Ruling — Blood Rage

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Blood Ragebg-170216-en-1e

Blood Rage is played over a series of three rounds, known as Ages.[1] Each Age is divided into six phases that must be played in order:

1. GODS' GIFTS [1]

2. ACTION [1]

3. DISCARD [1]

4. QUEST [1]

5. RAGNARÖK [1]

6. RELEASE [1]

7. VALHALLA [1]

A phase must be completely finished before moving to the next, and the Saga token is moved on the Age Track to track progress.[1] The game ends after the Third Age.[1]

**Gods' Gifts Phase (Drafting)**

During this phase, players build a hand of cards through a drafting process:[1]

1. Each player is dealt 8 cards from the current Age's deck.[1]

2. Players inspect their cards and select one to keep, placing it face down on their clan sheet.[1] (In a 2-player game, players select 2 cards to keep instead of 1).[2]

3. Everyone passes the remaining cards to the player on their left.[1]

4. Players repeat the selection and passing process until each player has placed 6 new cards on their clan sheet.[2] (In a 2-player game, this is done two more times).[2]

5. Once 6 cards are placed, any remaining cards are discarded without being shown (in a 2-player game, the final 2 cards are discarded).[2]

6. At the end of this phase, players should have 6 cards in their hand, plus any cards saved from a previous Age.[2]

**Action Phase**

Players take turns performing one action per turn.[3] A player who is down to zero Rage cannot perform any action and can only react to other players' actions.[3] Players may also choose to pass, but doing so causes them to lose all remaining Rage and prevents further actions.[3] Available actions include:

* **INVADE**: Pay Rage equal to a figure's STR to move a figure from your reserve to an empty village in any outer province (Ships must be placed in a fjord).[3] Invading with a Leader costs no Rage.[3] You cannot invade with more figures than your current Horns stat allows.[3]

* **MARCH**: Pay 1 Rage to move any number of figures from one province to empty villages in a different single province.[4] Ships cannot be moved.[4]

* **UPGRADE**: Place a card from your hand on your clan sheet to improve abilities.[3]

* **QUEST**: Commit to a quest by placing a Quest card from your hand face down on your clan sheet.[3]

* **PILLAGE**: Attack a province to plunder its bounty.[3]

**Battle Resolution**

During a battle, the following sequence occurs:

1. Each participating player chooses one card from their hand and holds it face down.[5][6]

2. Players reveal their chosen cards simultaneously.[5][6]

3. Total STR is calculated by adding the STR of all involved figures plus any +STR bonus from a played Battle card.[5][6] (Upgrade or Quest cards add no STR and have no effect in battle).[5][6]

4. The player with the highest STR total wins the battle; in the event of a tie, all participating players lose.[5][6]

5. The winner must discard all played cards.[5][6]

6. The losers take their played cards back into their hands and must destroy all figures that were in the battle, placing them on the Valhalla sheet.[5][6]

7. If the pillager wins, they gain the Pillage Reward and the province is flipped to its "pillaged" side, meaning it cannot be pillaged again until the next Age.[5] If the pillager loses, the province is not pillaged.[5]

8. The winner of the battle gains Battle Glory equal to their current Axes stat.[5][6]

[1] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.12 · pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?

[2] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.13 · FIRST GAME? · STRATEGY TIPS FOR DRAFTING · DRAFTING IN A 2-PLAYER GAME

[3] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.14 · The phases Of plaY · INVADE

[4] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.15 · MARCH · The phases Of plaY

[5] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.18 · 2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION

[6] RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook · p.18

🔧 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 114 ms · ask 6214 ms · total 6329 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6329 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 14, "score": 0.047073, "snippet": "A player who is down to zero Rage cannot perform any action on their turn, not even an action that costs zero Rage . All that player can do is react to other players' actions, such as participating in a battle started by another player. Players have five options to choose from when performing an act", "headingPath": "The phases Of plaY · INVADE", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "Blood Rage is played over a series of three rounds, known as Ages. Each Age is divided into six phases: GODS' GIFTS ACTION DISCARD QUEST RAGNARÖK RELEASE VALHALLA The phases must be played in order, and a phase must be completely finished before moving to the next one. Move the Saga token on the Age", "headingPath": "pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "Each player participating in the battle must choose one card from their hand and hold it face down in front of them (unless they have no cards left in their hand; in that case they don't have to put a card in). Then they all reveal their chosen card simultaneously. If you reveal a Battle card, its +", "headingPath": "2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "When you order your troops to March, you must pay 1 Rage. Choose one province (you cannot choose a fjord) and move any number of your figures from that province to empty villages in another single province. The destination province doesn't have to be adjacent, it can be anywhere on the board. You ca", "headingPath": "MARCH · The phases Of plaY", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.045957, "snippet": "This is the main part of the game, where invading and pillaging takes place, battles are fought, and blood is spilled. All players begin the Action phase with the amount of Rage indicated by the Rage stat on their clan sheet. If this is the first Age, you've already taken care of this by placing you", "headingPath": "aCTiOn phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "pRepaRe The CaRds Separate the cards by their card backs, creating three dif- ferent decks: 1, 2, and 3. Depending on how many people are playing the game, some cards may need to be removed from each deck to make sure the game is balanced properly. The cards that may need to be removed show on the l", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.044283, "snippet": "First, each player chooses one of the available clans to play, by placing one of the Clan Sheets in front of them. At the start of the game, all clans are equal, but they'll soon become unique with each player's choice of upgrades. Take your clan's Leader figure and 8 Warrior figures, and make sure ", "headingPath": "pRepaRe YOuR Clan", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044118, "snippet": "Separate the cards by their card backs, creating three different decks: 1, 2, and 3. Depending on how many people are playing the game, some cards may need to be removed from each deck to make sure the game is balanced properly. The cards that may need to be removed show on the left side a small num", "headingPath": "pRepaRe The CaRds", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "FIRST GAME? · STRATEGY TIPS FOR DRAFTING · DRAFTING IN A 2-PLAYER GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The phases Of plaY · INVADE", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "MARCH · The phases Of plaY", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 272}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 272 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 272 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 0.88446 of 2735 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 06:23

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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	The phases Of plaY · INVADE	p.14	0.047073 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?	p.12	0.046402 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION	p.18	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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	MARCH · The phases Of plaY	p.15	0.046239 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	aCTiOn phase	p.13	0.045957 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)		p.11	0.045228 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe YOuR Clan	p.9	0.044283 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe The CaRds	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

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 28 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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe YOuR Clan	p.9	#7	0.044283 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION	p.18	#3	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))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	The phases Of plaY · INVADE	p.14	#1	0.047073 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe The CaRds	p.11	#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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?	p.12	#2	0.046402 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	FIRST GAME? · STRATEGY TIPS FOR DRAFTING · DRAFTING IN A 2-PLAYER GAME	p.13	#19	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
#7	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)		p.18	#9	0.030415 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	MARCH · The phases Of plaY	p.15	#4	0.046239 (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 Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	pRepaRe The CaRds · GOds' GifTs phase · FIRST GAME?	p.12	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	FIRST GAME? · STRATEGY TIPS FOR DRAFTING · DRAFTING IN A 2-PLAYER GAME	p.13	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	The phases Of plaY · INVADE	p.14	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	MARCH · The phases Of plaY	p.15	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)	2. PLAY CARDS · 3. RESOLUTION	p.18	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Blood Rage — Rulebook (corpus doc 272)		p.18	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 114 ms · first delta 2008 ms · total 6329 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 114 ms · ask 6214 ms · gateway work 6329 ms · total 6329 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3528
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 868
tok/sec: 203.2 tok/sec — 868 output tokens in 4.272 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 15s 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 200), 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.