Ruling — Stratego

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Strategobg-1917-en-1e

Setup

1. Place the gameboard between you and your opponent with the name Stratego facing each of you.[1]

2. One player chooses a hand and plays a Red Army piece in one hand and a Blue Army piece in the other.[1]

3. Place your pieces on the gameboard with the notched end up and the labeled side facing you so your opponent cannot see the rank of your pieces; your opponent does the same.[1]

4. Place pieces anywhere in the first four rows on your half of the gameboard, leaving the two middle rows unoccupied at the start of the game.[1]

5. The Flag and Bomb pieces cannot be moved and must remain on the squares where they were originally placed throughout the game.[2]

A Turn

1. Players alternate turns, with the red player moving first.[1]

2. On your turn, you must do one of the following:

* Move: move one of your playing pieces to an open adjacent space.[1] (Note: Pieces move one square at a time, forward, backward, or side, except for Scouts, which can move any number of open squares forward, backward, or sideways.[2] Pieces cannot move diagonally, jump over another piece, or move onto a square already occupied by another piece unless attacking.[2] A piece cannot move back and forth between the same two squares in three consecutive turns.[2] )

* Attack: attack one of your opponent's playing pieces.[1]

3. To attack, when a red and blue piece occupy adjacent spaces (back to back, side to side, or face to face), take your attacking piece and lightly tap your opponent's piece.[2]

4. Declare the number rank of your attacking piece, and your opponent then declares the number rank of his or her defending piece.[2]

5. The piece with the lower number is captured, removed from the board, and placed in its position in the display tray.[2]

6. If the attacking piece is the remaining and winning piece, it moves onto the space formerly occupied by the defending piece; if the defending piece is the winner, it stays on its original square.[2]

7. When pieces of the same rank battle, both pieces are removed from the game.[2]

Special Rules

* Scouts are the only pieces allowed to both move and attack on the same turn.[3]

* When any piece (except a Miner) strikes a Bomb, that piece is lost and removed from the board.[3]

* When a Miner strikes a Bomb, the Bomb is defused and removed from the gameboard, and the Miner then moves onto the Bomb's space.[3]

* The Spy is the only piece that can capture a Marshal (ranked 10) if the Spy attacks first; if the Marshal attacks first, the Spy is removed.[3]

* When moving onto a square in an opponent's back row, you have the option to rescue one of your captured pieces by picking any piece from the pieces your opponent has captured and returning it to an unoccupied space on your half of the gameboard (Scouts cannot make a rescue, and you cannot rescue a Bomb).[4]

Winning the Game

1. The first player to pick an opponent's Flag captures it and wins the game.[4]

2. If all of your movable pieces have been removed and you cannot move or attack on a turn, you must give up and declare your opponent the winner.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook · p.2 · CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY

[2] RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook · p.3 · RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3

[3] RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook · p.4 · 2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS

[4] RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook · p.4 · WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:

That settles it — whose turn was it?

🔧 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 84 ms · ask 4652 ms · total 10275 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 5537 ms · generation 4738 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "OBJECT SETUP 'To capture your opponent's Flag, I. Place the gameboard between you and your opponent with the name Stratego facing each of you. AN ARMY on ich army consists of: 'opponent chooses a hand and pla 33 movable pieces ignates. The other color army lea Re ny piece in one hand and a Blue Army", "headingPath": "CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "For 2 Players + Ages 8 To Adult Ona lonely battlefield you meet your opponent for a skirmish that will decide the fate of your army. You must plan the battle, advance your men, attack and capture the enemy Flag. hb 'Your Marshal is your strongest man but vulnerable if not protected from the Spy. You", "headingPath": "CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "The first player to ick an opponent's Flag captures it and wins the gam If all of your movable pieces have been removed and you cannot move or attack on a turn, you must give up and declare your opponent the winner Here are three rule variations included for the Stratego player who wants an added le", "headingPath": "WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Remember, the Flag and Bomb pieces cannot be moved and must remain on the squares where they were originally placed throughout the game. Pieces move one square at a time, forward, backward, or side (Exception: See Special Scout Movement Privilege, below.) Pieces cannot move diagonally: They cannot j", "headingPath": "RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Scouts are the only pieces allowed to both move and attack on the sume turn, A Scout can move forward, backward, or sideways any number of open spaces into an attack position, Once in position, it n then attack. When any piece (except a Miner - ranked '3\") strikes a Bomb, that p Exception: When a Mi", "headingPath": "2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:", "sharpsignalDocId": 197}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 197 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 197 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 0.92265 of 2534 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 29, 2026 18:56 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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY	p.2	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	CONTENTS	p.1	0.048387 (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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:	p.4	0.047619 (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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3	p.3	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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS	p.4	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

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 5 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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	CONTENTS	p.1	#2	0.048387 (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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:	p.4	#3	0.047619 (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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS	p.4	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3	p.3	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY	p.2	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	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 Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	CONTENTS · 7 pieces that do not move: · ASSEMBLY · GAMEPLAY	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	RULES FOR MOVEMENT · SPECIAL SCOUT MOVEMENT PRIVILEGE · RULES FOR ATTACK FIGURE 3	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	2 SP) ATTACK PRIVILEGE CIAL SCOUT · SPECIAL MINER ATTACK PRIVILEGE · 5 ATTACK PRIVILEGE. SPECIAL SPY · STRATEGY HINTS	p.4	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Stratego — Rulebook (corpus doc 197)	WINNING THE GAME · ADDITIONAL TOURNAMENT RULES · AGGRESSOR ADVANTAGE · SILENT DEI · RESCUE · Restrictions:	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 84 ms · first delta 1038 ms · total 10275 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 5537 ms · retrieval 84 ms · ask 4652 ms · gateway work 4738 ms · total 10275 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2322
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 736
tok/sec: 203.7 tok/sec — 736 output tokens in 3.614 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 8s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 24h, checked 0s 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 115), 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.