Ruling — Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig

← Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwigbg-258036-en-1e

The game is played in 2 rounds.[1]

**Round One**

1. Draw 9 regular room tiles from the tray and hold them secretly in your hand.[2]

2. CHOOSE: Secretly, without communicating about the game with other players, choose 2 tiles from your hand to play.[2]

3. Place the remaining tiles face-down underneath the castle token to your left.[2]

4. REVEAL: Once all players have chosen, all players simultaneously reveal their chosen tiles.[2]

5. PLACE: Openly discuss strategy with partners to determine the best location for chosen tiles.[2] Place one chosen tile into the castle to your left and the other into the castle to your right.[2]

6. REPEAT: If there is more than 1 tile under the castle token to your right, take those tiles and repeat the choose, reveal, and place steps.[2]

7. When only 1 tile remains under the castle, discard it face-down out of the game and begin round two.[2]

**Round Two**

1. Follow the same steps as round one, except you put your remaining tiles face-down under the castle token to your right and pick up your tiles from your left.[2]

**Scoring and Ending the Game**

1. After round two is over, each castle is scored.[3][4]

2. Each player takes a score sheet and calculates the score for the castle to their left.[3][4]

3. Compare the scores for the castle to your left and the castle to your right.[3][4]

4. Your personal final score is the lower of the scores of your 2 castles.[3][4]

5. The player with the highest final score wins.[3][4]

6. FIRST TIE-BREAKER: Winners compare the scores of their higher-scoring castles; the player with the higher score wins.[3][4]

7. SECOND TIE-BREAKER: Winners compare the number of total specialty rooms among their two castles; the player with the highest total wins.[3][4]

8. If there is still a tie, players share the victory.[3][4]

[1] RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook · p.3 · GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW

[2] RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook · p.4 · GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO

[3] RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook · p.13

[4] RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook · p.13 · ENDING THE GAME · CASTLE SCORING EXAMPLE · GAME SCORING EXAMPLE

Answer in hand — your move.

🔧 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 162 ms · ask 5913 ms · total 6078 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6078 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "The game is played in 2 rounds. At the start of each round, you draw a hand of 9 tiles. On each turn, you secretly choose 2 tiles to place face-down in front of you, and pass the rest of your hand to the next player. To finish your turn, you flip your 2 selected tiles face up and-after discussion wi", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Go to stonemaiergames.com/games/between-two-castles/videos Download rules and guides in dozens of languages at stonemaiergames.com/games/between-two-castles/rules Post it on the Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig Facebook group, mention it on BoardGameGeek, or tweet it to @stonemaiergames Reques", "headingPath": "WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO? · WANT THE RULES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE? · HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? · NEED A REPLACEMENT PART? · WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH?", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "Players conduct the steps below simultaneously. Draw 9 regular room tiles from the tray and hold them secretly in your hand. Then take the following steps in order: CHOOSE: Secretly, and without any communication about the game with other players, choose 2 of the tiles from your hand to play. Place ", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "After the game ends, we recommend that players shuffle all of the regular room tiles on the table and place them randomly face-down in the tile tray. That way the game is set up and ready to go the next time you play. Make sure to separate out the specialty rooms and put them away before shuffling t", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "Set up a 2-player game as if there are 3 players. That means there will be 3 throne rooms, each with a castle token below it. The third player is called 'Ludwig'. The 2 human players will be building a castle together, like normal, and each human player will also be building 1 castle with Ludwig. Du", "headingPath": "TWO-PLAYER VARIANT · ROUND ONE · CASTLE TOKENS · ROUND TWO", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Sit around a table with equal space between players. The castles will be built between the players. NOTE: If this is your second consecutive game, mix up the seating assignments randomly (by order of age, birth month and day, hair length, etc.). Shuffle the 7 throne rooms tiles and place 1 between e", "headingPath": "SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030018, "snippet": "The designers would like to thank Stonemaier Games, Bezier Games, Margaux O’Malley, Brian Blankstein, the 2nd Friday Playtest Group, Table Treasure Games, all our amazing playtesters, Chicagoland Games Dice Dojo, and the talented artists, editors, and graphic designers who brought this game to life.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each utility room shows one room type that it wants to be connected to. The utility room scores 1 point for each room of that type that is connected to it. A room is considered 'connected' if you can trace a path back to the utility room using only that room type. For instance, the game storage will", "headingPath": "Scoring · Bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ENDING THE GAME · CASTLE SCORING EXAMPLE · GAME SCORING EXAMPLE", "sharpsignalDocId": 706}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 706 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 706 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 0.88652 of 1498 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 22, 2026 19:49 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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW	p.3	0.04866 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO? · WANT THE RULES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE? · HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? · NEED A REPLACEMENT PART? · WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH?	p.16	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
#3	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO	p.4	0.047371 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)		p.13	0.045475 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	TWO-PLAYER VARIANT · ROUND ONE · CASTLE TOKENS · ROUND TWO	p.14	0.045455 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	SETUP	p.2	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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)		p.16	0.030018 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	Scoring · Bonus	p.7	0.029851 (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 23 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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW	p.3	#1	0.04866 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)		p.13	#4	0.045475 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	WANT TO WATCH A HOW-TO-PLAY VIDEO? · WANT THE RULES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE? · HAVE A QUESTION WHILE PLAYING OR A STORY TO SHARE? · NEED A REPLACEMENT PART? · WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH?	p.16	#2	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
#4	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	ROOM BONUSES AND SCORING	p.4	#12	0.014493 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	TWO-PLAYER VARIANT · ROUND ONE · CASTLE TOKENS · ROUND TWO	p.14	#5	0.045455 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	ENDING THE GAME · CASTLE SCORING EXAMPLE · GAME SCORING EXAMPLE	p.13	#9	0.029469 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	SETUP	p.2	#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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO	p.4	#3	0.047371 (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 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: OVERVIEW	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	GAMEPLAY: DETAILS · ROUND ONE · ROUND TWO	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)		p.13	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig — Rulebook (corpus doc 706)	ENDING THE GAME · CASTLE SCORING EXAMPLE · GAME SCORING EXAMPLE	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 162 ms · first delta 2498 ms · total 6078 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 162 ms · ask 5913 ms · gateway work 6078 ms · total 6078 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2757
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 474
tok/sec: 134.5 tok/sec — 474 output tokens in 3.524 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 32s 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 0s 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: 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 639), 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.