Ruling — The King Is Dead: Second Edition

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The King Is Dead: Second Editionbg-319966-en-1e

To prepare for the game, follow these steps: 1. Place the board in the middle of the table [1]. 2. If playing a two-player game, return two followers of each faction to the box [1]. 3. Place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex [1]. 4. Place all remaining followers in the cloth bag [1]. 5. Randomly give each player two followers to place in front of them to serve as their court [1]. 6. Randomly place followers in each region so that there are four followers per region (for Moray, Gwynedd, and Essex, this involves adding two more followers to those already placed) [1]. 7. Place all remaining followers into the supply [1]. 8. Return the cloth bag to the box [1]. 9. Give each player a negotiation disc [1]. 10. Place all control discs in the supply [1]. 11. Place all instability discs in France [1]. 12. Deal each player eight specific action cards: Scottish Support, Welsh Support, English Support, Negotiate, Manoeuvre, Outmanoeuvre, and two copies of Assemble (do not use cunning action cards) [1]. 13. Shuffle the region cards and deal one face up next to each numbered space on the board [1]. 14. Place the victory card near the board where it is easily accessible [1]. 15. The player who most recently visited a castle is the start player [1].

[1] RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 243 ms · ask 7627 ms · total 72565 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 64687 ms · generation 7878 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 6, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Beginning with the start player and moving clockwise, players either take an action or pass. Play keeps going around the table, occasionally interrupted by power struggles, until the game ends. When you take an action, you play a card from your hand and resolve its effect. After taking an action, yo", "headingPath": "Turns · Power struggles", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Place the board in the middle of the table. If you are playing a two-player game, first return two followers of each faction to the box. Place two Scottish followers in Moray, two Welsh followers in Gwynedd, and two English followers in Essex. Place all the remaining followers in the cloth bag. Rand", "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Resolve the effect of an action card that is face up on top of another player's discard pile. This action counts as an exact copy of the action you have chosen. The normal rules for partial actions apply. Place two Scottish followers from the supply into a region, then return a follower from that re", "headingPath": "SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Throughout the game, you will take actions to place, move, and remove followers across the board. By doing so, you can influence which faction gains control of each region during a power struggle, shifting the board so it is in your favour. To take an action, you must play a card from your hand and ", "headingPath": "Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The game ends with either a French invasion or the coronation of the new ruler. Who wins depends on how the game ends. If all three instability discs are on the board, the game ends immediately with an invasion . If all eight power struggles are resolved without an invasion, the game ends with a cor", "headingPath": "Trigger · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place two Scottish followers from the supply into a region that borders a region controlled by the Scots. If there is no control or instability disc in Moray, you may instead place the followers into a region bordering Moray. You must place both followers into the same region. If there are fewer tha", "headingPath": "SCOTTISH SUPPORT · WELSH SUPPORT · ENGLISH SUPPORT · ASSEMBLE · NEGOTIATE · MANOEUVRE", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "If you are playing with four players, you play in teams of two. The player sitting opposite you is your teammate. You are not allowed to discuss tactics or strategies with your teammate, and you must not show each other your action cards. The play is the same as normal, with all players summoning fo", "headingPath": "Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "OVERVIEW The King is Dead is a game of political upheaval in medieval Britain. Over the course of the game, you will resolve power struggles in the eight regions of the island to determine which faction will prevail and crown the new monarch. Become the preferred candidate of the victorious faction ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 400}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 400 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 400 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)
debug row retained until: Nov 7, 2026 05:07

retrieval — what the search arm returned

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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Turns · Power struggles	p.6	0.032787 (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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …	p.4	0.032258 (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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	SPY · AMBUSH · MARCH · PLOT · CUNNING ACTIONS · AID · …	p.10	0.031746 (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 King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Taking actions · SUMMONING FOLLOWERS TO COURT · PARTIAL ACTIONS	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
#5	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Trigger · Invasion · Coronation	p.7	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
#6	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	SCOTTISH SUPPORT · WELSH SUPPORT · ENGLISH SUPPORT · ASSEMBLE · NEGOTIATE · MANOEUVRE	p.9	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
#7	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	Teamwork · Invasion · Coronation	p.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))	300
#8	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)		p.2	0.029412 (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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK The King Is Dead: Second Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 400)	BOARD · TWO-PLAYER · HOME REGIONS · FOLLOWERS · DISCS · CARDS · …	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 243 ms · first delta 3950 ms · total 72565 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 64687 ms · retrieval 243 ms · ask 7627 ms · gateway work 7878 ms · total 72565 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4155
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 331
tok/sec: 85.1 tok/sec — 331 output tokens in 3.888 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 57s ago)
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 329), 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.