Ruling — Torres

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Torresbg-88-en-1e

**Preparation**

1. Each player takes a CODEX card.[1]

2. Place the appropriate PHASES card (for 2, 3, or 4 players) face up on the table and return the other two to the box.[1]

3. Each player takes the 10 action cards of their color, shuffles them, and places them face down on the table.[1]

4. Place the king and the tower blocks next to the board to serve as the common supply.[1]

5. Place 8 tower blocks on the 8 spaces on the board marked with towers to serve as the foundations of the 8 castles.[1]

6. Beginning with the youngest player and moving clockwise, each player places one of their knights on an empty castle, ensuring each player starts on a different castle.[1]

7. The last player places the king on any empty castle, making it the king's castle for the first year.[1]

**Game Structure**

1. The game is played over three years or phases.[2]

2. The first phase lasts for four rounds, while the second and third phases last for three rounds (except in a two-player game, where all three phases are four rounds).[2]

3. Before each phase, players take tower blocks from the common supply as indicated on the PHES card.[2]

4. The youngest player starts, and play follows clockwise around the table.[2]

**A Player's Turn**

1. On a turn, a player has 5 action points (AP) to spend in any order.[2]

2. Possible actions include:

* Place a tower block (1 AP per block).[3]

* Acquire action cards (1 AP per card).[3] When acquiring a card, the player draws the top 3 cards from their deck and selects 1 to keep, returning the other 2 face down on the top or bottom of their deck.[3] A player may acquire up to two cards per turn, but a card cannot be used in the same turn it is acquired.[3]

* Play 1 action card (0 AP).[3] A player may play at most one action card each turn by placing it face up on the table and performing the described action, then returning it to the box.[3]

* Move along the scoring track (1 AP per space).[3]

* Add a knight (2 AP per knight).[2] New knights must be placed on an empty space adjacent (orthogonally) to a knight of the same color, at the same level or a lower level than the existing knight.[2]

**Scoring**

1. At the end of each year/phase, players score their positions.[4]

2. Players are scored in clockwise order starting with the starting player.[5]

3. A player receives points for each castle where they have one or more knights.[4]

4. Points for a castle are calculated as the product of the number of spaces in the castle's surface area and the level of that player's highest knight.[4]

5. If a player's scoring marker would land on an occupied space, it is placed on the next empty space on the track to avoid ties.[3]

**End of Phase and Game**

1. After all players have scored and received their king's bonus, a new phase begins.[6]

2. The player with the lowest score may move the king to any empty space on any level of any castle.[6]

3. The game ends after scoring following the third phase.[6]

4. The player with the most points is the winner.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.3 · PREPARATION

[2] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.4 · PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)

[3] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.6 · Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)

[4] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.6 · The castle positions

[5] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.7 · The castle positions

[6] RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook · p.8 · The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 208 ms · ask 7841 ms · total 8052 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 8052 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.04741, "snippet": "When you have become acquainted with the action cards, you may want to add additional challenges to the game. The master version does just that, adding the following rules to the basic game: Instead of placing the starting castles on the spaces shown on the board, the players choose the starting pos", "headingPath": "MASTER VERSION · Initial placement of the castles · Action cards · The master cards · Turn order", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "add 1 knight cost: 2 AP number: any 4 Torres is played over three years or phases. At the end of each phase the players' positions are scored. The first phase lasts for four rounds. Each of the second and third phases lasts for three rounds (except in a two player game when all three phases are four", "headingPath": "PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "6 Except when an action card allows otherwise, the following rules apply to the placing of tower blocks: A player may add blocks to any and as many castles as he has blocks for. A player must always add to an existing castle, either by placing the block on the board next to the castle (level 0), mak", "headingPath": "Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "8 The new phase begins after all players have scored their castle positions and received their king's bonus. The players take tower blocks from the common supply as indicated on the PHASES card. The player, who has the lowest score may now move the king. The player may place the king on any empty sp", "headingPath": "The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045285, "snippet": "A fter all playe rs have scored their castle positions (including those in the king's castle), the king's bonus is scored. Each player who has a knight in the king's castle will receive the king's bonus if the player has a knight on the appropriate level as shown below: When scoring after the first ", "headingPath": "The king's bonus", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each player takes a CODEX card. There are different PHASES cards according to the number of players. Place the appropriate card (for 2, 3 or 4 players) face up on the table and return the other two cards to the box. Each player takes the 10 action cards in his color, shuffles them and places them fa", "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "At the end of each year/phase, the players score their positions. A player receives points for each castle where he has one or more knights, but only scores once for each castle regardless of the number of knights he has there. However, knights of different colors (belonging to different players) on", "headingPath": "The castle positions", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "A player may move as many knights as many spaces on a turn as he has APs. Unless altered by playing one of the action cards, the rules for moving a knight are: A knight may only be moved orthogonally, not diagonally. A knight may move up only one level per move (ex. A), but may move down any number ", "headingPath": "Move a knight (= 1 AP per space) · Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block)", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The castle positions", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The castle positions", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 726}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 726 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 726 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 0.89645 of 2453 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 23, 2026 18:28 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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	MASTER VERSION · Initial placement of the castles · Action cards · The master cards · Turn order	p.9	0.04741 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)	p.4	0.047379 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)	p.6	0.047163 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …	p.8	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
#5	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The king's bonus	p.7	0.045285 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION	p.3	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
#7	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The castle positions	p.6	0.030303 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	Move a knight (= 1 AP per space) · Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block)	p.5	0.030118 (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 13 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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION	p.3	#6	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)	p.6	#3	0.047163 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …	p.8	#4	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
#4	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The castle positions	p.6	#7	0.030303 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	Turn order · THE ACTION CARDS	p.10	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The castle positions	p.7	#12	0.013889 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	MASTER VERSION · Initial placement of the castles · Action cards · The master cards · Turn order	p.9	#1	0.04741 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)	p.4	#2	0.047379 (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 Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION	p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	PREPARATION · PLAYING THE GAME · Tower block distribution · Starting player · A player's turn · Add a knight (= 2 AP per knight)	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	Place a tower block (= 1 AP per block) · Acquire action cards (= 1 AP per card) · Play 1 action card (= 0 AP) · Move along the scoring track (= 1 AP per space)	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The castle positions	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The castle positions	p.7	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Torres — Rulebook (corpus doc 726)	The king's bonus · After the scoring · Move the king · GAME END · RULE VARIANT · Preparation · …	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 208 ms · first delta 2176 ms · total 8052 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 208 ms · ask 7841 ms · gateway work 8052 ms · total 8052 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2924
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 785
tok/sec: 134.9 tok/sec — 785 output tokens in 5.819 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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 7s 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 660), 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.