I've been reading and rereading the reveal and product page, and I'm still a little fuzzy on the idea of claiming rings. Maybe I missed something (or maybe it hasn't been mentioned), but is there only one of each ring between players? The text on Elemental Fury mentions unclaimed rings, so I'm inclined to say yes, but then again that doesn't seem to make much sense. Then again (again), can you claim the same ring multiple times? Can you lose control of a ring? Do you even control rings? The only thing I think I can say for certain is that Enlightenment as a win condition doesn't exist given that it wasn't mentioned at all in the overview.
Any ideas?

I think all claimed rings are returned to unclaimed status at the end of a round.

I suspect that winning a battle of a ring type will "claim" it, and it will become available again at the end of the turn during the clean up phase.

Since every attack is associated with a ring, and you can do one political and one military conflict (and I guess the same goes for the opponent, who I think have their turns at the same time), so that means of the five rings the options will become thiner the more conflicts actually already happened durring that round.

And given the wording of the Crab province, it seems logical that in case of the defender of the battle is the winner, the ring will be claimed but without having its effect resolved.

Imho it goes like this :

There are 5 rings in pool, available to both players.
As soon as first attacker assigns a ring to a conflict - it is done, doesnt matter if he wins (and claims the effect) or not.
Second and further attacker won't be able to assign the same ring which has been previously assigned.

edit : ofcourse there are provinces and other effects which switch rings, so after assignment of the ring, your opponent would be able to change it thus you could assign that ring in another conflict, assuming that your opponent won't beat you to it.

1 hour ago, Arkhonai said:

Imho it goes like this :

There are 5 rings in pool, available to both players.
As soon as first attacker assigns a ring to a conflict - it is done, doesnt matter if he wins (and claims the effect) or not.
Second and further attacker won't be able to assign the same ring which has been previously assigned.

edit : ofcourse there are provinces and other effects which switch rings, so after assignment of the ring, your opponent would be able to change it thus you could assign that ring in another conflict, assuming that your opponent won't beat you to it.

This is exactly as I expect it to be. With the clarification that only attackers claim tings and thus their effects.

Conflict Phase:

The player with priority will take a Ring Token, choose the red or blue side, and declares attackers.

The next player declares an attack in the same manner or passes.

The first player then declares an attack by taking an unassigned Ring token and chooses the opposite color.

The second player may then have an option to declare a battle, we aren't sure if he can if he passed on his first rotation.

To elaborate a little, this was discussed in the video with the designers. ( Here, if you haven't seen it).

There are 5 tokens, 1 for each ring, each with a blue side and a red side, blue for politics, red for military. To declare an attack, you take one of the rings and put it, appropriate side up, on the province you are attacking. So if one of the rings has been used, it's unavailable for the rest of the turn, unless an effect moves it or whatever. And one of the info pages indicates that you can pass your first attack option and still attack during the second opportunity.