Ruling — Black Rose Wars

← Black Rose Wars

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Black Rose Warsbg-239942-en-1e

To play the game, follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. The player who most recently gave or received a rose in real life takes the Crown Token (First Player).[1]

2. Select a number of Mage’s Cell Tiles corresponding to the number of players in the game.[2]

3. Shuffle the selected Mage’s Cells and randomly place them face down in the positions shown in the provided figure.[2]

4. Turn all the Mage’s Cell Rooms face up and place each Mage in the Cell matching their color.[1]

5. Starting with the First Player (and proceeding clockwise), each player chooses a Mage and takes the matching Model, Mage Sheet, and Custom Spells.[1]

6. Each player also chooses a color among the chosen Mage Cell colors and takes all Damage/Instability Tokens, Physical Action Tokens, Protection and Trap Tokens, and Rose Pins of that color.[1]

7. Starting with the First Player, each Mage chooses their starting School of Magic (no two Mages may choose the same school).[1]

8. Each player chooses their own Starting Grimoire from the two available on the back of their School's Reference Cards.[1]

9. Assemble Grimoires by selecting Spells indicated by the chosen Starting Grimoire from the corresponding School of Magic Deck, adding 1 Custom Spell, and setting the other 2 aside to be added to the hand one at a time when the Moon Phase changes.[1]

10. Shuffle each Mage's 7-card Grimoire.[1]

11. Shuffle the six decks of the Schools of Magic and place them near the board with their respective Reference Cards.[1]

12. Shuffle the Deck of Forgotten Spells and set it nearby.[1]

13. On the Event Board, place the Black Rose's Damage/Instability Tokens and shuffle/place the Event Cards of the First Moon Phase as shown in the provided picture.[3]

14. On the Power Board, shuffle and place the Quest Card Deck of the First Moon Phase, the Activation Token of the Black Rose, and the Evocation Cards.[2]

15. Place the Power Board and the Event Board on the sides of the Lodge.[2]

16. Shuffle and put aside the remaining Quest Card and Event Card Decks until needed for next Moon Phases.[1]

**Game Turn**

The game takes place over multiple turns, with each turn divided into six phases:

1. Black Rose Phase [4]

2. Study Phase [4]

3. Preparation Phase [4]

4. Action Phase [4]

5. Evocation Phase [4]

6. Clean-up Phase [4]

All Mages must complete each phase before any player can move to the next one.[4]

**Black Rose Phase**

During this phase, the Event Board advances through three steps in order:

1. Events already on the Event Board shift forward one position; an Event moving off the board is discarded, and the Black Rose gains Power Points indicated on the card.[4]

2. The player to the right of the First Player draws an Event from the current Moon Phase deck, reads it aloud, and places it on the Event Board.[4]

3. If an Event enters the game, the Black and/or Black Rose gains Power Points as indicated; if an Event displaces an existing Event, the previous Event shifts forward and may be discarded.[4]

**Action Phase**

During the Action Phase, Mages cast Spells to gain Power Points, inflict Damage, and create Instability to Destroy Rooms.[3]

1. Mages may use Physical Actions, such as moving Rooms.[5]

2. Mages may reveal and cast Spells.[6]

3. Standard Spells may be cast in a specified order.[6] A Standard Spell may only be combined with the Quick Spell, and a Mage cannot cast two Standard Spells during a single combination.[3]

4. A Mage must play any remaining Spells or Physical Action Tokens if possible; they may not pass their turn if they have tokens remaining.[3]

5. If multiple Traps are triggered by moving into a Room, they are resolved clockwise, starting from the Mage who will take an Action after you.[7] If a player has multiple Traps that trigger simultaneously, they resolve them in their preferred order.[7]

**Scoring and Ending the Game**

* **Power Points:** These are the indicators of victory, tracked on the Power Board.[6]

* **Winning:** The game ends when a winner is determined.[8]

* **Tie-breaking:** If two or more Mages have the same number of Power Points at the end of counting, a playoff turn is played where all Mages play an extra Game Turn.[8] In extra turns

[1] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.16

[2] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.15

[3] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.25

[4] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.19

[5] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.24

[6] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.38

[7] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.37

[8] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.35

🔧 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 87 ms · ask 8678 ms · total 8769 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8769 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 35, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "At the end of the counting, if two or more Mages have the same number of Power Points, play continues with a playoff turn. All Mages play an extra Game Turn following the normal rules of the game. If at the end of this turn there is no winner yet, play continues with yet another Game Turn, and so on", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045133, "snippet": "Game Turn The game takes place over multiple Turns. Each Turn is divided into 6 phases: 1. Black Rose Phase 2. Study Phase 3. Preparation Phase 4. Action Phase 5. Evocation Phase 6. Clean-up Phase All Mages must complete each phase before any of them can move on to the next one. Tessa The Mage holdi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Jaf'ar At any point during the Study Phase, a player may remove 1 Spell from their hand by discarding the undesired card to the discard pile of the School to which the Spell belongs (Custom Spells are instead set aside, to be added back to the player’s hand when the Moon Phase changes, see page 18.)", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 34, "score": 0.043364, "snippet": "Black RoseRoom This is the final phase of the Game Turn. During this phase, Rooms are reset for Activation and checked for Instability, played Spells are disposed of, tokens are restored, and the board is prepared for the next Game Turn. If a Mage, or the Black Rose, has obtained enough Power Poin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.042817, "snippet": "23 During this phase, the strategy that was planned in the previous phase is executed. At the start of this phase, check the Event Board for any Events that Activate during this phase. In addition to the Spells placed on the Mage Sheets, each Mage has 2 Physical Action Tokens available. These tokens", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.041912, "snippet": "Draw (): Draw the indicated number of cards from the top of the specified deck and add them to your hand. Eliminate: Remove an object permanently from the game, placing it back in the box. Heal (): Remove the indicated number of Damage Tokens of the player choice from the Mage’s Sheet or from an ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Shuffle and put aside the remaining Quest Card and Event Card Decks until you need them for the next Moon Phases. The player who most recently has given or received a rose in real life takes the Crown Token (First Player). 8. Starting with the First Player (and proceeding clockwise from there) each ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "4. Select a number of Mage’s Cell Tiles corresponding to the number of players in the game. Take the selected Mage’s Cell and shuffle them. Randomly place them face down into the positions shown in the figure below corresponding to the number of players. Do not flip them over yet. Now the Black Rose", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 25, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 19, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 24, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 38, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 37, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 35, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 588 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 588 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 0.91187 of 3472 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 15, 2026 12:16

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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.35	0.048387 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.19	0.045133 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.21	0.044796 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.34	0.043364 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.23	0.042817 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.38	0.041912 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	0.03125 (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 59 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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.37	#19	0.024321 (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
#2	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	#8	0.03125 (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 + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.38	#6	0.041912 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.24	#15	0.02578 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.19	#2	0.045133 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.25	#11	0.027072 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.35	#1	0.048387 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.25	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.19	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.24	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.38	no quote on the wire
[7]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.37	no quote on the wire
[8]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.35	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 87 ms · first delta 3700 ms · total 8769 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 87 ms · ask 8678 ms · gateway work 8769 ms · total 8769 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4244
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 204.2 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 5.015 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 19s 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 520), 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.