At the end of your turn, or when this location is not occupied, flip this card.
At the end of your turn, flip this card.
An unoccupied Abyssal Rift will flip from its temp closed side to its open side. It won't flip back until it is occupied (either when someone ends their turn there or buries a blessing to flip it).
At this point the rift is not occupied, so you flip it to the always open side. At the end of the turn you'll flip it back, but if the location is not occupied you'll put it back again. The At This Location text always applies, even if nobody is there. (p. 21 of the WotR rules)I'm now paranoid I'm not playing right.
1. You make sure the Abyssal rift is flipped "temp closed" side.
2. Leave.
Ah. We missed the text "when this location is not occupied".
I'm not sure about the flipping it every turn even when not occupied.
That interpretation of "At this location" text becomes kind of ridiculous.
Having the Marketplace does not make all boons everywhere easier to acquire (does it)?
Having the Cell open does make it difficult to move from every location, does it?
Having Watchtower pen doesn't let just anyone anywhere fight a monster to acquire boons, does it?
Having the Occult Library does not cause all books played everywhere to be banished, does it?
I'm not sure about the flipping it every turn even when not occupied.
That interpretation of "At this location" text becomes kind of ridiculous.
Fully agree. Like I said, an unoccupied Abyssal Rift only flips once.
I'm not sure about the flipping it every turn even when not occupied.
The At This Location text applies as long as the location is permanently open. (p. 21 of the WotR Rulebook.) This is reinforced by FAQs like the one for Chasm of Shadows, whose At This Location power is intended to block examining or searching the location's deck whether or not you (or anyone) is at the location. (The Fog Bank has something similar.) I'd still say that you check for flipping at the end of every turn, whether or not anyone is there.
The double-flip may not apply, but that's a different question. (And may have been answered already, but my searching/skimming is bad tonight.)
That interpretation of "At this location" text becomes kind of ridiculous. ...
In each of the cases listed, are the events involved "At This Location"?
I agree that there's a lot of location powers that are meant to only apply to characters at the location, but they aren't templated that way because of the name of the box they're in. However, as defined in the rulebook, that box actually contains powers that always apply to everyone. Perhaps an addition to the rulebook that "At This Location powers only apply to characters at the location, the location's deck, or the location itself unless they say otherwise." might be warranted. Or maybe that's just being overly pedantic. Hard to say. :)
The passage you're quoting is:
At This Location: These are special powers that are in effect while the location is open.
This doesn't tell us that powers that refer to "you" or "your turn" apply to all characters at all locations. The Chasm of Shadows is different: its power does not refer to "you" or "your turn".
Your position leads to absurd conclusions. In the Organized Play scenario 0-1B, which has a Shark Island location for every character, in a six-player game each player would have to fight six Hammerhead Sharks at the start of every turn.
I think the intent of the abyssal rift is pretty clear. It can only be closed if someone is occupying it, and then only every other turn. Maybe the rules text could be tightened up a little bit to prevent confusion, but I feel like other interpretations are being a bit pedantic.
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Frankly, this is getting ridiculous.
The moment I saw this card I knew it would need a whole page of FAQ all to itself, and I can't understand how it was not evident during play-testing. I'm just holding out for that FAQ to arrive, and when that's settled, if I never see a card designed to be too 'clever' for its own good, it won't be soon enough >:
These forums aside, I don't believe the game should be about the finer points of the corners cases of the exceptions to a sub-rule of a rule. And complaints about 'too easy' notwithstanding, I think one of the best qualities of RotR were its user-friendliness and the ability to immediately pick it up and enjoy it with new/casual players without getting bogged down in absurd rules minutiae.
I read the two powers as:
Abyssal side: At this location, at the end of your turn, flip this card.
Normal side: At this location, at the end of your turn, or when this location is not occupied, flip this card.
Not necessarily grammatically correct, but it implies that whenever no one is at the location, the card flips.
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Your position leads to absurd conclusions. ...
It does! But we all understand that, despite the rules not saying so, in most cases they didn't mean for everyone to fight a bunch of sharks every turn or checks at all locations are affected by one location or whatever. They only meant for it to apply to folks At This Location. Vic mentions it in this post.
However, sometimes they did mean for an At This Location power to apply whether or not anyone is there, and so there can be confusion. Good thing that most of the time we can look at the power and be reasonable about what it meant. :)
Ridiculous as it is, this card still doesn't seem to have a FAQ, and just don't have the patience to trawl through dozens of threads again. If there was ever an official resolution, more fresh in some kind soul's mind, would you share what happens if:
- a Villain is undefeated there, and AR is on its Temp Closed side (as the last "open" location)
- you do defeat a Villain and AR is on its Open side: do I get to bury a blessing to flip AR? Do I *automatically* flip AR? Did I just fight the damned villain for nothing??
The RAW (Rules As Written) answers for your two questions:
1. You win, as the villain has nowhere to escape to.
2. Nothing happens, the location does not flip. The "When permanently closed" instructs you that the location is never permanently closed, so you never banish any of the cards or flip the location card. You just skip that step entirely.
The RAI (Rules As Intended) answers, according to prior posts in this thread:
1. Shuffle the undefeated villain back into the same location it came from.
2. RAI matches RAW here; you don't banish any cards and you don't flip the location.
An official statement for your 2nd question can be found on the first page of this very thread.
The Core rulebook changes the parenthetical to "(Note that if you did not defeat the villain, there is normally at least one unguarded location: the one in which it was just encountered.)" -- note the addition of normally in there, indicating that it is possible for that to not be the case. However, the Core rulebook also states "To win many scenarios, your party of adventurers must locate, defeat, and corner a threatening villain." so defeating the villain to win is definitely still the intent.
If we were to FAQ this finally, my preferred outcome would be a rules modification in the Guard step: change "the villain’s location cannot be guarded" to "the villain’s location can never be guarded". This would ensure that an undefeated villain is always able to escape back to the location it came from.
If we were to FAQ this finally, my preferred outcome would be a rules modification in the Guard step: change "the villain’s location cannot be guarded" to "the villain’s location can never be guarded".
Wait... If I'm following you correctly - while your suggestion would fix the "undefeated villain at Temp-closed Abyssal Rift" issue, it would introduce another issue altogether - that a villain can never be cornered and defeated at the Abyssal Rift, right?
Frankly, I wouldn't be proponent of a general Rules FAQ just for one broken card, and I'd say the AR needs its own write-up just for the general amount of confusion it causes (as seen by thread above) - even for the aspects in which it is NOT technically broken. After all, I'd say here's gathered the more rules-savvy part of the PACG player base, and if we *still* need Vic to come and say "this should work like that because such-and-such" ... There's plenty of precedent of FAQs that are issued just to clarify powers (as opposed to fix them) and if there ever was a card that needs one of those, it's the Abyssal Rift.At any rate, thanks for the answer, skizzers. We're already made it halfway through SotR and I can't wait to not have to deal with that set again.
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If we were to FAQ this finally, my preferred outcome would be a rules modification in the Guard step: change "the villain’s location cannot be guarded" to "the villain’s location can never be guarded".Wait... If I'm following you correctly - while your suggestion would fix the "undefeated villain at Temp-closed Abyssal Rift" issue, it would introduce another issue altogether - that a villain can never be cornered and defeated at the Abyssal Rift, right?
Frankly, I wouldn't be proponent of a general Rules FAQ just for one broken card, and I'd say the AR needs its own write-up just for the general amount of confusion it causes (as seen by thread above) - even for the aspects in which it is NOT technically broken. After all, I'd say here's gathered the more rules-savvy part of the PACG player base, and if we *still* need Vic to come and say "this should work like that because such-and-such" ... There's plenty of precedent of FAQs that are issued just to clarify powers (as opposed to fix them) and if there ever was a card that needs one of those, it's the Abyssal Rift.At any rate, thanks for the answer, skizzers. We're already made it halfway through SotR and I can't wait to not have to deal with that set again.
Yeah AR would still be problematic with my suggested changes. Modifying my blue text suggestion to "and a defeated villain cannot escape to the location it came from" or codifying in rules text somehow that defeated villains must always escape to another location would patch that up.
Abyssal Rift is not the only problematic location here. You run into issues with undefeated villains at Gate of the Worldwound (another double-sided card) and Middle of Nowhere (always permanently closed) as well. In the Mummy's Mask box, the promo location Hypogeum would cause issues too if you somehow managed to get a villain there before it opened and then have it be undefeated (Dreamstalker is one such way of accomplishing this).
Right now, Core and Curse avoid this by not having any wonky locations like that. But imo the rules should be shored up so that we don't have a repeat of the above discussion when they eventually do introduce things like always-guarded locations that could conceivably also have a villain there (aka Base doesn't count).
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Skizzerz, I think you've got the right idea and just overreached a bit. Just make the added rules text "An undefeated villain can always escape to the location it came from (even if that location is considered guarded for some reason)." Fixes it for undefeated, doesn't break it for defeated, and is a fairly understandable language even if you don't understand why it's there.
Chief Technical Officer
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We've worked on this several times over the years. Core's rule that removes closed locations from play solved this issue... at least, it did during the short period while that rule also applied to older locations. But since we changed that in the Conversion Guide, it broke again.
It's kind of hard to get all of that discussion back into my brain, but I *think* that the solution we'd come up with just prior to Core may do the trick. That's the addition of this sentence to Check to See Whether the Villain Escapes: “If you fail to defeat a villain at a closed location while all other locations are closed, open a random other location and shuffle the villain into it.” (I believe this is now needed only when using certain older locations under the Conversion Guide, so this sentence would be added only to that guide.)
We didn't finish vetting that solution before it fell to the Core/Curse solution, though. The question is, are there any locations that break if they're reopened, or if they're permanently closed twice during the same scenario? And if there are, are they used in any scenarios that also have permanently closed locations?
(By the way, letting the villain escape back to the location it came from isn't viable because there's at least one situation where that can result in an unwinnable scenario.)
“If you fail to defeat a villain at a closed location while all other locations are closed, open a random other location and shuffle the villain into it.”
We've had a couple of questions about that:
- do temp closed locations at this specific moment count as closed? (we'd say YES, as this seems to supplant the normal "escape" procedure; in essence, you're still "rewarded" for temp-closing all else, as the villain now has chance to be "shuffled " as the single card in empty location - so you're pretty well-poised for the win)- if the above is YES, how does that that interact with Always Temp-Closed Abyssal Rift? For the rest of locations, it's pretty clear-cut - if they come up as the "random other closed location" - you just ignore their temp close and shuffle the Villain into their deck. However, if AR comes up as the random - do we just ignore its "always temp-closed" condition and shuffle the villain, or do we also flip the AR card to its "always open" side??
(The above is not hypothetical as we're going to play SotR 5B in a couple of nights, where it has a pretty likely chance of actually occurring)