RuleSage cited table rulings
← Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

You asked

How does initiative work in a scenario?

Answered counted as answered
To determine the initiative order, follow these steps:
1. **Card Selection**: Each player selects two ability cards from their hand of six to play face down.[1] One of these is chosen as the "initiative card" based on its value in the center; lower numbers go first.[1]
2. **Revealing Values**: Once all players have selected their cards, they are flipped over to reveal the initiative values.[2]
3. **Monster Initiative**: In Scenario 1, monsters always act on an initiative of 50.[2][1]
4. **Ordering**: The figures (characters and monsters) are arranged in order from lowest to highest initiative value.[2]
5. **Tie-Breaking**:
* If there is a tie between a character and a monster, the character goes first.[2]
* If there is a tie between two characters, the one with the lower initiative value on their second card goes first.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.6 · Card Selection
[2] RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook · p.7 · Ordering of Initiative

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
unset-dev (corpus lane freezes the deploy value)
timings
search 105 ms · ask 4747 ms · total 4853 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 4853 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 6, "score": 0.032266, "snippet": "Each player will now privately and simultaneously select two ability cards from their hand of six cards to play face down in front of them. During this step, players can make general statements about their actions for the round and discuss strategy, but they cannot show other players their cards nor", "headingPath": "Card Selection", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Now that the game has been set up properly, we can start playing! Gameplay within a scenario is broken up into a series of rounds. In each round, all players will select which ability cards they would like to play. The chosen cards will determine the \"initiative order\", which is the sequence in whic", "headingPath": "Playing the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "Once all players have selected their cards, flip over each character's cards to reveal their initiative. Determine initiative order by comparing the initiative value of each character's initiative card and the initiative of the monsters (this will always be 50 for Scenario 1). Then, arrange the init", "headingPath": "Ordering of Initiative", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Once the end of the initiative order is reached and all figures have taken their turn in a round, the round will end. At this time, if any attack modifier deck has flipped over a card with a shuffle icon , shuffle its discard pile back into the deck. Go ahead and play the next two rounds (card selec", "headingPath": "End of Round", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "Now that you have recorded everything important pertaining to the outcome of Scenario 1, you can continue reading the next page to start playing Scenario 2, or you can put everything back in the box to continue the campaign another time. The most important thing is to put all the materials currently", "headingPath": "Saving", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Using these character materials and other components, we will now set up Scenario 1. Each player should place their character mat ①, player reference , six level \"A\" ability cards 3 , attack modifier deck (the deck of smaller cards) , and hit point dial in front of them. The red side of the dial sho", "headingPath": "Play Area Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "On initiative 50, the Vermling Raiders will now all act. Any single set of monsters will always act on the same initiative. Any elite monsters will act first, in standee numerical order, and then any normal monsters will act, also in numerical order. When a monster acts, it carries out its entire tu", "headingPath": "Mmoer rns", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Introduction. Scenario I Rules Play Area Setup. Scenario Book Features Playing the Game Card Selection. Ordering of Initiative. Move. Character Turns.. Attack. Attack Modifier Cards. Range and Melee Advantage and Disadvantage. Line-of-Sight.. Damage and Killing Monsters. Target. Conditions.. Suffer ", "headingPath": "Table of Contents", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Card Selection", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Ordering of Initiative", "sharpsignalDocId": 61}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
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)
debug row retained until
Oct 7, 2026 20:40

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. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. 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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Card Selection p.6 0.032266 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Playing the Game p.6 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Ordering of Initiative p.7 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) End of Round p.12 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Saving p.13 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Play Area Setup p.4 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Mmoer rns p.10 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Table of Contents p.2 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

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.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Card Selection p.6 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion — Rulebook (corpus doc 61) Ordering of Initiative p.7 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 105 ms · first delta n/a · total 4853 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 105 ms · ask 4747 ms · gateway work 4853 ms · total 4853 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 18s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 9), 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.