Ruling — Washington's War

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Washington's Warbg-38996-en-1e

During the Strategy Phase, players play cards to move Generals and accompanying CUs, place and flip PC markers, or bring reinforcements into the game.[1]

Playing OPS Cards

Each time a player plays an OPS Card, they may perform one of the following actions:[2]

1. Activate a General for movement, with or without Combat Units, provided the General's Strategy Rating is equal to or less than the number on the card.[2]

- A '3' card can activate any General.[2]

- A '2' card can activate Generals with Strategy Ratings of 2 or 1.[2]

- A '1' card can activate only a General with a Strategy Rating of 1.[2]

2. Add a number of PC Markers to the map equal to the number on the card.[2]

- For the British, this can include placing new British PC markers or flipping American PC markers to the British side.[3]

- New British PC markers must be placed in spaces adjacent to spaces that already contained British PC markers at the start of the card play (no "dauring" or "daisy chaining").[3]

- The British may place a British PC marker in any space not containing a PC marker of either side or an American Unit.[3]

3. Bring on Reinforcements.[2]

4. Place the number of Operations into an Operations Queue.[2]

- A player starts a queue by playing a 1 or 2 OPS Card face up in front of them and placing an "Operations Queue" marker on top.[4]

- On the next Strategy Card play, the player may play an additional OPS Card into the Queue.[4]

- The player may then activate a General with a Strategy Rating less than or equal to the total value of the cards in the Queue, or continue the Queue.[4]

- The Queue is abandoned if the player discards or plays any Strategy Card to perform a different activity (though Battle Cards or discarded Event cards during battle resolution do not cause abandonment).[4]

- When the Queue is used or abandoned, all associated OPS Cards are placed face up in the Discard Pile.[4][2]

Playing Event Strategy Cards

1. When an Event Strategy Card is played, the instructions on the card are implemented.[5]

2. If the text uses "may," the action is voluntary.[6]

3. If the text does not use "may," all instructions must be implemented.[6]

4. Most (but not all) Event Strategy cards may be discarded; if discarded, the player may take alternative minor actions as described.[5]

5. Special Event Strategy Cards must be implemented and cannot be discarded.[5]

6. If an event causes a Strategy Card to be removed from an opponent's hand, the player playing the event randomly draws and discards a card from the opponent's hand without looking.[6]

7. After play, cards that are removed from play are set aside, while all other cards are placed face up on the Discard Pile.[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.4 · 3.0 TERMINOLOGY

[2] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.7 · 6.2 Playing the OPS Cards

[3] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.18 · B. British:

[4] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.10 · 7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards

[5] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.8 · 6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards

[6] RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook · p.8 · 6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards

Rule found, game on.

🔧 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 204 ms · ask 6212 ms · total 6419 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 6419 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 10, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "As his first play, he places one of the 1 OPS Cards in front of him and starts an Operations Queue, placing an 'Operations Queue' marker on top of it. The American player makes a routine play that does not change the British player's plan. The British player then plays the second 1 OPS Card into the", "headingPath": "7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "A. To activate a General with a Strategy Rating of 3 (e.g., Carleton), play an OPS Card with the number 3 on it. To activate a General with a Strategy Rating of 2 (e.g., Gates), play an OPS Card with either the number 3 or 2 on it. A General with a strategy rating of 1 (e.g., Greene) may be activate", "headingPath": "7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "Washington's War follows a specific sequence of play. All activi -ties of one phase must be completed before the subsequent phase is started. Within a phase, all activities of one segment must be completed before the next segment is started. Within a segment, players may perform their activities sim", "headingPath": "5.0\t SEQUENCE OF PLAY · 5.1 Reinforcements Phase · 5.2 Strategy Cards Phase · 5.3 Strategy Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.04598, "snippet": "A. The Event Strategy Cards simulate events that occurred, or may have occurred, during the historical conflict. When an Event Strategy Card is played, the instructions on the card are precisely implemented. Alternatively most (but not all) Event Strategy cards may be discarded, in which case the di", "headingPath": "6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045957, "snippet": "Most of the game play revolves around the use of OPS Cards. These cards let players conduct their military campaigns and take control of spaces and colonies. Each time a player plays an OPS Card, he may do one (and only one) of the following: Activate a General for movement, with or without Combat U", "headingPath": "6.2 Playing the OPS Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045928, "snippet": "Play of a Strategy Card Event implements all of the actions described in the text of the card. To allow the text on the card to be concise, some generalities apply: Many events have conditional clauses that limit the activity in the event; read the card text carefully. For example the 'Joseph Brant ", "headingPath": "6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045635, "snippet": "During the Strategy Phase, all activity depends on the play of Strategy cards. This includes moving Armies and fighting battles as well as taking control of spaces (by placing PC markers), bringing in reinforcements, and causing events to happen. The first three actions occur by playing the OPS Card", "headingPath": "6.0\t STRATEGY CARDS · 6.1 Dealing Strategy Cards and Reshuffling the Strategy Card Deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.039313, "snippet": "3 4 Setting up the Game .........................................5 5 Sequence of Play ..............................................6 6 Strategy Cards ...................................................7 7 Movement ....................................................... 10 8 Reinforcements .........", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3.0\t TERMINOLOGY", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6.2 Playing the OPS Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 18, "quote": null, "headingPath": "B. British:", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 973}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 973 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 973 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 0.91385 of 2217 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 6, 2026 21:51 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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards	p.10	0.047712 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards	p.10	0.047163 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	5.0 SEQUENCE OF PLAY · 5.1 Reinforcements Phase · 5.2 Strategy Cards Phase · 5.3 Strategy Phase	p.6	0.046635 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards	p.8	0.04598 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.2 Playing the OPS Cards	p.7	0.045957 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards	p.8	0.045928 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.0 STRATEGY CARDS · 6.1 Dealing Strategy Cards and Reshuffling the Strategy Card Deck	p.7	0.045635 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)		p.1	0.039313 (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 62 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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards	p.10	#1	0.047712 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards	p.8	#6	0.045928 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	3.0 TERMINOLOGY	p.4	#16	0.025579 (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
#4	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	B. British:	p.18	#9	0.028405 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)		p.1	#8	0.039313 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards	p.8	#4	0.04598 (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
#7	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards	p.10	#2	0.047163 (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
#8	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.2 Playing the OPS Cards	p.7	#5	0.045957 (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 Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	3.0 TERMINOLOGY	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.2 Playing the OPS Cards	p.7	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	B. British:	p.18	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	7.1 Activating Generals with OPS Cards	p.10	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.3 Playing the Event Strategy Cards	p.8	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Washington's War — Rulebook (corpus doc 973)	6.31 Playing Event Strategy Cards	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 204 ms · first delta 3054 ms · total 6419 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 204 ms · ask 6212 ms · gateway work 6419 ms · total 6419 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3095
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 658
tok/sec: 201.8 tok/sec — 658 output tokens in 3.261 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 23s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 3s 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 903), 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.