Ruling — In the Hall of the Mountain King

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: In the Hall of the Mountain Kingbg-265402-en-1e

**General Setup**

1. Place the game board in the center of the table, using the winter side for 4 or 5 players and the autumn side for 3 players (2 players may use either side).[1]

2. Create supply piles of all resources (stone, iron, heartstone, coins, carts, hammers, and runes) beside the board.[1]

3. Create the tunnel supply by stacking tunnels by shape next to the board.[1]

4. Display the great halls nearby.[1]

5. Create the horde by shuffling troll cards separately by level to create a 3-level pyramid: deal five Level-1 trolls for the bottom row, four Level-2 trolls for the middle row, and three Level-3 trolls for the top row, keeping the decks facedown nearby.[1]

6. Place pedestals in a bag and mix.[1]

7. Randomly draw 4 pedestals and place one on each Level-2 troll in the horde.[1]

8. Keep the bag near the horde.[1]

9. Place 3 pedestal reminder tokens, one on each Level-3 troll in the horde.[1]

10. Stack the 2 coronation tokens near the horde, with the 5 on top of the 3 (in a 2-player game, return the 5 to the box and play only with the 3).[1]

11. Shuffle workshop tiles face down, then reveal 2 per player plus 1 more, and keep these revealed workshops in a supply on an unused corner of the game board.[1]

12. Create a shuffled facedown deck of spell cards and reveal 3 face up to form the spellbook, keeping the deck nearby.[1]

13. Place statues onto the statue spots on the board by randomly picking any clan's statue and placing it in a random spot, then placing a different clan's statue in the next clockwise spot, and continuing with a third clan, repeating the pattern clockwise until all spots are filled (return any leftover statues to the box).[1][2]

14. Mix pedestal point tokens face down and randomly distribute them face-up onto the Pedestal track, 1 token per space.[2]

**Player Setup**

1. Choose a starting player and give them the crown.[3]

2. Each player chooses a player colour and takes the player mat, 6 starting troll cards, gate tile, and score marker of their colour (return unused player colour components to the box).[3]

3. All players place their score markers on 0 of the score track.[3]

4. Beginning with the starting player and proceeding clockwise, each player places their gate tile on a start point of their choice marked with the player count (in a 2-player game, use any two matching-numbered start points).[3]

5. Each player assembles their starting trolls in their trollsmoot by shuffling their starting troll deck and following these steps: draw the top two trolls, choose one to place face up in one of the 4 empty slots on the player mat and keep the other in hand; repeat this process until you have a starting row of 4 trolls in the trollsmoot, 1 troll in hand, and 1 unseen troll remaining in the deck.[3]

6. Take from the supply all starting resources shown on your chosen starting trolls and place them in your storage, then slide your player mat up to hide the starting resources on your trolls.[4][3]

7. Gain bonus starting resources based on turn order: the start player gets no extra resources; the second and third players gain the starting resources from the troll in their hand; the fourth and fifth players gain the starting resources from the troll in their hand and from the unseen troll in their deck.[4][3]

[1] RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook · p.4 · General SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook · p.4 · General SETUP

[3] RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYER SETUP

[4] RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook · p.4 · PLAYER SETUP

Now you know — make it count.

🔧 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 214 ms · ask 5701 ms · total 5917 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5917 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048412, "snippet": "Choose a starting player, and give them the crown as a reminder. Each player chooses a player colour, and takes the player mat, 6 starting troll cards, gate tile , and score marker of their colour. All components from unused player colours are returned to the box. All players place their score marke", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Place the game board in the center of the table, with the side up depending on player count. Th e winter side is for 4 or 5 players. Th e autumn side is for 3 players. 2 players may play on either side of the board. Create supply piles of all of the resources ( stone, iron, heartstone, coins, carts,", "headingPath": "General SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "Be aware that the two inside trolls in your starting row will generate their resources more times during the game than the two outside trolls will . Take from the supply all of the starting resources shown on your chosen starting trolls; place these resources in your storage . Th en slide your playe", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.044796, "snippet": "Th is is a special variant mode of play for exactly 4 players . Follow all regular rules with the following changes: Form into two 2-player teams. Pick one scoring token to represent your team, and return the other to the box. Sit adjacent to your teammate, and ensure that your gates are beside each", "headingPath": "TEAM Play RULES · Setup Changes · Gameplay Changes", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Gameplay begins with the Start player and plays in turns, proceeding clockwise until the game ends. Final scoring is then added to in-game scoring to determine the winner. Here are a few general rules to know before you begin: Each player will be building a network on the board, beginning with their", "headingPath": "GAMEPLAY · Your Network · Adjacency · Spending Resources · ON YOUR TURN · 1. SPELLS & WORKSHOPS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "7 A 2 B 3 C D 4 5 9 1 6 8 E", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place statues onto the statue spots on the board in this fashion: randomly pick any clan's statue ( for example Moon ) and place it in any random statue spot. Th en place a diff erent clan's statue ( for example Fire ) in the next statue spot clockwise. Th en a statue from the remaining clan ( Ice i", "headingPath": "General SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Add the newly recruited troll to your trollsmoot, placing it above and between two other existing trolls there ( your choice where if there are multiple options ). In this way you will be forming a 'pyramid' of trolls as the game goes on, which will result in 10 trolls total (including your starting", "headingPath": "Step THREE: Add it to your trollsmoot and trigger a cascade", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "General SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "General SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 703}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 703 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 703 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 0.91292 of 2710 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 27, 2026 05:48 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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	0.048412 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	0.048139 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	0.048131 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	TEAM Play RULES · Setup Changes · Gameplay Changes	p.16	0.044796 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	GAMEPLAY · Your Network · Adjacency · Spending Resources · ON YOUR TURN · 1. SPELLS & WORKSHOPS · …	p.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))	300
#6	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.5	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))	27
#7	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	Step THREE: Add it to your trollsmoot and trigger a cascade	p.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))	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 30 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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	#2	0.048139 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	#3	0.048131 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	Step THREE: Add it to your trollsmoot and trigger a cascade	p.9	#8	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
#4	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	GAMEPLAY · Your Network · Adjacency · Spending Resources · ON YOUR TURN · 1. SPELLS & WORKSHOPS · …	p.6	#5	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
#5	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	#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
#6	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.5	#6	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
#7	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	TEAM Play RULES · Setup Changes · Gameplay Changes	p.16	#4	0.044796 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	#1	0.048412 (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 In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	General SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK In the Hall of the Mountain King — Rulebook (corpus doc 703)	PLAYER SETUP	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 214 ms · first delta 1828 ms · total 5917 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 214 ms · ask 5701 ms · gateway work 5917 ms · total 5917 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2679
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 811
tok/sec: 200.6 tok/sec — 811 output tokens in 4.043 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 9s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 636), 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.