Ruling — Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

← Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalonbg-264220-en-1e

The game is played through a continuous cycle of three stages:[1]

**I. Start of the Day** [1]

1. Remove expired Menhirs (those with no Dial in the slot of their base).[1]

2. Remove Locations that are no longer adjacent to a Location with an Active Menhir.[1]

3. Reduce the Dial of each Active Menhir by 1; if a Dial is at 1 and cannot be reduced further, remove it from under the Menhir.[1]

4. Reduce Time Dials and remove Time Tokens on the table (including those on Secret cards or next to Characters) by 1; if a Dial can no longer be reduced, remove it from the game.[1]

5. Reveal and read a new Event card.[1]

**II. Day (Stage II)** [1]

Characters perform Actions until they have no more or decide to Pass.[1]

**III. End of the Day (Stage III)** [1]

Characters rest, recover, read Dreams, advance, and optimize their decks.[1]

**Combat Turns** [2]

A Combat turn consists of the following phases:

1. **Pick the Active Character**: The Party selects an unactivated Character (one with no Time Token on their Character Tray).[2] If they cannot reach an unanimous decision, the Character with the lowest Character Number becomes Active.[2] A Time Token is then placed on that Character's Tray.[2]

2. **Character Activation**:[2]

* **Delayed Abilities**: Remove one Time Token from each Combat card in the Sequence that has any; if the last token is removed, resolve its Ability.[2]

* **Playing Cards**:

* Play one Combat card. The first card played during an Activation does not need to fulfill special requirements, though it must line properly with the previous card in the Sequence to join bottom Keys.[3][2] After playing, check for connected Attribute Keys to Bonus Keys, Magic Keys, or Free Keys to apply bonuses, and resolve any triggered Abilities.[3]

* Play additional Combat cards. Every card played after the first in a Turn MUST connect with a Key.[3] If no connection can be made, no additional cards may be played.[3] Resolve these cards using the same process as the first card.[3]

* **Check for Opportunity Attack**: If no cards were played during the Activation, the enemy immediately makes an Opportunity attack; afterwards, draw a card.[3]

* **Perform the Victory Check**: Count the markers in the Combat Pool. If the count is higher than or equal to the target Value on the Encounter card, you win, receive rewards, share loot, and reshuffle your Combat deck.[3] Otherwise, proceed to the next step.[3]

3. **Enemy Attack**: Find the Attack on the Encounter card that matches the number of markers in the Combat Pool and apply the result to the Active Character.[3] If the attack removes markers and the pool lacks enough markers to cover the loss, discard a card from your hand for every excess point.[3][4] After modifying the pool, perform the Victory Check again.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.8

[2] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.15

[3] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.15

[4] RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook · p.24

🔧 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 90 ms · ask 7403 ms · total 7496 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7496 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 15, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "You may also be forced to play a card if you're affected by Panic (see: Panic). To complete this step, follow the list below: a) Play one Combat card. When playing the very first Combat card during your Activation, you don't need to fulfill any special requirements! This card doesn't have to connect", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.046402, "snippet": "CombaT Turn A Combat usually consists of several Combat Turns, with each Turn going through the following phases: i. piCk The aCTive CharaCTer The Party members decide who will be the next Active Character. They can select any Characters who have not been Activated this Combat Turn (they have no Tim", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.045831, "snippet": "paniC Panic takes place anytime your is higher than your current (marker on the track is above the wings of the T-shaped limiter). When that happens: Instead of playing a card from your hand in step 2 (Playing Cards), play a card from the top of your Diplomacy / Combat deck. Then, you may play addit", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.042961, "snippet": "VII) Distribute Help cards. Each player should receive one Icon Guide card, and one Turn Order card with the Action list on the back. Leave the Combat / Diplomacy Help card on the table. VIII) Optional: pick your Chronicler. Designating one player as a Chronicler helps to maintain the flow of the ga", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.042925, "snippet": "When that happens: Instead of playing the first card of this Turn from your hand in step 2 (Playing Cards), play a card from the top of your Diplomacy deck. Then, you may play any additional cards from your hand, according to the standard rules. Do not draw a new card at the End of Turn. Any bonus o", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.042221, "snippet": "Your Character will Travel from one Location card to another, spending Energy and revealing more Locations. To progress further, you often must activate one of the Menhir statues scattered throughout the realm. These monuments go dark after some time, and activating them requires considerable Resour", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.042046, "snippet": "X) The first day of your journey has started. Go to the 'Play- e 7 N R world seTup After all players have set up their Characters, follow the steps below. I) Set the Starting Location. The Starting Location for the Fall of Avalon is Location card 101. Place your Starting Location in the middle of yo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "In short, During the Day, on your turn you may take one Action from the Action Help card, your Character Tile, or any other cards and boards currently available to your Character. Other Characters in your Location may join you. Then, players who haven't yet acted take one Action. Repeat this sequenc", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}, {"page": 24, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 390}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 390 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 390 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 0.89909 of 2319 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 07:52

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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	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
#2	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.24	0.045831 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	0.042961 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.20	0.042925 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.4	0.042221 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	0.042046 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.9	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

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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.8	#19	0.023796 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.20	#5	0.042925 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.12	#33	0.021709 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.7	#7	0.042046 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.21	#22	0.023342 (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 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.24	#3	0.045831 (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	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.8	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.15	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon — Rulebook (corpus doc 390)	p.24	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 90 ms · first delta 4162 ms · total 7496 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 90 ms · ask 7403 ms · gateway work 7496 ms · total 7496 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4135
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 671
tok/sec: 205.0 tok/sec — 671 output tokens in 3.273 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 319), 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.