RuleSage cited table rulings
← Hannibal & Hamilcar

You asked

how do i set the game up?

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

Asked with: Hannibal & Hamilcarbg-227460-en-1e

I looked through Hannibal & Hamilcar'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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook · p.8 · 6.7 . Scipio Africanus · 7.1. Receiving Strategy Cards · 7.2. Two Options for Each Card · 7.3. Who Goes First · 7 .3.1. Preempting Who Goes First · 7 .3.2. How to Preempt · …
Scipio Africanus arrives as a reinforcement in the Hannibal scenario on Turn 6 (211-210 B.C.) as a second Proconsul. He brings five CUs (these are in addition to the five CUs the Roman player normally receives) with him. Scipio and his 5 CUs must be placed as a group; they may not be split up. The R
RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook · p.8 · 7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase
The players alternate playing Strategy Cards until all cards in each player's hand have been played. At this point, the Strategy Phase ends. It is possible that one player may use all of his Strategy Cards while his opponent still has several left in his hand. In this case, the player who still has
RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook · p.18 · EXAMPLE: · 14.4. Militia · 14.5. Sequence of Land Battle Resolution · 14.6. Battle Round · 14.7 . Matching the Attacker's Battle Card
In the Hannibal scenario, the Carthaginian player controls Gallia Cisalpina and Lucania. The Roman player controls Campania, Samnium, and Etruria. Neither side controls Apulia. Both sides would receive two extra BCs for Allies. Rome receives two extra BCs for any Land Battle that occurs in Latium (t
RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook · p.19 · 14.8. Counterattacks · 14.9. Reserve Cards · 14.10. How to Win a Land Battle · 14.11. Land Battle Casualties
To attempt a counterattack, the defender rolls the die. If the die roll is less than or equal to his commanding General's Battle Rating, he has seized the initiative and becomes the attacker. If the die roll is greater than his General's Battle Rating, he fails and remains the defender in the next B
RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook · p.9 · 7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase · 8.1. Description · 8.2. Using the Operation Points (OPs) · EXAMPLE:
OPS Value = 1 Each Strategy Card has two primary elements: a number between 1 and 3 in the upper left corner (called the Operation Points or OPs) and an Event. The type of circle around the number shows who may use the Event (8.3). The OPs number is used to activate Generals or place PCs. The Event
🔧 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 127 ms · ask 3850 ms · total 3979 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 3979 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Scipio Africanus arrives as a reinforcement in the Hannibal scenario on Turn 6 (211-210 B.C.) as a second Proconsul. He brings five CUs (these are in addition to the five CUs the Roman player normally receives) with him. Scipio and his 5 CUs must be placed as a group; they may not be split up. The R", "headingPath": "6.7 . Scipio Africanus · 7.1. Receiving Strategy Cards · 7.2. Two Options for Each Card · 7.3. Who Goes First · 7 .3.1. Preempting Who Goes First · 7 .3.2. How to Preempt · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The players alternate playing Strategy Cards until all cards in each player's hand have been played. At this point, the Strategy Phase ends. It is possible that one player may use all of his Strategy Cards while his opponent still has several left in his hand. In this case, the player who still has ", "headingPath": "7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "In the Hannibal scenario, the Carthaginian player controls Gallia Cisalpina and Lucania. The Roman player controls Campania, Samnium, and Etruria. Neither side controls Apulia. Both sides would receive two extra BCs for Allies. Rome receives two extra BCs for any Land Battle that occurs in Latium (t", "headingPath": "EXAMPLE: · 14.4. Militia · 14.5. Sequence of Land Battle Resolution · 14.6. Battle Round · 14.7 . Matching the Attacker's Battle Card", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "To attempt a counterattack, the defender rolls the die. If the die roll is less than or equal to his commanding General's Battle Rating, he has seized the initiative and becomes the attacker. If the die roll is greater than his General's Battle Rating, he fails and remains the defender in the next B", "headingPath": "14.8. Counterattacks · 14.9. Reserve Cards · 14.10. How to Win a Land Battle · 14.11. Land Battle Casualties", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "OPS Value = 1 Each Strategy Card has two primary elements: a number between 1 and 3 in the upper left corner (called the Operation Points or OPs) and an Event. The type of circle around the number shows who may use the Event (8.3). The OPs number is used to activate Generals or place PCs. The Event ", "headingPath": "7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase · 8.1. Description · 8.2. Using the Operation Points (OPs) · EXAMPLE:", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "After a successful Avoid Land Battle, the active player may attempt to continue moving (either to pursue or to move off in a different direction). To determine if the attempt is successful, roll the die. If the die roll is less than or equal to your General's Battle Rating, your Army can continue mo", "headingPath": "13.4. Pursuit · 13.5. Walled Cities and Avoid Land Battle · Land Battles · 14.1. Battle Cards (BC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 30, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "26.6.1. All cities (except Rome, Carthage, Syracuse, Carthago Nova, and Gades) fall once TWO (not three) Siege Points are accumulated by the besieging Force. 26.6.2. Roll the White Siege die if: \u0007 1 or more unbesieged enemy CUs are located in a space adjacent to the besieged city and/or 1 or more en", "headingPath": "26.6. Alternate Siege Rules (Charles' Variant) · 26.7 . Vanilla Hannibal", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "During the Victory Check Phase, players count the number of politically significant Provinces they control. All are politically significant except Gallia Transalpina, Massilia, Liguria, Baleares, and Mauretania (optional province). You earn one Political Point for each politically significant Provin", "headingPath": "22.1. Procedure · EXAMPLE: · 22.3. Sue for Peace · 22.4. End of Game · Sudden Victory", "sharpsignalDocId": 977}]
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 977 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 977 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 10, 2026 15:26 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 6.7 . Scipio Africanus · 7.1. Receiving Strategy Cards · 7.2. Two Options for Each Card · 7.3. Who Goes First · 7 .3.1. Preempting Who Goes First · 7 .3.2. How to Preempt · … p.8 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase p.8 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) EXAMPLE: · 14.4. Militia · 14.5. Sequence of Land Battle Resolution · 14.6. Battle Round · 14.7 . Matching the Attacker's Battle Card p.18 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 14.8. Counterattacks · 14.9. Reserve Cards · 14.10. How to Win a Land Battle · 14.11. Land Battle Casualties p.19 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase · 8.1. Description · 8.2. Using the Operation Points (OPs) · EXAMPLE: p.9 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)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 13.4. Pursuit · 13.5. Walled Cities and Avoid Land Battle · Land Battles · 14.1. Battle Cards (BC) p.17 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)) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 26.6. Alternate Siege Rules (Charles' Variant) · 26.7 . Vanilla Hannibal p.30 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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 22.1. Procedure · EXAMPLE: · 22.3. Sue for Peace · 22.4. End of Game · Sudden Victory p.26 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 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 atdocumentheadingpage fused rankfused RRF scorecarried byhow it got its slot
#1 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) Introduction · Game Components p.3 #27 0.011494 (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
#2 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) Optional Rules · 26.1. Additional Strategy Cards (Hannibal Scenarios) · 26.1.1. Messenger Intercepted: Variant · 26.1.2. Elephant Fright: Variant · 26.2. Additional Generals (Hannibal scenarios) p.29 #14 0.013514 (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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) HANNIBAL & HAMILCAR contain several different scenarios. · HANNIBAL & HAMILCAR are played in turns, each of which must be played in the following order: · 5.2. Deal Strategy Cards · 5.3. Strategy Phase · 5.4. Winter Attrition Phase · 5.5. Political Isolation Removal Phase · … p.6 #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
#4 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 2.2. The Playing Pieces · Design Note: · 2.2.5. DICE: p.4 #9 0.014493 (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
#5 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 6.7 . Scipio Africanus · 7.1. Receiving Strategy Cards · 7.2. Two Options for Each Card · 7.3. Who Goes First · 7 .3.1. Preempting Who Goes First · 7 .3.2. How to Preempt · … p.8 #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
#6 RULEBOOK Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 3.1. Province · 3.2. Regions · Note: · Glossary Of Game Terms p.5 #37 0.010309 (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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) EXAMPLE: · 8.3. Events · 8.4. Counter Events · 8.5. 'Remove if Played' Cards · 8.6. Discarding p.10 #21 0.012346 (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 Hannibal & Hamilcar — Rulebook (corpus doc 977) 7.4. Ending the Strategy Phase p.8 #2 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)) 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 127 ms · first delta 3818 ms · total 3979 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 127 ms · ask 3850 ms · gateway work 3979 ms · total 3979 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
4020
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
180.0 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.050 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 25s 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 907), 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.