Ruling — The King Is Dead: Second Edition

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The King Is Dead: Second Editionbg-319966-en-1e

### Setup

1. Place the board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. If playing a two-player game, return two followers of each faction to the box, place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex, then place all remaining followers in the cloth bag.[1]

3. Randomly give each player two followers to place in front of them to form their court.[1]

4. Randomly place followers in each region so there are four followers per region (for Moray, Gwynedd, and Essex, add two more followers to the ones already placed).[1]

5. Place all remaining followers into the supply and return the cloth bag to the box.[1]

6. Give each player a negotiation disc.[1]

7. Place all control discs in the supply and all instability discs in France.[1]

8. Deal each player eight action cards: Scottish Support, Welsh Support, English Support, Negotiate, Manoeuvre, Outmanoeuvre, and two copies of Assemble (do not use cunning action cards).[1]

9. Shuffle the region cards and deal one face up next to each numbered space on the board.[1]

10. Place the victory card near the board.[1]

11. The player who most recently visited a castle is the start player.[1]

### Turns

1. Beginning with the start player and moving clockwise, players either take an action or pass.[2]

2. To take an action, play a card from your hand and resolve its effect.[2][3]

3. When resolving an action, you must carry out its effect in full if you can, or as far as possible if not.[3]

4. You cannot place or move followers into controlled regions (regions with a control disc or instability disc) when resolving an action.[3]

5. After resolving an action, place the card face up in your discard pile.[3]

6. Immediately after taking an action, you must summon a follower to your court by choosing any follower from a region (not the supply) and placing it in front of you.[3]

7. If you pass, you forfeit your turn for one round; when play returns to you, you may take an action or pass again.[2]

8. If all players pass in sequence, you must resolve a power struggle.[2]

### Power Struggles

1. Find the contested region by locating the face-up region card in the lowest-numbered space around the board.[2]

2. Check which faction has the most followers in the contested region.[2]

3. Place a control disc for that faction in the region to indicate they control it.[2]

4. If there is a tie between factions or no factions are present, the region becomes unstable by placing an instability disc in the region.[2]

5. Return all followers in the contested region to the supply.[2]

6. Flip the region card of the contested region face down.[2]

### Ending the Game

The game ends via a Coronation or an Invasion.[2][4]

**Coronation**

1. The game ends with a coronation if the game does not end in an invasion.[4]

2. The faction with the highest number of controlled regions is the most powerful; if tied, the faction that last won a power struggle is more powerful.[5]

3. The player with the most followers of the most powerful faction in court wins (and their teammate wins if playing in teams).[5][4]

4. Tiebreakers: The player with the most followers of the second most powerful faction in court wins; if still tied, the player who first played all their action cards wins.[5][4]

**Invasion**

1. The game ends with an invasion if there are three instability discs on the board.[2]

2. The winner is the player or team with the highest number of complete sets of followers (one follower from each faction).[5][4]

3. Tiebreaker: The team that last played an action card wins.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …

[2] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.6 · Turns · Power struggles

[3] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.6 · Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS

[4] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.8 · Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation

[5] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.2

🔧 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 77 ms · ask 5685 ms · total 5764 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5764 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Beginning with the start player and moving clockwise, players either take an action or pass. Play keeps going around the table, occasionally interrupted by power struggles, until the game ends. When you take an action, you play a card from your hand and resolve its effect. After taking an action, yo", "headingPath": "Turns · Power struggles", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "If you are playing with four players, you play in teams of two. The player sitting opposite you is your teammate. You are not allowed to discuss tactics or strategies with your teammate, and you must not show each other your action cards. The play is the same as normal, with all players summoning fo", "headingPath": "Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Throughout the game, you will take actions to place, move, and remove followers across the board. By doing so, you can influence which faction gains control of each region during a power struggle, shifting the board so it is in your favour. To take an action, you must play a card from your hand and ", "headingPath": "Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046175, "snippet": "Place the board in the middle of the table. If you are playing a two-player game, first return two followers of each faction to the box. Place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex. Place all the remaining followers in the cloth bag. Rand", "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046154, "snippet": "The King is Dead is a game of political upheaval in medieval Britain. Over the course of the game, you will resolve power struggles in the eight regions of the island to determine which faction will prevail and crown the new monarch. Become the preferred candidate of the victorious faction and the k", "headingPath": "OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "OVERVIEW The King is Dead is a game of political upheaval in medieval Britain. Over the course of the game, you will resolve power struggles in the eight regions of the island to determine which faction will prevail and crown the new monarch. Become the preferred candidate of the victorious faction ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "The game ends with either a French invasion or the coronation of the new ruler. Who wins depends on how the game ends. If all three instability discs are on the board, the game ends immediately with an invasion . If all eight power struggles are resolved without an invasion, the game ends with a cor", "headingPath": "Trigger · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.044118, "snippet": "Resolve the effect of an action card that is face up on top of another player's discard pile. This action counts as an exact copy of the action you have chosen. The normal rules for partial actions apply. Place two Scottish followers from the supply into a region, then return a follower from that re", "headingPath": "SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Turns · Power struggles", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 400 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 400 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 0.90515 of 2952 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 05:55

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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Turns · Power struggles	p.6	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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation	p.8	0.048652 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS	p.6	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
#4	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …	p.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))	300
#5	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	OVERVIEW	p.2	0.046154 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)		p.2	0.045724 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Trigger · Invasion · Coronation	p.7	0.045455 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …	p.10	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

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 16 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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Turns · Power struggles	p.6	#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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …	p.4	#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
#3	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	OVERVIEW	p.2	#5	0.046154 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …	p.10	#8	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
#5	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	OUTMANOEUVRE	p.9	#12	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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)		p.2	#6	0.045724 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS	p.6	#3	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
#8	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation	p.8	#2	0.048652 (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 The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Turns · Power struggles	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation	p.8	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)		p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 77 ms · first delta 1434 ms · total 5764 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 77 ms · ask 5685 ms · gateway work 5764 ms · total 5764 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3241
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 872
tok/sec: 203.9 tok/sec — 872 output tokens in 4.277 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 329), 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.