Ruling — The Battle of Five Armies

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Battle of Five Armiesbg-135219-en-1e

To play the game, follow these steps:

1. Decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow.[1]

2. Set up the game by placing the board on a large surface, distributing units, characters, and tokens to both players, and placing starting figures and Recruitment tokens on the board.[1]

3. Shuffle the Event, Story, and Fate decks and place them on the table.[1]

4. Place the Fate marker on Step 0 of the Fate Track and position specific figures (Bilbo, Thorin, The Lord of the Eagles, and Beorn) on the track as indicated by their cards.[1]

5. Distribute Action Dice (six red Shadow Action Dice to the Shadow player and five blue Free Peoples Action Dice to the Free Peoples player) and set aside Combat Dice.[1]

6. At the beginning of each turn, each player draws two cards: one from the Event deck and one from their own Story deck.[2]

7. At the beginning of the Action Round, both players roll all the dice in their respective Action Dice pools.[3][4]

8. Players alternate actions, starting with the Free Peoples player, by selecting one die and taking the action made available by its specific die result.[3][4]

9. The Free Peoples player may use the General ability of one of his activated Generals before each of his Actions.[4]

10. A player may choose to pass or skip an action.[3][4]

11. When a player completes an action, the corresponding die is set aside as "used" until needed again for the next turn.[3]

12. If a player runs out of Action Dice before their opponent, the opponent executes their remaining actions one after the other.[3]

13. When both players have used all their Action Dice, proceed to the next phase.[4]

14. Check victory conditions; if neither player has reached them, a new turn begins.[4]

15. At the end of the turn, remove all Leadership tokens from the game board, remove any Great Bat figures from play, and place any Eagle figures back in the Eagles' Eyrie.[4]

16. Remove unused Activation tokens from the Free Peoples Generals.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook · p.6 · CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …

[2] RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook · p.15 · DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD

[3] RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook · p.12 · USING ACTION DICE

[4] RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook · p.11 · The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.

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 96 ms · ask 5236 ms · total 5334 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5334 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 19, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "As indicated on their card, some characters (Bard, Dáin, Gandalf, and Thranduil) are in play at the start of the game. The figures representing these characters are placed on the game board during setup, in the region indicated on the card, and then the card is immediately flipped to show their abil", "headingPath": "CHARACTER REFERENCE CARD · CHARACTERS IN PLAY · MOVING CHARACTERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046544, "snippet": "B efore you start playing, you should decide who will play the Free Peoples and who will play the Shadow. Then, get the game ready to play by following these steps. Place the game board on a suitable surface, large enough to leave some room along the sides of the game board, to place cards, figures ", "headingPath": "CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.046244, "snippet": "Each player draws two cards at the beginning of each turn of play, one from the Event deck and one from his own Story deck . Players may also draw additional cards using an Event die result, during the Action Round, to draw one card from the Event deck and another from the Story deck. The maximum ha", "headingPath": "DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.043269, "snippet": "T he Battle of Five Armies is played over a series of turns, until one player wins the game. Each turn is divided into six phases, as follows: Each player recovers his Action Dice. The Free Peoples player takes 5 dice, or 6 dice if either Thorin or Beorn is in play. The Shadow player takes 6 dice, o", "headingPath": "CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · The players recover Action Dice and draw cards. · The Free Peoples player selects Generals and places Leadership. · The Shadow Player draws Fate tiles and the Fate marker advances. · The Shadow Player places Leadership and Great Bats.", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.041746, "snippet": "Both players roll the dice available in their respective Action Dice pool. Then, starting with the Free Peoples player, players alternate in taking actions, choosing one of their Action Dice and using one of the possible choices allowed by the die result. The Free Peoples player may use the General ", "headingPath": "The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.040829, "snippet": "Players roll a number of Combat dice equal to the Combat Strength of their respective Armies (up to a maximum of five dice). Players may re-roll once a number of failed Combat dice up to their Army's Leadership. Players add Damage tokens to the Armies, and take casualties if either necessary or desi", "headingPath": "Step 2) Combat Roll · Step 3) Leader Re-roll · Step 4) Apply Damage · Step 5) End of Round · STEP 1) MANEUVERING", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.040401, "snippet": "The Eagles of the Misty Mountains enter play when The Lord of the Eagles enters play. To be used, Eagles must first be moved out of the Eyrie using The Lord of the Eagles' General ability. Then, the Free Peoples player can spend a Muster die result to activate their Strong and Noble-hearted ability.", "headingPath": "USING THE EAGLES", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "At the beginning of the Action Round, both players roll all the dice in their respective Action Dice pools. Then, starting with the Free Peoples player, they alternate actions, selecting one die and immediately taking the action made available by its specific die result. Each action is summarized in", "headingPath": "USING ACTION DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "USING ACTION DICE", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.", "sharpsignalDocId": 684}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 684 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 684 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 0.91220 of 1640 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 26, 2026 11:51 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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHARACTER REFERENCE CARD · CHARACTERS IN PLAY · MOVING CHARACTERS	p.19	0.048916 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.6	0.046544 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD	p.15	0.046244 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHAPTER IV: THE GAME TURN · The players recover Action Dice and draw cards. · The Free Peoples player selects Generals and places Leadership. · The Shadow Player draws Fate tiles and the Fate marker advances. · The Shadow Player places Leadership and Great Bats.	p.11	0.043269 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.	p.11	0.041746 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	Step 2) Combat Roll · Step 3) Leader Re-roll · Step 4) Apply Damage · Step 5) End of Round · STEP 1) MANEUVERING	p.26	0.040829 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING THE EAGLES	p.32	0.040401 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING ACTION DICE	p.12	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

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 65 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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.6	#2	0.046544 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING ACTION DICE	p.12	#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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.	p.11	#5	0.041746 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHARACTER REFERENCE CARD · CHARACTERS IN PLAY · MOVING CHARACTERS	p.19	#1	0.048916 (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
#5	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING RECRUITMENT TOKENS · ELIMINATING RECRUITMENT TOKENS	p.24	#25	0.023434 (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
#6	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING THE EAGLES	p.32	#7	0.040401 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	Step 2) Combat Roll · Step 3) Leader Re-roll · Step 4) Apply Damage · Step 5) End of Round · STEP 1) MANEUVERING	p.26	#6	0.040829 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD	p.15	#3	0.046244 (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 The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	CHAPTER II: S E T T I N G U P THE GAME · STEP 1 · STEP 2 · STEP 3 · STEP 4 · STEP 5 · …	p.6	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	DRAWING CARDS · EXHAUSTING THE CARD DECKS · PLAYING AN EVENT OR STORY CARD AS AN ACTION · REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING A CARD	p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	USING ACTION DICE	p.12	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK The Battle of Five Armies — Rulebook (corpus doc 684)	The players roll Action Dice, then alternate in using them to take Actions. · The players check victory conditions and remove Leadership tokens, Eagles and Great Bats.	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 96 ms · first delta 2904 ms · total 5334 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 96 ms · ask 5236 ms · gateway work 5334 ms · total 5334 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2771
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 479
tok/sec: 202.5 tok/sec — 479 output tokens in 2.365 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 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 617), 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.