Ruling — No Retreat! The Russian Front

You asked

How do I play?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: No Retreat! The Russian Frontbg-68264-en-1e

I looked through No Retreat! The Russian Front's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook · p.4 · Soviet Player Turn · [5.0] THE CARDS · Appropriate Timing · [5.1] Discard Step

The Soviet player becomes the 'Phasing Player' and repeats the above seven Phases, in order, that the Axis player just completed. Cards are drawn, one by one, during a player's Card Phase from a Draw Pile. After their use, played cards are placed face-up in a Discard Pile. The Draw Pile is reshuffle

RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook · p.22 · [16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY

It is the start of the Turn 2 German Movement Phase. The Axis player plans to blast his way through the center at high odds, and then use Advance After Combat to firmly encircle Kiev (and, with luck, to have the Soviet unit there wither and die in an unsupplied state during the Soviet player's turn)

RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook · p.2 · [1.0] INTRODUCTION · Parts Inventory · [2.1] Game Map and Scale · [2.2] Game Charts & Tables · [2.3] Playing Pieces

No Retreat! is a two-player grand strategic level wargame depicting the struggle between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union during World War 2 from the start of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 (the invasion of Russia) to the final surrender of Germany in 1945. one 22 x 36' mapboard two ident

RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook · p.1

14 [12.0] HOW TO WIN .......................... 14 [13.0] GAME TURN EVENTS .................. 16 [14.0] SPECIAL UNITS ........................ 18 [15.0] OPTIONAL RULES ..................... 20 [16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY ....... 22 The Russian Front: 1941-1945 RULE BOOK 3rd (reprint) Edition, 20

RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook · p.23 · [16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY

Desperate, and despite his low chances for success (even a roll of '5' would help, as it would send his Central Front to the Destroyed Units Box instead of the Surrendered Units Box), the Soviet player commits his last Event card, Heroes of the Soviet Union, and re-rolls the die. This time he tosses

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome

ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below

warm abstain

this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)

corpus profile

live,vps

answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)

gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70

timings

search 231 ms · ask 5407 ms · total 5641 ms

single-flight (PR-5)

queued 0 ms · generation 5641 ms

retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read

[{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "The Soviet player becomes the 'Phasing Player' and repeats the above seven Phases, in order, that the Axis player just completed. Cards are drawn, one by one, during a player's Card Phase from a Draw Pile. After their use, played cards are placed face-up in a Discard Pile. The Draw Pile is reshuffle", "headingPath": "Soviet Player Turn · [5.0] THE CARDS · Appropriate Timing · [5.1] Discard Step", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.046671, "snippet": "It is the start of the Turn 2 German Movement Phase. The Axis player plans to blast his way through the center at high odds, and then use Advance After Combat to firmly encircle Kiev (and, with luck, to have the Soviet unit there wither and die in an unsupplied state during the Soviet player's turn)", "headingPath": "[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046176, "snippet": "No Retreat! is a two-player grand strategic level wargame depicting the struggle between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union during World War 2 from the start of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 (the invasion of Russia) to the final surrender of Germany in 1945. one 22 x 36' mapboard two ident", "headingPath": "[1.0] INTRODUCTION · Parts Inventory · [2.1] Game Map and Scale · [2.2] Game Charts & Tables · [2.3] Playing Pieces", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.045245, "snippet": "14 [12.0] HOW TO WIN .......................... 14 [13.0] GAME TURN EVENTS .................. 16 [14.0] SPECIAL UNITS ........................ 18 [15.0] OPTIONAL RULES ..................... 20 [16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY ....... 22 The Russian Front: 1941-1945 RULE BOOK 3rd (reprint) Edition, 20", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 23, "score": 0.043009, "snippet": "Desperate, and despite his low chances for success (even a roll of '5' would help, as it would send his Central Front to the Destroyed Units Box instead of the Surrendered Units Box), the Soviet player commits his last Event card, Heroes of the Soviet Union, and re-rolls the die. This time he tosses", "headingPath": "[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.041757, "snippet": "Battles are conducted via the Battle Procedure. These steps must be completed for each attack in the exact order listed below: 1. Strength Step: Total the Combat Strengths of (respectively) the attacking units and the defending units. 2. Commitment Step: First, the attacker (only) may announce his c", "headingPath": "[10.5] Steps in a Battle · Battle Procedure", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "A. Advance Game Turn Marker: Advance the Game Turn marker on the Turn Track or, if the 28th turn was just completed (or possibly the 22nd (see 12.4), the game ends and the winner is determined. B. New Game Turn Events Phase: Any Event listed on the Turn Track for the new Game Turn (i.e., the box the", "headingPath": "New Game Turn Housekeeping · Axis Player Turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "During a friendly Combat Phase, each unit may participate in an attack against an adjacent hex that is occupied by enemy forces. When a player initiates an attack between adjacent units, it results in a battle (i.e., completing all of the Steps in the Battle Procedure). Throw the die, and consult th", "headingPath": "[10.0] COMBAT · Combat Phase Preparation", "sharpsignalDocId": 1257}]

citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show

[]

boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)

no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1257 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true

base rulebook doc 1257 boosted

answered-before recall

no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough

similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)

debug row retained until

Nov 27, 2026 02:23 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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	Soviet Player Turn · [5.0] THE CARDS · Appropriate Timing · [5.1] Discard Step	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY	p.22	0.046671 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[1.0] INTRODUCTION · Parts Inventory · [2.1] Game Map and Scale · [2.2] Game Charts & Tables · [2.3] Playing Pieces	p.2	0.046176 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)		p.1	0.045245 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY	p.23	0.043009 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[10.5] Steps in a Battle · Battle Procedure	p.11	0.041757 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	New Game Turn Housekeeping · Axis Player Turn	p.3	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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[10.0] COMBAT · Combat Phase Preparation	p.10	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

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 71 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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	Soviet Player Turn · [5.0] THE CARDS · Appropriate Timing · [5.1] Discard Step	p.4	#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
#2	RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY	p.22	#10	0.028405 (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
#3	RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)		p.1	#4	0.045245 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	Counterblow Combat Result Example	p.13	#27	0.021852 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[10.0] COMBAT · Combat Phase Preparation	p.10	#8	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY	p.23	#20	0.025008 (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 No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	On to Berlin! Setup Procedure · [6.0] SUPPLY · [6.1] Supply Sources & Overland Supply Path · [6.2] Alternate Supply Sources	p.5	#12	0.027151 (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
#8	RULEBOOK No Retreat! The Russian Front — Rulebook (corpus doc 1257)	[16.0] COMBINED EXAMPLE OF PLAY	p.22	#2	0.046671 (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

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 231 ms · first delta 5528 ms · total 5641 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 231 ms · ask 5407 ms · gateway work 5641 ms · total 5641 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3503
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 9
tok/sec: 176.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.051 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: ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale: I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped

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 1187), 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.