Ruling — Battle for Rokugan

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Battle for Rokuganbg-234477-en-1e

To set up a game of Battle for Rokugan, follow these steps:

1. Place the game board in the center of the play area.[1]

2. Place the special tokens in a pile near the board.[1]

3. Place one random card from each territory facedown under the matching territory space along the edge of the game board, and return all other territory cards to the game box.[1]

4. Each player chooses a clan, takes their clan's corresponding daimyō screen and tokens, and reads their clan ability aloud to the other players.[1]

5. Each player takes their bluff token and places it behind their daimyō screen.[1]

6. Players flip their remaining combat tokens facedown and mix them to create a randomized combat token pool.[1]

7. Deal two scout cards and one shugenja card to each player.[1]

8. Shuffle the secret objective cards and deal two to each player; each player chooses one of these cards as their secret objective and returns the remaining cards to the game box.[1]

9. Each player locates their clan's capital and places one of their control tokens facedown in that capital's province.[1]

10. Each player sets aside a number of control tokens indicated by the 'Control Token Setup' table (11 for 2 players, 7 for 3 players, 5 for 4 players, and 4 for 5 players).[1]

11. Shuffle the initiative card of each clan chosen for the game to create the initiative deck.[2]

12. Reveal the top card from the deck to determine the first player; that player takes the first player card and places it near their daimyō screen, and the revealed initiative card is returned to the game box.[2]

13. Shuffle the neutral initiative cards and add them to the remaining cards in the initiative deck one at a time until the deck has a total of four cards (for a five-player game, no neutral initiative cards are used), then shuffle the deck and place it near the game board.[2]

14. Beginning with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player places one of their set-aside control tokens facedown in the center of any province that does not already contain a control token (provinces containing clan capitals and Shadowlands provinces may be chosen) until all set-aside tokens have been placed.[2]

15. Place the round track token on space '1' of the round track at the bottom of the game board.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook · p.4 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 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 257 ms · ask 4656 ms · total 4917 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4917 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "To set up a game of Battle for Rokugan, follow these steps: Place Game Board: Place the game board in the center of the play area. Place the special tokens in a pile near the board. Randomize Territory Cards: Place one random card from each territory facedown under the matching territory space along", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Determine First Player: Shuffle the initiative card of each clan chosen for this game to create the initiative deck . Then, reveal the top card from the deck; the clan that corresponds to the revealed card is the first player . That player takes the first player card and places it near their daimyō ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "A game of Battle for Rokugan is played over a series of five rounds. Each round consists of the following three phases that players resolve in order: the upkeep phase, the placement phase, and the resolution phase. During the upkeep phase, players determine a new first player, draw combat tokens, an", "headingPath": "Playing the Game · Upkeep Phase · 3. Play Territory Cards (Ignore During First Round):", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "During the placement phase, players place their combat tokens on the map to fortify their defenses, to attack neighboring clans, or to engage in diplomacy. Beginning with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player places one of their combat tokens from their hand facedown on the map. Pla", "headingPath": "Placement Phase · Placing Combat Tokens", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each territory has a space on the game board for a territory card. At the end of each resolution phase, each player determines if they control any territories. If a player controls all of the provinces in one territory, they take the card from that territory's space. At the end of the resolution pha", "headingPath": "Playing Territory Cards · Removing Tokens · The Shadowlands", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "During the resolution phase, players perform the following steps to resolve the combat tokens they placed on the map. After a token is resolved, it is discarded to a faceup pile near the player who placed it. This is the player's discard pile . Reveal Combat Tokens: Players flip all combat tokens on", "headingPath": "Resolution Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030118, "snippet": "This section contains many of the key concepts that players will need to understand to play the game. The game board features a map of Rokugan. The map contains two landmasses and a sea. The landmasses are divided into provinces , which are grouped into territories . A province is an area of the map", "headingPath": "Key Concepts · The Map · Provinces · Territories · Clans · Control and Combat Tokens · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Determine First Player Draw Combat Tokens Play Territory Cards ◊ Players take turns placing combat tokens on the board to attack or defend ◊ Only one combat token can be placed on a border (blessings are the exception) ◊ Combat tokens are always placed facedown (blessings are the exception) ◊ No lim", "headingPath": "Upkeep Phase Order · Placement Phase · Resolution Phase Order · End of Game Honor · Fantasy Flight Games · Asmodee North America", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 800}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 800 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 800 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 0.92754 of 1877 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 03:23 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 for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.4	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	300
#2	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.5	0.048387 (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 for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Playing the Game · Upkeep Phase · 3. Play Territory Cards (Ignore During First Round):	p.7	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 for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Placement Phase · Placing Combat Tokens	p.7	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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Playing Territory Cards · Removing Tokens · The Shadowlands	p.11	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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Resolution Phase	p.9	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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Key Concepts · The Map · Provinces · Territories · Clans · Control and Combat Tokens · …	p.6	0.030118 (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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Upkeep Phase Order · Placement Phase · Resolution Phase Order · End of Game Honor · Fantasy Flight Games · Asmodee North America	p.12	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 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 19 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 for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.4	#1	0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1)	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Playing the Game · Upkeep Phase · 3. Play Territory Cards (Ignore During First Round):	p.7	#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
#3	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)		p.3	#10	0.014286 (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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	End of the Game · Additional Rules · Successful Defense · Defense Bonuses	p.10	#9	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Playing Territory Cards · Removing Tokens · The Shadowlands	p.11	#5	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Placement Phase · Placing Combat Tokens	p.7	#4	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))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Key Concepts · The Map · Provinces · Territories · Clans · Control and Combat Tokens · …	p.6	#7	0.030118 (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 Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.5	#2	0.048387 (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 for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Battle for Rokugan — Rulebook (corpus doc 800)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 257 ms · first delta 2080 ms · total 4917 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 257 ms · ask 4656 ms · gateway work 4917 ms · total 4917 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3630
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 536
tok/sec: 195.5 tok/sec — 536 output tokens in 2.742 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 12s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 4s 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: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 735), 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.