Ruling — Black Rose Wars

← Black Rose Wars

You asked

How do I setup the game for 2 players

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Black Rose Warsbg-239942-en-1e

To setup the game for 2 players, follow these steps:

1. Place the Black Rose Room and the Throne Room in the middle of the table adjacent to each other.[1]

2. Shuffle the remaining Rooms and place them randomly around the Black Rose Room.[1]

3. Place the corresponding Activation Token in each Room, except for the Black Rose Room.[1]

4. Select 2 Mage’s Cell Tiles.[2]

5. Shuffle the selected Mage’s Cells and randomly place them face down into the positions shown in the figure corresponding to the number of players.[2]

6. Place the Power Board and the Event Board on the sides of the Lodge.[2]

7. On the Event Board, place the Damage/Instability Tokens of the Black Rose, and shuffle and place the Event Cards of the First Moon Phase as shown in the picture.[3]

8. On the Power Board, shuffle and place the Quest Card Deck of the First Moon Phase as shown in the picture, then place the Activation Token of the Black Rose and the Evocation Cards.[2]

9. Shuffle and put aside the remaining Quest Card and Event Card Decks until they are needed for the next Moon Phases.[3]

10. The player who most recently has given or received a rose in real life takes the Crown Token (First Player).[3]

11. Starting with the First Player (and proceeding clockwise), each player chooses a Mage and takes the matching Model, the Mage Sheet, and the Custom Spells of the chosen Mage.[3]

12. Each player also chooses a color among the Mage Cell colors chosen in step 4 and takes all Damage/Instability Tokens, Physical Action Tokens, Protection and Trap Tokens, and Rose Pins of the chosen color.[3]

13. Starting with the First Player, each Mage chooses their starting School of Magic (a School already chosen by another Mage may not be selected).[3]

14. Each player chooses their own Starting Grimoire from the two available on the back of the Reference Cards of the chosen School.[3]

15. Mages begin assembling their Grimoires by selecting the Spells indicated by the chosen Starting Grimoire from the corresponding School of Magic Deck, then adding 1 of their Custom Spells to the Grimoire and setting the other 2 aside to be added 1 at a time to their hand when the Moon Phase changes.[3]

16. Shuffle each Mage's Grimoire of 7 cards.[3]

17. Turn all the Mage’s Cell Rooms face up and place each Mage in the Cell matching their color.[3]

18. Shuffle the six decks of the Schools of Magic and place them near the board, reachable by all players, with the Reference Cards placed under the decks to indicate the Schools of Magic.[3]

19. Shuffle the Deck of Forgotten Spells and set it nearby.[3]

20. Remove any Quest Cards from the game that have the symbol indicating they can only be played with 4, 5, or 6 players.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.14

[2] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.15

[3] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.16

[4] RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook · p.10

Question closed. Friendships intact.

🔧 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 242 ms · ask 6878 ms · total 7122 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7122 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Shuffle and put aside the remaining Quest Card and Event Card Decks until you need them for the next Moon Phases. The player who most recently has given or received a rose in real life takes the Crown Token (First Player). 8. Starting with the First Player (and proceeding clockwise from there) each ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "4. Select a number of Mage’s Cell Tiles corresponding to the number of players in the game. Take the selected Mage’s Cell and shuffle them. Randomly place them face down into the positions shown in the figure below corresponding to the number of players. Do not flip them over yet. Now the Black Rose", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 14, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "1. The first step is to prepare the Lodge. Place the Black Rose Room and the Throne RoomThrone Room in the middle of the table adjacent to each other (orientation does not matter). 2. Then shuffle the remaining Rooms and place them randomly around the Black Rose Room, as shown in the example below. ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Game Turn The game takes place over multiple Turns. Each Turn is divided into 6 phases: 1. Black Rose Phase 2. Study Phase 3. Preparation Phase 4. Action Phase 5. Evocation Phase 6. Clean-up Phase All Mages must complete each phase before any of them can move on to the next one. Tessa The Mage holdi", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 27, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "  Blade BarrageBlade Barrage Blade BarrageBlade Barrage  044 / 226044 / 226 When a Mage enters the Room, you may: Immediately cast the Target Mage's next Standard Ready Spell as if it were your own. When a Mage enters the Room, you may: Gain,pluseveryon the Target Mage (max ). ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Move all Models from adjacent Rooms to the Target Room, then inﬂ icton each Model in that Room.       MaelstromMaelstrom MaelstromMaelstrom This rule allows placing Instability exceeding a Room’s maximum. Mages may continue to assign additional Instability to a Room, even if there is n", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.030214, "snippet": "Alchemical Laboratory Throne Room The Abyss Summoner Room SummonSummon CerberoCerbero Mirrors Room Observatory Oracle Room Treasure Room The game is marked by the passage of three Moon Phases. The active phase is determined by the token (Mage or Black Rose) with the most points on the Power Board. I", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When you are the Target of a Spell, you may: Count the number of Spell Card currently revealed by the casting Mage, then choose: Gainfor each (max). Inﬂ ict   for each on the casting Mage.     Ghost AssassinGhost Assassin Ghost AssassinGhost Assassin Illusion  016 / 226016 / 226 ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 14, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 15, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 16, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 588}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 588 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 588 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 0.92284 of 2229 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 5, 2026 14:46 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	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	0.048139 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	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
#3	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.14	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
#4	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.19	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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.27	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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.32	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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.18	0.030214 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	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

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 59 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	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	#2	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	#1	0.048139 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.21	#20	0.0125 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.37	#42	0.009804 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.10	#10	0.029387 (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 Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.38	#26	0.011628 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.19	#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
#8	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.14	#3	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.14	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.15	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.16	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Black Rose Wars — Rulebook (corpus doc 588)	p.10	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 242 ms · first delta 3769 ms · total 7122 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 242 ms · ask 6878 ms · gateway work 7122 ms · total 7122 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4131
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 653
tok/sec: 200.4 tok/sec — 653 output tokens in 3.259 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 9s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 520), 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.