Ruling — For the People

← For the People

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: For the Peoplebg-833-en-1e

To play For The People, follow these steps:

Setup

1. Decide which scenario of the game you are going to play.[1]

2. Shuffle the Strategy Cards and place them on the table.[1]

3. Place the pieces according to the initial setup locations listed in the scenario.[1] Confederate pieces are placed on the board first.[1]

4. Place the Game Turn marker on the first game turn of the scenario on the Game Turn Record Track.[1]

Strategy Rounds

1. Determine who plays first: If the Confederate player has a Major or Minor Campaign Strategy Card, he may choose to go first (but must then use that card as an EC card); otherwise, the Union player plays the first Strategy Card and goes first.[2]

2. Players alternate playing Strategy Cards until all cards in each player's hand have been played.[2]

3. If one player exhausts his cards prior to the other, the player who still has Strategy Cards plays them one at a time until his entire hand is played.[2]

4. When a Strategy Card is played, the opponent may potentially play an "interrupt" card to override or modify the original card's instructions.[2][3]

5. If an interrupt card is used to interrupt a move of a campaign card, the remaining moves of that campaign card are completed before the interrupting player takes his normal strategy round.[3]

6. If a player has at least one Strategy Card in his hand when it is his turn, he must play it or discard.[3] Discarding a card counts as a Strategy Card play, but none of the card's instructions are implemented.[3]

Political Control Phase

1. Players first place their Capital markers in a space (if necessary).[2]

2. Players then determine political control.[2]

3. If a side's capital was occupied by enemy combat units, the capital must be moved to another friendly space.[2]

Reinforcement Phase

1. During each Reinforcement Phase, newly arriving generals are placed face down on the map after Strategic Movement.[4]

2. A player must announce the space into which a general will be placed prior to randomly picking the general.[4]

3. A leader may not be placed in a space that does not have a LOC or a friendly SP; if more than one unrevealed general is placed in the same space, there must be at least 1 SP per general in that space.[4]

4. After all unrevealed generals from both sides have been placed, reveal all of them for both the Union and Confederacy simultaneously.[4]

Ending the Game

1. A game can end at the conclusion of any Fall game turn (using the appropriate scenario victory conditions) or the Spring 1865 game turn (using the Campaign Game's victory conditions).[1]

[1] RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook · p.11 · 1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up

[2] RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook · p.12 · 3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase

[3] RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook · p.13 · 4.2 Event Cards (EC)

[4] RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook · p.37 · 10.6 Bringing Generals Into Play

Settled. Play 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 191 ms · ask 7271 ms · total 18542 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 11074 ms · generation 7468 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 12, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "3.31 WHO PLAYS FIRST: If the Confederate player has a Major or Minor Campaign Strategy Card, he may choose to go first, if he wishes, but then must use that card as an EC card. Otherwise, he tells the Union player to proceed. The Union player then plays the first Strategy Card and goes first. 3.32 P", "headingPath": "3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.045055, "snippet": "STEP A: Both players place their reinforcements on the map (Union first, followed by the Confederate player). The Union player receives his reinforcements from a fixed schedule [10.3] minus enemy controlled state capitals and foreign intervention, whereas the Confederate reinforcements are potential", "headingPath": "3.1 Reinforcement Phase · 3.2 Players Deal Strategy Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 41, "score": 0.042878, "snippet": "The scenarios are intended to be played in the following man -ner. Begin and end a scenario as indicated in the description and determine victory as per the relevant victory conditions. Alter -nately, start a scenario and play to the end of a later scenario. This allows for a play of the game to var", "headingPath": "SCENARIOS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.042221, "snippet": "If some combination of events or circumstances is not explicitly mentioned in the rules (including design and playnotes), then you cannot do it. Decide which scenario of the game you are going to play. The setup for the Campaign Game and the 1861 Scenario appear be -low in this section and is printe", "headingPath": "1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.041414, "snippet": "1 © 2024 GMT Games, LLC FOR THE PEOPLE GMT Games, LLC • P.O. Box 1308, Hanford, CA 93232-1308 • www.GMTGames.com Rules of Play 2024 EDITION Inventory ..................................................................... 2 Credits ......................................................................", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.041317, "snippet": "DESIGN NOTE: The Strategy Cards are the engine that runs this design. The cards are designed to present the player with his political and operational options. The use of Strategy Cards as political instruments will slow the operational tempo of military operations. The converse is also true. Both si", "headingPath": "4.0 Strategy Cards · 4.1 Operations Cards (OC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "FOR THE PEOPLE 2024 EDITION © 2024 GMT Games, LLC 1", "headingPath": "Rules of Play · TABLE OF CONTENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "4.21 PROCEDURE: All Strategy Cards can potentially be played as an Event Card (EC). Event Cards allow the player to incorporate critical events into their overall strategy. The event on each Strategy Card carries specific instructions as to which side can play it, when it can be played, and the effe", "headingPath": "4.2 Event Cards (EC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "4.2 Event Cards (EC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}, {"page": 37, "quote": null, "headingPath": "10.6 Bringing Generals Into Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 1215}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 1215 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 1215 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 0.91864 of 2151 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 7, 2026 03:09 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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase	p.12	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
#2	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	3.1 Reinforcement Phase · 3.2 Players Deal Strategy Cards	p.12	0.045055 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	SCENARIOS	p.41	0.042878 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up	p.11	0.042221 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)		p.1	0.041414 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	4.0 Strategy Cards · 4.1 Operations Cards (OC)	p.13	0.041317 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	Rules of Play · TABLE OF CONTENTS	p.1	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))	51
#8	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	4.2 Event Cards (EC)	p.13	0.029958 (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 80 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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up	p.11	#4	0.042221 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase	p.12	#1	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
#3	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	10.6 Bringing Generals Into Play	p.37	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	Union Strategy Round 3:	p.8	#43	0.017556 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	Union Strategy Round 2:	p.7	#49	0.016475 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	4.3 Major and Minor Campaign Strategy Cards	p.13	#13	0.025987 (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
#7	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	4.2 Event Cards (EC)	p.13	#8	0.029958 (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
#8	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	SCENARIOS	p.41	#3	0.042878 (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 For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	1.4 How to Interpret Rules Ambiguity · 2.1 Choose Scenario · 2.2 Setting Up	p.11	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	3.3 Strategy Rounds · 3.4 Political Control Phase	p.12	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	4.2 Event Cards (EC)	p.13	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK For the People — Rulebook (corpus doc 1215)	10.6 Bringing Generals Into Play	p.37	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 191 ms · first delta 4347 ms · total 18542 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 11074 ms · retrieval 191 ms · ask 7271 ms · gateway work 7468 ms · total 18542 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3004
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 608
tok/sec: 201.4 tok/sec — 608 output tokens in 3.019 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 58s 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: 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 1145), 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.