Ruling — Rising Sun

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Rising Sunbg-205896-en-1e

The game is played over 4 rounds called Seasons, beginning with Spring, followed by Summer, then Autumn, and ending with Winter.[1]

Setup

1. Each player chooses an available Clan by placing a Clan Screen in front of them and a Political/War tile behind it with the Political side facing up.[2]

2. Players sit around the table in clockwise order based on their Clan's Starting Honor Rank, starting with the Clan with the lowest-numbered rank.[3]

3. Place one Clan marker on the first slot of the Victory Point Track.[3]

4. Place the other Clan marker on the Honor Track based on the Clan's Starting Honor Rank, ensuring no empty slots between markers.[3]

5. Take the Clan's Daimyo figure, 3 Shinto figures, and 6 Bushi figures, attaching black bases to the Daimyo and white bases to the Shinto, and keep them in your Reserve.[3]

6. Keep all plastic bases in your Clan's color next to you.[3]

7. Take the 4 Stronghold tokens and the Alliance token belonging to your Clan and keep them next to you.[3]

8. Each player takes 1 Daimyo figure, 1 Bushi figure, and 1 Stronghold token and places them on the board inside their Home Province.[3]

9. At the start of a Season, take the randomized War Province tokens for that Season and place them faceup on the War Province Slots on the board.[1]

10. Place War Number tokens in the War Number Slot of the Province indicated by the War Province tokens.[1]

11. Discard any Season cards left from the previous Season and place the current Season's deck faceup next to the board.[4]

12. Each player receives Coins from the common pile equal to their Seasonal Income.[4]

Each Season

Each Season is divided into two main phases:

1. Political Phase: Players play Political Mandates and worship the Kami to prepare Clans and position forces.[1]

2. War Phase: Battles in contested Provinces are resolved.[1]

Mandate Turns

1. The player currently in possession of the Political Mandates deck draws the top 4 Mandate tiles and looks at them in secret.[5]

2. The player chooses 1 Mandate and returns the other 3 facedown to the top of the deck.[5]

3. The chosen Mandate is placed faceup on the first available slot on the board.[5]

4. One by one, in clockwise order, each player performs the chosen Mandate.[5]

5. The player who selected the Mandate is the last to perform it (except for the Train Mandate).[5]

6. Only the player who selected the Mandate and their Ally may perform the Mandate's Bonus.[5]

7. Once all players have performed the Mandate, the current player passes the facedown deck to the player to their left, who becomes the next current player.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook · p.10 · Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War

[2] RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook · p.8 · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook · p.8 · Sitting Order

[4] RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook · p.11 · seT season Cards · seasonal inCome · reTurn hosTaGes

[5] RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook · p.13 · mandaTe T urns

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 164 ms · ask 6914 ms · total 7079 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7079 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "It is important that players sit around the table in the right order, according to the Starting Honor Rank of the Clan they chose (as indicated on their Clan Screens) . The Clan with the lowest-numbered Starting Honor Rank will be the first to play . The Clan with the next Rank after that must sit t", "headingPath": "Sitting Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.047131, "snippet": "The Marshal Mandate allows players to Move their figures around the Map, according to their strategies. It may also allow players to build new Strongholds in order to establish their footholds. If you play Marshal, you get to decide where to move your figures after your opponents. The player may Mov", "headingPath": "MARSHAL · ALL PLAYERS · Negotiation Tip · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Rising Sun is played over the course of 4 rounds, known as Seasons. It begins with Spring, followed by Summer, and then Autumn. When Winter comes, the game draws to a close. Not much happens as the land falls silent under a layer of snow, and players calculate their bonuses to decide who is the winn", "headingPath": "Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045945, "snippet": "1 First, each player chooses one of the available Clans to play, by placing one of the Clan Screens in front of them and placing a Political/War tile behind it (with the Political side facing up). All materials and figures for Clans that were not chosen are returned to the game box.", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "During a Mandate Turn, the player currently in possession of the deck of Political Mandates draws the top 4 Mandate tiles and looks at them in secret. They choose 1 of the Political Mandates and returns the other 3, facedown, to the top of the deck, without reshuffling . They then place the chosen P", "headingPath": "mandaTe T urns", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.045002, "snippet": "The Train Mandate allows players to acquire new Season cards for their Clan, upgrading it with all manner of new abilities and even adding Monsters to their ranks. IMPORTANT: Unlike other Mandates, the player who selects the Train Mandate performs it FIRST, having first pick of the available cards. ", "headingPath": "TRAIN · ALL PLAYERS · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY · Negotiation Tip · Acquiring Monsters", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.043905, "snippet": "The Recruit Mandate allows players to place more of their figures on the board, bolstering their armies. The player who choses this Mandate gets to decide last where to place their figures, first seeing what their opponents do. The player may Summon 1 of the figures they have in reserve to each of t", "headingPath": "RECRUIT · ALL PLAYERS · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY · Negotiation Tip", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Battles only take place in Provinces where at least 2 players who are not Allied with each other have Force. The Battle involves all players who have any Force in that Province, even if they are Allied with each other. When a Battle takes place, the players involved will have a chance to use their C", "headingPath": "resolvinG baTTles", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Sitting Order", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "seT season Cards · seasonal inCome · reTurn hosTaGes", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "mandaTe T urns", "sharpsignalDocId": 314}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 314 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 314 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 0.91090 of 2166 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 27, 2026 23:41 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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Sitting Order	p.8	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
#2	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	MARSHAL · ALL PLAYERS · Negotiation Tip · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY	p.15	0.047131 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War	p.10	0.046875 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Setup	p.8	0.045945 (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))	283
#5	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	mandaTe T urns	p.13	0.045475 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	TRAIN · ALL PLAYERS · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY · Negotiation Tip · Acquiring Monsters	p.16	0.045002 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	RECRUIT · ALL PLAYERS · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY · Negotiation Tip	p.14	0.043905 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	resolvinG baTTles	p.22	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

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 47 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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Sitting Order	p.8	#1	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
#2	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	MARSHAL · ALL PLAYERS · Negotiation Tip · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY	p.15	#2	0.047131 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	RECRUIT · ALL PLAYERS · CURRENT PLAYER AND THEIR ALLY · Negotiation Tip	p.14	#7	0.043905 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	seT season Cards · seasonal inCome · reTurn hosTaGes	p.11	#20	0.014286 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	loTus Clan	p.26	#13	0.026585 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	mandaTe T urns	p.13	#5	0.045475 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War	p.10	#3	0.046875 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Setup	p.8	#4	0.045945 (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 Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Playing the Seasons · The Phases of each Season: · Seasonal Setup · PrePare for War	p.10	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Setup	p.8	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	Sitting Order	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	seT season Cards · seasonal inCome · reTurn hosTaGes	p.11	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Rising Sun — Rulebook (corpus doc 314)	mandaTe T urns	p.13	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 164 ms · first delta 3796 ms · total 7079 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 164 ms · ask 6914 ms · gateway work 7079 ms · total 7079 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2907
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 647
tok/sec: 201.0 tok/sec — 647 output tokens in 3.219 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 43s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 2s 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 242), 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.