Ruling — Battle Line: Medieval

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Battle Line: Medievalbg-297985-en-1e

Setup

1. Lay out the nine Battlefields, text side down, in a line between the two players.[1]

2. Cut the Troop deck until one player has the higher number; that player shuffles and deals seven Troop cards to each player.[1]

3. Place the remaining Troop cards as a facedown deck at one end of the battle line.[1]

4. Shuffle the ten Tactics cards and place them as a face-down deck at the same end of the battle line.[1]

Gameplay

1. The non-dealer plays first; play alternates thereafter.[2]

2. On their turn and before drawing their card from the deck, a player may claim one or more Battlefields.[3]

3. To claim a Battlefield, a player must have a completed formation of three cards on their side of the Battlefield and prove that Troop cards on the opponent's side cannot beat this formation.[3]

4. When a player successfully claims a Battlefield, they take the Battlefield card and move it to their side of the play area.[3]

5. On their turn, a player selects either one Troop card or one Tactics card from their hand and places it face up on their side of the battle line.[2]

6. Troop cards are placed in one of three imaginary card 'slots' on each side of the Battlefield to create formations, though some cards may add a fourth 'slot'.[2]

7. Players may overlap cards to save space, but numbers must remain visible to both players.[2]

8. Tactics cards can be used to influence formations.[2] Morale Tactics are played into the player's layout in place of, and in a similar way to, Troop cards.[3] Weather Tactics are played face up on a player's side of an unclaimed Battlefield and do not take up a 'slot'.[3]

9. A player may never play more than one more Tactics card than their opponent has played.[3]

10. At the end of their turn, the player draws one card from either the Troop deck or the Tactics deck to refresh their hand to seven.[2]

11. If a player is unable to play any Troop card, they may pass or play a Tactics card on their turn, but their opponent continues to play until the game is decided.[2]

12. When both decks run out, no further cards can be drawn, but play continues.[2]

Formations (Highest to Lowest)

1. Wedge: Cards of the same color with consecutive values (straight flush).[2]

2. Square: Cards of the same value (3 of a kind).[2]

3. Column: Cards of the same color (flush).[2]

4. Skirmish: Cards with consecutive values (straight).[2]

5. Fray: Any other formation (sum of values).[2]

6. When comparing two formations in the same category, the formation with the higher total sum of card values is higher.[2]

Winning the Game

1. The first player to win three adjacent Battlefields or any five Battlefields achieves victory.[1]

2. When a player successfully claims three adjacent or five Battlefields, the game ends immediately.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook · p.1 · COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE

[2] RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook · p.2 · PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS

[3] RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook · p.3 · CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS

[4] RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook · p.4 · TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:

The table has its answer — dice up.

🔧 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 81 ms · ask 4342 ms · total 4426 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4426 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "The non-dealer plays first; play alternates thereafter. On their turn, a player selects either one Troop card or one Tactics card from their hand and places it face up on their side of the battle line. At the end of their turn, the player draws one card from either the Troop deck or the Tactics deck", "headingPath": "PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "On their turn and before drawing their card from the deck, a player may claim one or more Battlefields. In order to do so, they must have a completed formation of three cards on their side of the Battlefield, and they must be able to prove that Troop cards on the opponent's side of the Battlefield c", "headingPath": "CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "Guile Tactics: These cards are played face up on the player's own side next to the Tactics card deck. All cards played there must be clearly visible and remain there until the end of the game. Scout, Redeploy, Deserter, Traitor When one player has successfully claimed three adjacent Battlefields or ", "headingPath": "TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.046875, "snippet": "Players: Two Playing Time: 30 minutes This rule sheet 60 Troop cards, in six colors each with the values 1 to 10 Ten Tactics cards (white, with different backs) Nine Battlefield cards, one side with text and one side without text Two player aids One double-sided variant card Lay out the nine Battlef", "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:", "sharpsignalDocId": 1137}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1137 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1137 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 0.90458 of 2295 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 13:33 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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS	p.2	0.048916 (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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS	p.3	0.048652 (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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:	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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE	p.1	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

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 4 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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS	p.2	#1	0.048916 (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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE	p.1	#4	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
#3	RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:	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
#4	RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS	p.3	#2	0.048652 (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 Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	COMPONENTS · SET-UP · OBJECTIVE	p.1	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	PLAY · TROOP CARDS · FORMATIONS	p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	CLAIMING BATTLEFIELDS · TACTICS CARDS	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Battle Line: Medieval — Rulebook (corpus doc 1137)	TACTICS CARDS · GAME END · ADVANCED RULE · TERRAIN VARIANT · 100 YEARS WAR VARIANT · GAME CREDITS:	p.4	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 81 ms · first delta 944 ms · total 4426 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 81 ms · ask 4342 ms · gateway work 4426 ms · total 4426 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 1787
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 688
tok/sec: 200.5 tok/sec — 688 output tokens in 3.431 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, 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 1067), 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.