RuleSage cited table rulings
← Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Brian Boru: High King of Irelandbg-337765-en-1e

The game is played over a series of rounds, which consist of four phases: preparation, draft, action, and upkeep.[1]
**1. Preparation Phase**
* Reveal the top card of the Viking deck.[1]
* Place the number of Viking raider tokens indicated by the card's invasion strength in the battle area of the board.[1]
* Discard that card.[1]
* Reveal the top card of the marriage deck and place it at the top of the marriage track.[1]
* If there are no more cards in the marriage deck, this is the final round of the game.[1]
**2. Draft Phase**
* Shuffle all action cards.[1]
* Deal cards to players based on player count: eight cards for three players, six cards for four players, and five cards for five players.[1]
* If playing with three or four players, place the remaining card face down near the board.[1]
* Select two cards from your dealt cards and place them face down in front of you.[1]
* Pass all remaining cards to the player to your left.[1]
* Select two cards from those passed and place them face down in front of you with your existing two cards.[1]
* Repeat this process until all dealt cards have been placed in front of players.[1]
* If you are passed only one or two cards from the player to your right, place them directly into your face-down pile.[1]
* Take all the cards in front of you into your hand.[2][1]
* You may look at the cards you have already selected, but you may not swap them out.[2][1]
**3. Action Phase**
* The phase is resolved in a series of tricks.[2][1]
* At the start of each trick, the player with the active town marker places the marker on any town on the board without a disc on it (the active town).[3]
* The player with the active town marker plays a card from their hand that matches the colour of the town or is a royal (white) card.[3]
* In clockwise order, each other player plays one card from their hand.[3]
* The player who played the card with the highest value in the same colour as the active town wins the trick (royal cards are wild and count as the active town's colour).[3]
* Players take actions in ascending number order.[4]
* The player who played the card with the lowest value takes an action:
* If they won the trick, they perform the card's primary action.[3]
* If they lost the trick, they choose and perform one of the card's secondary actions.[3]
* After performing an action, the player places the card into a shared discard pile.[3]
* The player who played the card with the next lowest value takes an action in the same way.[3]
* Once all players have taken an action, the trick is over.[3]
* If players have more than one card left, the player who now has the active town marker begins a new trick.[3]
* The action phase ends when each player has only one action card left in hand.[2][1]
**4. Upkeep Phase**
* Players discard the remaining card in their hand.[2]
* Resolve the following four steps in order: Marriage, Battle, Church, and Claim regions.[5]
* **Marriage:** If a player's disc is on the highest space of the marriage track (above all other players), they take the marriage card, gain its benefits, and move their disc to the first space of the marriage track.[5] If all players are on the first space, the marriage card is removed from the game and the battle step is resolved.[5] The player who resolved the marriage card moves their disc to the bottom of the marriage track.[5]
* **Battle:** Players gain the number of points indicated.[5]
* **Church:** (No specific instructions provided in sources).
* **Claim regions:** Players place a coloured disc on any town without a disc in the indicated region to control it.[5]
* After the upkeep phase, if there are no marriage cards left, the game ends.[6] Otherwise, move to the preparation phase of the next round.[1][6]
**Ending the Game and Scoring**
* The game ends after three rounds for a three-player game, or four rounds for a four- or five-player game.[1]
* The game also ends if there are no marriage cards left at the end of the upkeep phase.[6]
[1] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.5 · Board
[2] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.5 · Board
[3] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.5 · TRICKS
[4] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.7 · ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE
[5] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.8 · ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK
[6] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook · p.10 · VIKINGS AND THE PRINCESS OF DENMARK · The player with the most points wins.

Rule found, game 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 169 ms · ask 9752 ms · total 9923 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9923 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 5, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "At the start of each trick, the player with the active town marker places the marker on any town on the board without a disc on it. This is the active town . Then, they play a card from their hand. The card must match the colour of the town or be a royal (white) card. In clockwise order, each other ", "headingPath": "TRICKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "The game is a played over a series of rounds. After three rounds (in a three-player game) or four rounds (in a four- or five-player game), the game ends and the player with the most points wins. Each round has four phases: preparation, draft, action, and upkeep. In the preparation phase , you reveal", "headingPath": "Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "Take all the cards in front of you into your hand, and move on to the action phase. You may look at the cards you have already selected, but you may not swap them out. The action phase is resolved in a series of tricks. Keep playing tricks until each player has one action card left in hand. Then mov", "headingPath": "Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "Deirdre, Kate, Georgios, and Peer are part-way through the action phase. They have just completed a trick. At the start of the next trick, Deirdre has the active town marker, so she places it on an empty town in Connaught. As it is a red town, she has to play a red (or white) card. She plays the red", "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "He decides to move up the marriage track, advancing three spaces. This leaves him on the same space as Kate. He now must either spend two coins to advance another space on the marriage track, or move down one space. However, Georgios is on the space below, so Peer would need to move down another ste", "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "4 Place the board in middle of the table. Sort the coins, renown tokens, monastery tokens, Viking raider tokens, and Viking control tokens by type and place them near the board. This is the supply . Give each player all the wooden discs of one colour. Return any unused discs to the box. Give each pl", "headingPath": "Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each primary and secondary action shows one or more symbols. When you take an action, you must resolve all the symbols from left to right. Take the active town marker and place a disc on the active town. You now control that town. This symbol appears in primary actions only. Take a coin from the sup", "headingPath": "ACTIONS · Icon Action", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Resolve these four steps in order: Marriage Battle Church Claim regions Then, if there are no cards left in the marriage deck, the game ends. Otherwise, move on to the preparation phase of the next round. If your disc is on the highest space of the marriage track, you have successfully arranged a po", "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Board", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TRICKS", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "VIKINGS AND THE PRINCESS OF DENMARK · The player with the most points wins.", "sharpsignalDocId": 655}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 655 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 655 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 0.90419 of 3267 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until
Nov 22, 2026 12:37 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) TRICKS p.5 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 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
#3 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 0.047131 (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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE p.7 0.046432 (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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE p.7 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
#6 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.4 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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTIONS · Icon Action p.6 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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK p.8 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 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 19 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 #3 0.047131 (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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 #2 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
#3 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE p.7 #4 0.046432 (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 Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK p.8 #8 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)) vector + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#5 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) VIKINGS AND THE PRINCESS OF DENMARK · The player with the most points wins. p.10 #12 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
#6 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE p.7 #5 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)) vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it
#7 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.4 #6 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
#8 RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) TRICKS p.5 #1 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm the re-ranker chose it

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) Board p.5 no quote on the wire
[3] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) TRICKS p.5 no quote on the wire
[4] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE p.7 no quote on the wire
[5] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) ACTION PHASE EXAMPLE · MARRIAGE STEP · Icon benefit · PRINCESS OF DENMARK p.8 no quote on the wire
[6] RULEBOOK Brian Boru: High King of Ireland — Rulebook (corpus doc 655) VIKINGS AND THE PRINCESS OF DENMARK · The player with the most points wins. p.10 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 169 ms · first delta 2163 ms · total 9923 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 169 ms · ask 9752 ms · gateway work 9923 ms · total 9923 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3172
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
1024
tok/sec
133.1 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 7.695 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 42s 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 9s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 588), 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.