Ruling — Friedrich: Anniversary Edition

← Friedrich: Anniversary Edition

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Friedrich: Anniversary Editionbg-12891-en-1e

Setup

1. Raffle the roles of Friedrich, Elisabeth, Maria Theresa, and Pompadour to players using Tactical Cards.[1]

2. Divide one army sheet into four and give each player a quarter.[1]

3. Set up all pieces on the indicated setup and depot cities.[1]

4. Place generals on cities marked with their rank number in their color, and supply trains on cities marked with a 'T' in their color.[1]

5. Secretly assign all starting troops to generals by writing numbers in the boxes next to their names, ensuring each general has at least 1 but no more than 8 troops.[1][2]

6. Shuffle one Tactical Card deck for immediate use and set aside the other three.[1]

7. Place five game turn record markers in the track next to '1756' (one in each box numbered 1 to 5).[1]

8. Shuffle the English Cards of Fate deck and place it on the hourglass next to the game turn record track.[1]

Sequence of Play

The game is played in turns, with each turn consisting of 7 action stages (one for each nation) carried out in a strict order: France, Prussia, Hanover, Russia, Sweden, Austria, and Imperial Army.[3] Each nation's action stage is divided into 5 phases in the following order:

1. Tactical Cards: The active nation draws TCs from the draw deck.[3][4]

2. Movement: The active nation may move all its pieces, conquer objectives, recruit new troops, and re-enter generals and supply trains.[3]

3. Combat: All active generals must attack adjacent enemy generals.[3]

4. Retroactive conquests: These are checked for.[3]

5. Supply: Supply is checked for all active generals.[3]

6. End of turn: For the first five turns, one marker is removed from the game turn record track; starting with the sixth end of turn, the top Card of Fate is turned, read, and its instructions are executed.[3]

Combat

1. Every general adjacent to an enemy general at the beginning of a nation's combat phase must attack.[5][3]

2. If multiple attacks must be made, the active player chooses the order of resolution.[5]

3. Players first state how many troops their participating generals command; the difference between these numbers is the initial score.[5]

4. The inferior player (the one with the lower troop count) has the right to play a single TC of the same suit as the sector in which their general is positioned, adding its value to the initial score.[5][6]

5. The right to play TCs switches to the other player if the score becomes zero or positive.[6]

6. The player with the right to play continues playing TCs as long as they have a negative current score.[6]

7. Combat ends when the player with the right to play is unable or unwilling to play a card.[6]

8. The defeated general loses troops equal to the final negative score (up to the amount they commanded) and retreats that many cities.[6]

9. The winner loses no troops and remains in place.[6]

10. In the event of a tie (where a player cannot or will not play a card on a score of zero), neither side loses troops or retreats.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.2 · How to start

[2] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · 6 THE TROOPS

[3] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.3 · 2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY

[4] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.3 · 3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)

[5] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.4 · 7 COMBAT

[6] RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook · p.5 · 7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:

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 189 ms · ask 6394 ms · total 9460 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 2874 ms · generation 6586 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.047371, "snippet": "The game FRIEDRICH includes: 1 game board 24 stickers for generals 240 cards, in detail: 4 Tactical Cards decks, 50 cards each 2 × 18 Cards of Fate (English & German) 4 playing aids this rules booklet (incl. 4 army sheets in the middle of this booklet) Every nation has generals and supply trains, he", "headingPath": "The playing pieces · The map", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "negative for the player inferior in troops, and positive for the other one. Next, the inferior player has the right to play a single TC of his suit. He adds the TC value to the initial score. This results in the current score which he states aloud. Again, this score is valid for both players (negati", "headingPath": "7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046964, "snippet": "The game is played in turns. A turn consists of 7 action stages, one for each nation. The nations' action stages are carried out one after the other in the following strict order: France During her action stage a nation is called active . Every nation's action stage is divided into 5 phases, which a", "headingPath": "2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045724, "snippet": "At the beginning of the game no nation holds any Tactical Cards (TC). Each turn, the first phase of a nation's action stage is to draw a number of TCs from the draw deck: | Prussia | 4+3 TC | Hanover | 1+1 TC | | Russia | 4 TC | Sweden | 1 TC | | Austria | 4+1 TC | Imperial Army | 1 TC | | France | ", "headingPath": "3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045536, "snippet": "Every general who is adjacent to an enemy general at the beginning of his nation's combat phase must attack. If more than one attack must be made, the active player chooses the order of resolution. Every attack is resolved as a card game using Tactical Cards (TCs). A player may play only those TCs w", "headingPath": "7 COMBAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.044002, "snippet": "If the picked Card of Fate shows 4 versions, read out the one with the suit corresponding to the sector where the most recently victorious general is currently positioned. If you want fate to be less extreme, you can set up the Clock of Fate as follows: : Before shuffling the Cards of Fate, set asid", "headingPath": "13 THE EXPERT GAME · 14 SCENARIOS FOR 2 PLAYERS", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Using the Tactical Cards 13, 13, 13, 13, the roles of Friedrich, Elisabeth, Maria Theresa and Pompadour are raffled to the players. In the middle of this booklet are the army sheets. Divide one army sheet into four and give each player his respective quarter. Each player will also need a pen The pla", "headingPath": "How to start", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029469, "snippet": "BWCTCUCTCPD8 \bD6D9D7D7CXCP CQCTCUD3D6CT D8CWCT CCD7CPD6CXD2CP CSCXCTD7AX \u0007D6B8 CQCT BYD6CTCSCTD6CX CZ D8CWCT BZD6CTCPD8 CPD2CS D7D8D6D9CVCVD0CT CUD3D6 D7D9D6DACXDACPD0 DBCXD8CW CP D1CXDCD8D9D6CT D3CU D3D9D6CPCVCTD3D9D7 DBCXD0D0D4D3DBCTD6B8 D7D9CSCSCTD2 CXD2D7D4CXD6CPD8CXD3D2 FRIEDRICH is a strategy ", "headingPath": "ANNIVERSARY EDITION · 1 INTRODUCTION", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "How to start", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "6 THE TROOPS", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7 COMBAT", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:", "sharpsignalDocId": 969}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 969 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 969 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 0.90626 of 2443 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Sep 20, 2026 09:23 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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	The playing pieces · The map	p.2	0.047371 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:	p.5	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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY	p.3	0.046964 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)	p.3	0.045724 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT	p.4	0.045536 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	13 THE EXPERT GAME · 14 SCENARIOS FOR 2 PLAYERS	p.7	0.044002 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	How to start	p.2	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
#8	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	ANNIVERSARY EDITION · 1 INTRODUCTION	p.2	0.029469 (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 29 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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT	p.4	#5	0.045536 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY	p.3	#3	0.046964 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	How to start	p.2	#7	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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)	p.3	#4	0.045724 (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
#5	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	6 THE TROOPS	p.4	#19	0.013889 (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
#6	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	13 THE EXPERT GAME · 14 SCENARIOS FOR 2 PLAYERS	p.7	#6	0.044002 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	TACTICAL HINTS	p.8	#10	0.029211 (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 Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:	p.5	#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

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	How to start	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	6 THE TROOPS	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	2 SEQUENCE OF PLAY	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	3 TACTICAL CARDS (TC)	p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT	p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Friedrich: Anniversary Edition — Rulebook (corpus doc 969)	7 COMBAT · SPECIAL CASES:	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 189 ms · first delta 2784 ms · total 9460 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 2874 ms · retrieval 189 ms · ask 6394 ms · gateway work 6586 ms · total 9460 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3335
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 723
tok/sec: 194.4 tok/sec — 723 output tokens in 3.719 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 21s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 22h, checked 1s 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 899), 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.