Ruling — Mage Wars Arena

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Mage Wars Arenabg-101721-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Place the game board on the table.[1]

2. Each player chooses a Mage and takes the matching Mage Card and Ability Card for that Mage (in Apprentice Mode, do not use the Ability Cards).[1]

3. Each player chooses red or blue, and takes 10 action markers of that color.[1]

4. Each player takes 3 black status cubes, 1 red status cube, and 1 black quickcast marker.[1]

5. Place your Mage Card in the corner zone closest to you (marked with a door on the board).[1]

6. Place one of your action markers and your quickcast Marker on your Mage Card, with the white symbols up.[1]

7. Place your Mage status board near you.[1]

8. Place a black status cube on your Mage's starting Channeling, Mana Supply (all Mages start with 10 mana in their supply), and Life value.[1]

9. Place a red status cube on the '0' of your Mage's Life track to mark how much damage the Mage has taken.[1]

10. Choose a spellbook (if this is your first game, you will need to assemble your spellbook).[1]

11. Place the dice, condition markers, and other game markers in easy reach.[1]

12. Both players roll the effect die (the d12); the higher roller decides who takes the initiative marker.[1][2]

[1] RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook · p.7 · The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game

[2] RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook · p.8 · THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE

Settled. Play on.

🔧 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 99 ms · ask 5493 ms · total 5594 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5594 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 7, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "The game board shows the arena where you will battle your rivals for magical supremacy! The board is divided into 12 areas called 'zones,' which control movement and range. Zones are adjacent only if they share a common edge orthogonally (horizontally or vertically). Zones that touch only at a corne", "headingPath": "The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 40, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "After you've played a few Apprentice Mode games and you feel ready, we recommend using these new spellbooks. They are not recommended for first time players. These spellbooks were designed using the rules for building spellbooks, so they are 'legal' for any games. You can modify or 'tweak' these bas", "headingPath": "STARTING SPELLBOOKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 40, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "These spellbooks were designed using the rules for building spellbooks, so they are 'legal' for any games. You can modify or 'tweak' these basic spellbooks, or design your own from scratch, whichever you prefer! Note: You can build all four of these spellbooks at once with the spell cards provided i", "headingPath": "STARTING SPELLBOOKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Objects with the Spawnpoint trait have the ability to cast spells for you. You select spells for your Spawnpoints during the Planning Phase, at the same time that you choose spells for your Mage to cast. Usually, the Spawnpoint can only cast certain types of spells, as listed on the Spawnpoint's car", "headingPath": "SPAWNPOINTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Some objects, such as Familiars or Spawnpoints, have the ability to cast spells. You may choose one spell for each of these objects at this time. Place these spells face down next to the creature or object. Spells which are not cast during the round are returned to your spellbook at the beginning of", "headingPath": "Phase 5: PLANNING · Phase 6: DEPLOYMENT · THE ACTION STAGE · First Quickcast Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "THE GAME ROUND THE READY STAGE Initiative Reset Channel Upkeep Planning Deployment THE ACTION STAGE First Quickcast Phase Creature Action Phases Final Quickcast Phase Mage Wars is played over a series of rounds, which continue until one Mage takes enough damage to be destroyed. The last Mage standin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "this manner the initiative marker alternates back and forth between players. The player with the initiative acts first during the Action Stage, and goes first whenever you must determine the order of events. Reset all action markers, quickcast markers, and ready markers on your cards by flipping the", "headingPath": "THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "You will need to assemble 2 spellbooks. Choose 2 Mages that you and a friend wish to play; we recommend the Warlock and Beastmaster. On page 3 is a list of spells each Mage will use during the game. Find the Mage card, and all of the spell cards on the list for each of the chosen Mages. The spell ca", "headingPath": "Spellbooks · The Rules · The Magic Rule · The Sidebars", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 572}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 572 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 572 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 0.88349 of 987 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 17, 2026 21:57 UTC

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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game	p.7	0.048131 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	STARTING SPELLBOOKS	p.40	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
#3	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	STARTING SPELLBOOKS	p.40	0.045002 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	SPAWNPOINTS	p.18	0.032787 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	Phase 5: PLANNING · Phase 6: DEPLOYMENT · THE ACTION STAGE · First Quickcast Phase	p.10	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
#6	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)		p.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))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE	p.8	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
#8	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	Spellbooks · The Rules · The Magic Rule · The Sidebars	p.4	0.029412 (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	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game	p.7	#1	0.048131 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	The Arena Calls… · STOP! · Learning Mage Wars · Apprentice Mode · The Arena · The Mages	p.4	#10	0.027888 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	WHEN CAN YOU REVEAL?	p.21	#45	0.009615 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	MULTIPLAYER	p.41	#9	0.027894 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE	p.8	#7	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	LINE OF SIGHT	p.19	#16	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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	MULTIPLAYER	p.41	#11	0.027885 (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 Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	The Arena Calls…	p.3	#12	0.027673 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	The Mage Wars Arena · Setting Up the Game	p.7	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Mage Wars Arena — Rulebook (corpus doc 572)	THE GAME ROUND · Phase 2: RESET · THE READY STAGE · THE ACTION STAGE · Phase 1: INITIATIVE	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 99 ms · first delta 3911 ms · total 5594 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 99 ms · ask 5493 ms · gateway work 5594 ms · total 5594 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3576
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 326
tok/sec: 200.5 tok/sec — 326 output tokens in 1.626 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s ago)
gateway schema (read from the running child): schema head 0042_definer_search_path (live revision not readable by this principal)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 60h, checked 5s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 504), 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.