RuleSage cited table rulings
← Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

You asked

How do I setup and play with 3 people

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battlebg-199042-en-1e

I looked through Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook · p.14 · Advanced Wizards
After reading these rules, if you are familiar with deckbuilding games, you may proceed directly to Game 3. You will open boxes for Games 1-3, review the additional rules enclosed in each, and start your adventure there. You can also increase the difficulty of each game by starting with 1 or 2 on th
RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook · p.4
For Game 1 there will only be one active Villain at a time. Reveal the top card face up in space below. Villain cards Discard Pile (face up) Shuffle and stack your Hero deck of 10 cards face down, then draw 5 cards. Choose your Hero Place an oversized Turn Order and Hero card face up above your Play
RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook · p.8 · STEP 3. Play HOGWARTS cards and take Hero actions.
As the active Hero, you may do all of the following in any order you choose. Play cards to gain resources ( & tokens) and generate effects. As you play out cards, set them to the side to indicate that they have been played. Tokens you gain are collected on your player board. Cards and resources cann
RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook · p.1 · Overview · OBJECTIVE · Advanced Wizards:
In this cooperative game, you will take on the heroic role of either HARRY POTTER ™ , RON WEASLEY ™ , HERMIONE GRANGER ™ or NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM ™ in order to defeat a series of evil threats. The Villains launch attacks against you in their attempts to conquer the wizarding world one Location at a tim
RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook · p.3 · 4 Health Trackers :
Game Board Open the Game 1 Box and proceed to the next page. For your first game, you will not need the boxes for Games 2-7. 4 Player Boards Give one to each player.
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 267 ms · ask 2064 ms · total 2334 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 2334 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 14, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "After reading these rules, if you are familiar with deckbuilding games, you may proceed directly to Game 3. You will open boxes for Games 1-3, review the additional rules enclosed in each, and start your adventure there. You can also increase the difficulty of each game by starting with 1 or 2 on th", "headingPath": "Advanced Wizards", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "For Game 1 there will only be one active Villain at a time. Reveal the top card face up in space below. Villain cards Discard Pile (face up) Shuffle and stack your Hero deck of 10 cards face down, then draw 5 cards. Choose your Hero Place an oversized Turn Order and Hero card face up above your Play", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "As the active Hero, you may do all of the following in any order you choose. Play cards to gain resources ( & tokens) and generate effects. As you play out cards, set them to the side to indicate that they have been played. Tokens you gain are collected on your player board. Cards and resources cann", "headingPath": "STEP 3. Play HOGWARTS cards and take Hero actions.", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "In this cooperative game, you will take on the heroic role of either HARRY POTTER ™ , RON WEASLEY ™ , HERMIONE GRANGER ™ or NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM ™ in order to defeat a series of evil threats. The Villains launch attacks against you in their attempts to conquer the wizarding world one Location at a tim", "headingPath": "Overview · OBJECTIVE · Advanced Wizards:", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Game Board Open the Game 1 Box and proceed to the next page. For your first game, you will not need the boxes for Games 2-7. 4 Player Boards Give one to each player.", "headingPath": "4 Health Trackers :", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "25 Influence tokens 35 Attack tokens 3 Draw Discard Draw Discard 4 Player Boards Player Board (with Health Tracker) Game Board Open the Game 1 Box and proceed to the next page. For your first game, you will not need the boxes for Games 2–7.Give one to each player.", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When the tokens assigned to a Villain equal its (Health), the Villain is defeated! You immediately gain the reward listed on the Villain card, and place it in the discard space in the center of the board. Return the tokens assigned to the Villain back to the pile. At the end of your turn, replace th", "headingPath": "Defeating a Villain · Location Control *", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "3 Villains ( ( 2 Locations ❷ 10 Dark Arts sort and distribute game 1 cards Stack the oversized Location cards face up in the order indicated on upper-right corner. Shuffle and stack the square Dark Arts cards face down. Shuffle and stack the oversized Villain cards face down. For Game 1 there will o", "headingPath": "4 Health Trackers : · ❶ Location cards · ❷ Dark Arts cards · ❸ Villain cards · Choose your Hero", "sharpsignalDocId": 490}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 490 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 490 boosted
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row recorded
Sep 5, 2026 20:07 UTC

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) Advanced Wizards p.14 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
#2 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) p.4 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
#3 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) STEP 3. Play HOGWARTS cards and take Hero actions. p.8 0.031746 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) Overview · OBJECTIVE · Advanced Wizards: p.1 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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) 4 Health Trackers : p.3 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)) 165
#6 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) p.3 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)) 264
#7 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) Defeating a Villain · Location Control * p.12 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
#8 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) 4 Health Trackers : · ❶ Location cards · ❷ Dark Arts cards · ❸ Villain cards · Choose your Hero p.4 0.029412 (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 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 32 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) STEP 3. Play HOGWARTS cards and take Hero actions. p.8 #3 0.031746 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) STEP 3. Play HOGWARTS cards and take Hero actions. p.9 #16 0.013158 (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
#3 RULEBOOK Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) 4 Health Trackers : · ❶ Location cards · ❷ Dark Arts cards · ❸ Villain cards · Choose your Hero p.4 #8 0.029412 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) Overview · OBJECTIVE · Advanced Wizards: p.1 #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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) HOGWARTS cards · Drawing and Discarding cards · Placing Cards on top of your Deck · Saving Influence and Attacks · Villains and Dark arts cards · LOCATION CARDS ™ Storing the game p.14 #24 0.011905 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) p.10 #11 0.014085 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) STEP 4. END YOUR TURN. · THE NEXT HERO'S TURN · See the following pages for more information on: p.10 #12 0.013889 (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 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle — Rulebook (corpus doc 490) Advanced Wizards p.14 #1 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

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 267 ms · first delta 2224 ms · total 2334 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 267 ms · ask 2064 ms · gateway work 2334 ms · total 2334 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
2940
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
173.1 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.052 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 39s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 23h, 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.
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
BOILERPLATE, not reasoning: this is the answerer's fixed abstention phrase, the same sentence it emits whenever it declines. It records THAT the answerer declined and never why — no per-ruling reason was captured, because none was sent. Hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 421), 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.