Ruling — Lancaster

← Lancaster

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Lancasterbg-96913-en-1e

The game is played over five game rounds.[1] The sequence of play is as follows:

1. Phase 1: Place knights

* Randomly determine a start player and give them the start player marker.[1]

* Players take turns in clockwise direction.[1]

* The active player takes one of their own knights from their court and places him on a knight's space.[1] (In certain expansions, the active player may place one of his own knights or his own lord [2]).

* Players continue taking turns until all players have placed all their knights.[1] (In certain expansions, players continue until all players have placed all their knights and lords [2]).

* If a player has no more knights at their court, their turn is $\text{is}$ skipped.[1]

* If only one player remains with knights at their court, they place them successively one after another.[1]

* Knights can be placed in various locations, including:

* County: A knight can be placed on an empty or occupied space if the knight matches or exceeds the demanded minimum strength.[1] Players may also place any number of squires with the knight to add 1 strength point each, though squires do not count toward the minimum strength requirement.[1] If a space is occupied, the active player's knight (or knight and squires combined) can expel the existing knight if their strength exceeds the occupant's.[1] Expelled knights return to their owner's court to be placed again in turn order, and accompanying squires return to the general supply.[1]

* Conflict: (Specific placement rules for Conflict are not fully detailed in the provided text, though players may place knights and ally knights on the same conflict card, but not the same knight's space [3]).

* Castle: (Specific placement rules for Castle are not fully detailed in the provided text, though players may not place their own knights in an ally's castle [3]).

* The Tower: A player may drop 1 knight inside the tower to dispose of 1 dishonor marker for each strength point of the knight dropped.[4] Tudor knights cannot be dropped in the tower.[4]

* In certain expansions, the active player may also place a lord at the king's court to either apply for an office (paying a specific tribute) or enter the treasury to claim available voting markers, squires, or gold.[2]

2. Phase 2: Parliament

* (The specific steps for Phase 2 are not explicitly detailed in the provided sources).

3. Phase 3: Rewards

* (The specific steps for Phase 3 are not explicitly detailed in the provided sources, though it is noted that knights may gain rewards either immediately or during this phase [1]).

[1] RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook · p.2 · Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County

[2] RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook · p.14 · Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury

[3] RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook · p.7 · Use the rules for 4 players, with following amendments: · Set-up · Each player selects the color of their ally and receives additionally: · Phase 1: Place knights · Phase 2: Parliament

[4] RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook · p.17 · Phase 1: Place knights

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 95 ms · ask 7354 ms · total 16262 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 8810 ms · generation 7452 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 14, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "'At the King's Court' affects the game play of phases 1 and 3. During phase 1, the players apply for the new offices of the country. During phase 3, the offices and privileges are distributed, which the players can use during the next game round. The active player places one of his own knights or hi", "headingPath": "Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.046964, "snippet": "The players want to proceed from simply being a Lord to the most powerful ally of the king. They may achieve this by developing their own knighthood as well as by clever deployment of individual knights in the counties of England, at their own castle and to conflicts with 1 Game board 2 Supply board", "headingPath": "Object of the game · Common components: · Individual components of the players (in 5 colors): · Give each player...", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Randomly determine a start player, give them the start player marker. The players take their turns in clockwise direction. The game is played over five game rounds. Each round consists of 3 Phases: 1: Place knights 2: Parliament 3: Rewards The active player takes one of their own knights from their ", "headingPath": "Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.046696, "snippet": "8 new law cards - you can play 'Laws of the king' only when playing with this entire expansion. You may combine 'Laws of the King' with the laws of the basic game or with the 1 st expansion, 'The New Laws'. There are 2 options: Use the laws of the basic game. Remove the laws with numbers 2 or 3 on t", "headingPath": "Components · PARLIAMENT · 1 st option - play with 'Laws of the King' · 2 nd option - play with variable combinations of laws · Summary of the laws of the king", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.046394, "snippet": "Before your first game, you must affix the stickers of the archers and the Tudor knights to 3 each of the 6 brown wooden discs. In addition, you must affix one bishop sticker to each of the 9 black wooden discs, and one lord sticker of the player colors to each of the remaining 5 discs. Regal board ", "headingPath": "New components and set-up modifications", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.045743, "snippet": "Please see the detailed description of the new laws on the back of this rules sheet. The new laws may enter the game in 2 different ways : Replace all law cards of the basic game with the new law cards. Leave the old laws in the box, they are not used for this game. You may combine the old and new l", "headingPath": "· 18 new law cards · PARLIAMENT · 1st option 'The game with the new laws' · 2nd option 'The game with variable combinations' · Nobleman tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.030366, "snippet": "· reward tiles in total - 9 tiles for use with the basic game and 3 exchange tiles for use in combination with the expansion 'Henry V - The Power of the King'. On the backsides of the tiles the letters A-I are imprinted, in accordance with the counties of the game board. Put the 9 tiles for the basi", "headingPath": "New components and set-up · Sequence of play · Counties · Summary of reward tiles · Special features in the 2-player game · QUEENIE 1: REWARD TILES", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Sort the nobleman tiles by the letters on their back and randomly place each pile face open in one of the counties. The exact number of tiles depends on the number of players. Front Back | Number of players | Nobleman tiles per county | | 2 & 3 | 2 tiles | | 4 | 3 tiles | | 5 | 4 tiles | face open o", "headingPath": "Summary of laws · COUNTY · CONFLICT", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Use the rules for 4 players, with following amendments: · Set-up · Each player selects the color of their ally and receives additionally: · Phase 1: Place knights · Phase 2: Parliament", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}, {"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Phase 1: Place knights", "sharpsignalDocId": 139}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 139 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 139 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 0.91439 of 2161 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 25, 2026 16:58 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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury	p.14	0.048172 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Object of the game · Common components: · Individual components of the players (in 5 colors): · Give each player...	p.1	0.046964 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County	p.2	0.046898 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Components · PARLIAMENT · 1 st option - play with 'Laws of the King' · 2 nd option - play with variable combinations of laws · Summary of the laws of the king	p.19	0.046696 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	New components and set-up modifications	p.13	0.046394 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	· 18 new law cards · PARLIAMENT · 1st option 'The game with the new laws' · 2nd option 'The game with variable combinations' · Nobleman tiles	p.11	0.045743 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	New components and set-up · Sequence of play · Counties · Summary of reward tiles · Special features in the 2-player game · QUEENIE 1: REWARD TILES	p.20	0.030366 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Summary of laws · COUNTY · CONFLICT	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 27 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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County	p.2	#3	0.046898 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury	p.14	#1	0.048172 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	New components and set-up modifications	p.13	#5	0.046394 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	· 18 new law cards · PARLIAMENT · 1st option 'The game with the new laws' · 2nd option 'The game with variable combinations' · Nobleman tiles	p.11	#6	0.045743 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Castles · Conflicts · 1. Winner of conflict: England or France · Assigning power points: · Example:	p.5	#14	0.013699 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Phase 1: Place knights	p.17	#11	0.02901 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Use the rules for 4 players, with following amendments: · Set-up · Each player selects the color of their ally and receives additionally: · Phase 1: Place knights · Phase 2: Parliament	p.7	#17	0.012987 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Components · PARLIAMENT · 1 st option - play with 'Laws of the King' · 2 nd option - play with variable combinations of laws · Summary of the laws of the king	p.19	#4	0.046696 (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 Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play · Phase 1: Place knights · County	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Sequence of play modifications · Phase 1: Place knights or the lord · The lord applies for an office · The lord enters the treasury	p.14	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Use the rules for 4 players, with following amendments: · Set-up · Each player selects the color of their ally and receives additionally: · Phase 1: Place knights · Phase 2: Parliament	p.7	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Lancaster — Rulebook (corpus doc 139)	Phase 1: Place knights	p.17	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 95 ms · first delta 2786 ms · total 16262 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 8810 ms · retrieval 95 ms · ask 7354 ms · gateway work 7452 ms · total 16262 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3841
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 602
tok/sec: 131.5 tok/sec — 602 output tokens in 4.579 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 48s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 7s 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 61), 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.