Ruling — Gears of War: The Board Game

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How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Gears of War: The Board Gamebg-42776-en-1e

The game is played over a number of turns until players complete all mission objectives or all COG soldiers are bleeding out.[1] The first player begins as the active player.[1] During an active player's turn, they perform the following steps in order:

1. Heal Step: The active player draws up to two Order cards without exceeding his hand limit, which is normally six cards.[1]

2. COG Order Step: The active player must play one Order card from his hand, discarding it to perform one of the following: resolve the actions printed on the card, move up to two areas, or perform one attack.[2][1] During this step, the player may also discard additional cards from his hand to perform special actions, such as reviving a COG figure in his area that is bleeding out, picking up a dropped weapon marker in his area, or activating his area's equipment.[2][1]

3. Locust Activation Step: The active player draws the top card of the Locust AI deck and resolves it, which usually allows certain Locust figures to move, attack, and/or spawn.[1]

After these steps, the player to the left of the active player becomes the new active player and begins his turn with his Heal step.[1]

To win the game, players must complete all of their Mission cards' objectives.[3] Players lose the game if every COG figure is bleeding out.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.9 · Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step

[2] RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.10 · 2. COG Order Step · Special Actions

[3] RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.11 · Winning the Game

The book has spoken.

🔧 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 204 ms · ask 4621 ms · total 4827 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4827 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 9, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "The game is played over a number of turns until either the players have completed all mission objectives or all COG soldiers are bleeding out (see 'Winning the Game' on page 11). The first player begins the game as the active player (the active player is the one currently resolving his turn). During", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.04598, "snippet": "This section contains variations of the rules that provide different gameplay experiences. Before each game, the players must decide if they would like to use one of the following variants, or a combination of both. When playing Gears of War: The Board Game alone (as the only player), the player con", "headingPath": "Optional Rules · Solo Rules · Insane Difficulty", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "Before playing the game, players must perform the following steps in order: Choose First Player and COG Characters: Randomly choose one player to be the first player. Starting with this player, each player chooses a COG Character card. Receive Starting Weapons, Grenades, and Ammo: Each player receiv", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045079, "snippet": "To win the game, players must complete all of their Mission cards' objectives. Players begin the game with the stage 1 Mission card faceup, following any 'Special Rules' listed on the front of the card. Once the ' Flip When ' objective is fulfilled, they read the story on the back of this card and r", "headingPath": "Winning the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.043941, "snippet": "At the start of the game, the first level of the map is set up (see example on page 7). Some missions contain more than one level of map divided by a door. A COG player may explore an unlocked door in his area at any point during his Order step. This does not cost any additional movement points or O", "headingPath": "Exploring the Map", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.043817, "snippet": "Rules of play", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Exploring interrupts the active player's turn. Once the steps of exploring are resolved, the player continues his turn, including using any unspent movement. See 'Map Setup Example' on page 7 for an example of exploring a level of the map. Special Rule: In the rare circumstance that a map tile canno", "headingPath": "Exploring the Map · Locked Doors · Defining Levels and Stages", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "During this step, the active player must play 1 Order card from his hand, discarding it to perform one of the following: Resolve the action(s) listed on the card. The first bullet point on the Order card must be resolved before the second, and so forth. All of the actions on the Order card do not ne", "headingPath": "2. COG Order Step · Special Actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2. COG Order Step · Special Actions", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Winning the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 690}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 690 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 690 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 0.93480 of 1089 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 01:57 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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step	p.9	0.047712 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Optional Rules · Solo Rules · Insane Difficulty	p.30	0.04598 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Setup	p.5	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
#4	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Winning the Game	p.11	0.045079 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Exploring the Map	p.22	0.043941 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)		p.1	0.043817 (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))	13
#7	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Exploring the Map · Locked Doors · Defining Levels and Stages	p.23	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
#8	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	2. COG Order Step · Special Actions	p.10	0.029958 (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 49 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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Setup	p.5	#3	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
#2	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)		p.1	#6	0.043817 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	2. COG Order Step · Special Actions	p.10	#8	0.029958 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Scattered · Rule clarifications: · Hive	p.28	#15	0.027032 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Winning the Game	p.11	#4	0.045079 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Exploring the Map	p.22	#5	0.043941 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step	p.9	#1	0.047712 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Map Setup Example	p.7	#9	0.02967 (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 Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Playing the Game · Turn Details · 1. Heal Step	p.9	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	2. COG Order Step · Special Actions	p.10	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Gears of War: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 690)	Winning the Game	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 204 ms · first delta 3298 ms · total 4827 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 204 ms · ask 4621 ms · gateway work 4827 ms · total 4827 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3129
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 298
tok/sec: 202.6 tok/sec — 298 output tokens in 1.471 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 6s 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 623), 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.