RuleSage cited table rulings
← Dune: War for Arrakis

You asked

How do I play?

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

Asked with: Dune: War for Arrakisbg-367150-en-1e

I looked through Dune: War for Arrakis'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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook · p.17 · ◊ ACTION TURNS · elective action eFFects · ◊ ACTION DICE RESULTS · STRATEGY ACTION
Once both players have rolled their Action dice, they alternate turns taking 1 Action each, starting with the Atreides player. The available options are: ◊ Spend 1 Action die to execute 1 of the Actions corresponding to its die result. ◊ Spend any 1 Action die to play a Planning card from their hand
RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook · p.19 · ◊ PLAYING PLANNING CARDS
Playing Planning cards from their hand allows the players to take special Actions, often twisting the basic rules of the game. Many of the best-known events and secondary characters from the Dune saga may enter the game through the appropriate use of these cards. ◊ Players draw cards at the beginnin
RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook · p.38
If at any point during the placement, there are no more free Air Zones connected to the Sector where the Target Sietch is located, place the remaining Ornithopters in the Air Zones connecting Sectors adjacent to the Target Sietch, prioritizing Air Zones connecting Central Sectors with other Central
RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook · p.11 · PLAYER DASHBOARDS · THE SPICE MUST FLOW BOARD · PLAYING PIECES · ◊ UNITS
The two factions each have a dedicated dashboard the Giedi Prime dashboard for the Harkonnen player and the Sietch Tabr dashboard for the Atreides player. During the game, players take turns performing Actions including moving their figures on the board to capture enemy Settlements, deploying new Un
RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook · p.15 · SETUP · GAME ROUND · ◊ START OF THE ROUND · 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT (HARKONNEN ONLY)
Shuffle the 16 Wormsign tokens facedown to form the Wormsign tokens pool. 10 Take your faction's appropriate dashboard. Place all Named Leader cards marked as 'in play at the start of the game' faceup on the Action boxes matching their Action symbols. Set aside the corresponding Leader figures. Both
🔧 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 249 ms · ask 3727 ms · total 3978 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 3978 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 17, "score": 0.046544, "snippet": "Once both players have rolled their Action dice, they alternate turns taking 1 Action each, starting with the Atreides player. The available options are: ◊ Spend 1 Action die to execute 1 of the Actions corresponding to its die result. ◊ Spend any 1 Action die to play a Planning card from their hand", "headingPath": "◊ ACTION TURNS · elective action eFFects · ◊ ACTION DICE RESULTS · STRATEGY ACTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045956, "snippet": "Playing Planning cards from their hand allows the players to take special Actions, often twisting the basic rules of the game. Many of the best-known events and secondary characters from the Dune saga may enter the game through the appropriate use of these cards. ◊ Players draw cards at the beginnin", "headingPath": "◊ PLAYING PLANNING CARDS", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 38, "score": 0.045455, "snippet": "If at any point during the placement, there are no more free Air Zones connected to the Sector where the Target Sietch is located, place the remaining Ornithopters in the Air Zones connecting Sectors adjacent to the Target Sietch, prioritizing Air Zones connecting Central Sectors with other Central ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.04359, "snippet": "The two factions each have a dedicated dashboard the Giedi Prime dashboard for the Harkonnen player and the Sietch Tabr dashboard for the Atreides player. During the game, players take turns performing Actions including moving their figures on the board to capture enemy Settlements, deploying new Un", "headingPath": "PLAYER DASHBOARDS · THE SPICE MUST FLOW BOARD · PLAYING PIECES · ◊ UNITS", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.042399, "snippet": "Shuffle the 16 Wormsign tokens facedown to form the Wormsign tokens pool. 10 Take your faction's appropriate dashboard. Place all Named Leader cards marked as 'in play at the start of the game' faceup on the Action boxes matching their Action symbols. Set aside the corresponding Leader figures. Both", "headingPath": "SETUP · GAME ROUND · ◊ START OF THE ROUND · 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT (HARKONNEN ONLY)", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 37, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "SETUP Set up the game as in a 2-player game. Shuffle the 8 Tactical cards into a facedown Tactical deck and place it near at hand. Note: Leave the Sietch and Atreides Deployment tokens face down! Revealing such tokens has a game effect (see Special Rules on page 42). You can always inspect them at a", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "The Action Resolution phase is the most important phase of the game. It is during this phase that the players carry out their plans by executing Actions, trying to achieve their victory conditions. The available Actions depend mainly on the results of the players' sets of Action dice, and include de", "headingPath": "PHASE 2. ACTION RESOLUTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Vehicle Placement is carried out exclusively by the Harkonnen player. To do so, the player must check The Spice Must Flow board and the position of the Imperium markers next to it. The active row is the one where the lowest Imperium marker is positioned. Other markers positioned above it are irrelev", "headingPath": "PHASE 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT", "sharpsignalDocId": 380}]
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 380 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 380 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 7, 2026 18:03 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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) ◊ ACTION TURNS · elective action eFFects · ◊ ACTION DICE RESULTS · STRATEGY ACTION p.17 0.046544 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) ◊ PLAYING PLANNING CARDS p.19 0.045956 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.38 0.045455 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) PLAYER DASHBOARDS · THE SPICE MUST FLOW BOARD · PLAYING PIECES · ◊ UNITS p.11 0.04359 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) SETUP · GAME ROUND · ◊ START OF THE ROUND · 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT (HARKONNEN ONLY) p.15 0.042399 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.37 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
#7 RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) PHASE 2. ACTION RESOLUTION p.17 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
#8 RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) PHASE 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT p.16 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 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 78 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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.38 #3 0.045455 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) ◊ PLAYING PLANNING CARDS p.19 #2 0.045956 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.37 #6 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
#4 RULEBOOK Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.34 #13 0.025564 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.35 #12 0.026984 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) p.33 #20 0.024198 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) SETUP · GAME ROUND · ◊ START OF THE ROUND · 1. VEHICLE PLACEMENT (HARKONNEN ONLY) p.15 #5 0.042399 (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 Dune: War for Arrakis — Rulebook (corpus doc 380) SETUP p.14 #36 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

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 249 ms · first delta 3870 ms · total 3978 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 249 ms · ask 3727 ms · gateway work 3978 ms · total 3978 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3433
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
176.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.051 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 59s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage)
reachable (for 22h, checked 5s 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
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 309), 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.