Ruling — Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

← Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixbornbg-167400-en-1e

Setup

1. Choose a deck to play with, build a deck, or draft a deck.[1]

2. Place your Phoenixborn in your play area with the information side face up.[1]

3. Place your conjuration pile face down in your play area.[1]

4. Place the dice power reference cards that correspond to the dice you are using in your play area and take a phases of play reference card, if needed.[1]

5. Place all ten of your dice to the right of your dice power reference cards to form your exhausted dice pool.[1]

6. Choose your First Five by taking five different cards of your choice from your deck, ensuring you do not include more than one copy of a card in your First Five.[2][1]

7. Shuffle the rest of your deck and form a face down draw pile in your and your play area.[2][1]

8. Ensure you have easy access to wound, exhaustion, and status tokens.[2][1]

Game Flow

Ashes is played over a series of rounds, each divided into three phases that must be resolved in order:[3]

1. Prepare Phase

During this phase, each player simultaneously resolves the following three steps in order:[3]

1. Roll Dice: Roll all dice in your exhausted pool and place them to the left of your dice power reference cards to create your active dice pool.[3][4] On the first round, the player who rolls the most basic symbols chooses the First Player (or uses a tie-breaker re-roll).[3]

2. Discard Cards: You may discard any number of cards from your hand.[3][4]

3. Draw Cards: Draw cards until you have 5 cards in your hand.[3][4]

4. Fatigue Damage: Starting with the First Player, players alternate placing 1 wound token on their Phoenixborn until all players have placed wounds equal to the number of cards they should have drawn but could not.[3][4]

2. Player Turns Phase

This phase consists of many short turns where players take turns back and forth until both players consecutively pass.[3] On a turn, a player must take one main action and may choose to take one side action, which can be taken in either order.[3][5]

* Main Actions/Side Actions include: Paying a cost, Meditating, or Activating a dice power.[5][4]

* Passing: Players continue taking turns until both players have taken "Pass" as their main action on consecutive turns.[3]

3. Recovery Phase

The players move to the recovery phase after the player turns phase ends.[3] This phase includes:

1. Recover: Remove wounds from units with recover values.[4]

2. Remove Exhaustion: Remove 1 exhaustion token from each card.[4]

3. Rotate Phoenixborn upright.[4]

4. Exhaust Dice: You may exhaust any number of your dice.[4]

5. Resolve 'end of round' card effects and pass the First Player token.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.5 · GAME SETUP

[2] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.5

[3] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.6 · ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE

[4] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.28 · 1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …

[5] RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook · p.26 · Magic Play Cost:

So says the rulebook. So plays the table.

🔧 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 82 ms · ask 5528 ms · total 5612 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 5612 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.046239, "snippet": "To set up a game of Ashes, each player should do the following: Choose a deck to play with (see pp. 18-19 for suggested decks). Or build a deck to play with (see p. 18 for deck building rules). Or draft a deck to play with (see pp. 20-21 for drafting rules). Place your Phoenixborn in your play area ", "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.044023, "snippet": "Choose your First Five by taking five different cards of your choice from your deck. This is your starting hand. You cannot include more than one copy of a card in your First Five. Shuffle the rest of your deck and form a face down draw pile in your play area. 7. Make sure you have easy access to wo", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.044002, "snippet": "Deal 2 damage to a target unit Deal damage to a target unit equ number of status tokens rem Phoenixborn: Each player controls a Phoenixborn which is not a unit. When your Phoenixborn is destroyed, you lose the game. or Phoenixborn that opponent controls. 'No, no dear. That's not how it's done. This ", "headingPath": "Magic Play Cost:", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.043935, "snippet": "During the Recovery Phase, each player simultaneously resolves the following three steps in order: Recover: Remove a number of wound tokens from each unit you have in play equal to that unit's recover value. Remove Exhaustion: Remove 1 exhaustion token from each card you have in play that has 1 or m", "headingPath": "3. RECOVERY PHASE · End of Round · WINNING AND LOSING THE GAME · 3-4 PLAYER GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.04354, "snippet": "If you want us to teach you how to play, you can visit plaidhatgames.com and watch a video explanation.", "headingPath": "Stop!", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.042239, "snippet": "To take this side action, play or activate a card where the symbol appears in the play or activation cost. For a side action you may exhaust a die that is on its power side to activate its dice power effect. The effect for each type of power symbol is detailed on the dice power reference card corres", "headingPath": "Pay a Cost · Activate a Dice Power · Main Action: Pass · Meditate", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.041639, "snippet": "Ashes is played over a series of rounds. Each round is divided into three phases that must be resolved in order. Most of the game takes place during the player turns phase. During the prepare phase each player simultaneously resolves the following three steps in order: Roll Dice: Roll all of the dic", "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 21, "score": 0.039513, "snippet": "Starting with the first player and continuing clockwise around the table, each player chooses 1 Phoenixborn along with its corresponding Phoenixborn unique cards. Then the first player passes the first player token to their left. Deal each player 9 cards from the draft deck. Each player will choose ", "headingPath": "Draft", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 28, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}, {"page": 26, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Magic Play Cost:", "sharpsignalDocId": 773}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 773 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 773 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 0.89452 of 2190 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 28, 2026 03:23 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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	GAME SETUP	p.5	0.046239 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	0.044023 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Magic Play Cost:	p.25	0.044002 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	3. RECOVERY PHASE · End of Round · WINNING AND LOSING THE GAME · 3-4 PLAYER GAME	p.13	0.043935 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Stop!	p.1	0.04354 (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))	103
#6	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Pay a Cost · Activate a Dice Power · Main Action: Pass · Meditate	p.12	0.042239 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE	p.6	0.041639 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Draft	p.21	0.039513 (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 51 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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	#2	0.044023 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Stop!	p.1	#5	0.04354 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE	p.6	#7	0.041639 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Magic Play Cost:	p.25	#3	0.044002 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Magic Play Cost:	p.26	#30	0.023459 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Magic Play Cost:	p.26	#9	0.029644 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …	p.28	#14	0.027402 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	GAME SETUP	p.5	#1	0.046239 (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 Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	GAME SETUP	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)		p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	ROUND ORDER · 1. PREPARE PHASE · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	1. PREPARE PHASE (p. 6) · 2. PLAYER TURNS PHASE (p. 6) · Cost (p. 7) · (p. 12) · Pay a Cost (p. 12) · Activate a Dice Power (p. 12) · …	p.28	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn — Rulebook (corpus doc 773)	Magic Play Cost:	p.26	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 82 ms · first delta 2332 ms · total 5612 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 82 ms · ask 5528 ms · gateway work 5612 ms · total 5612 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2368
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 660
tok/sec: 203.8 tok/sec — 660 output tokens in 3.238 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 41s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s 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 707), 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.