose Order Cards Resolve Order Cards After performing the 'Resolve Order Cards' step, the season has ended, and a new season is resolved start", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.043124, "snippet": "The first player to control six areas containing dragon runes immediately wins the game. Each player begins the game with two dragon runes and can acquire more by conquering opponents' areas, obtaining Reward cards, fulfilling criteria on Objective cards, and as prompted by Season and Title cards. S", "headingPath": "Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 40, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Resolve a Season Card 1. Choose Order Cards Resolve Order Cards Place Battle Marker 1. Place Units Next to Faction Sheets 2. Start of Battle Abilities 3. Rounds of Combat 4. Tally Strength 5. Fortification Developments a. Count Units b. Add Stronghold Strength c. Damage Stronghold d. Loser Retreats.", "headingPath": "Steps of A Game Season · Steps of a Battle · Resolution 6. · Rounds of Combat · Steps of a Duel · Season Card Secondary Abilities", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When a player moves his hero into an area containing an enemy hero during the Quest Phase, he may start a duel with the enemy hero in an attempt to defeat him and take his Reward cards. Declare Defender: 1. The player who is starting the duel chooses a single enemy hero present in his hero's area to", "headingPath": "Duels", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Map Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 508}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 508 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 508 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 0.92593 of 2835 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 05:49

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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Objective Cards · Tactics Cards	p.30	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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Component L imitations · Player Elimination · Play Order and Ties	p.31	0.046898 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Battles	p.21	0.046871 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Setup	p.8	0.044306 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown	p.11	0.044118 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup	p.7	0.043124 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Steps of A Game Season · Steps of a Battle · Resolution 6. · Rounds of Combat · Steps of a Duel · Season Card Secondary Abilities	p.40	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
#8	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Duels	p.28	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 75 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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Setup	p.8	#4	0.044306 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown	p.11	#5	0.044118 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Map Setup	p.8	#12	0.02619 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Setup	p.8	#32	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
#5	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Retreats	p.23	#13	0.026044 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup	p.7	#6	0.043124 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Strategize Order Example	p.16	#9	0.029031 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Component L imitations · Player Elimination · Play Order and Ties	p.31	#2	0.046898 (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 Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Map Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Playing the Game · A Game Season · 1) Resolve a Season Card · Season Card Breakdown	p.11	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Runewars — Rulebook (corpus doc 508)	Object of the Game · Pre-game Setup	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 88 ms · first delta 3699 ms · total 7441 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 88 ms · ask 7349 ms · gateway work 7441 ms · total 7441 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3570
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 757
tok/sec: 205.3 tok/sec — 757 output tokens in 3.687 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 11s 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 439), 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.