Hi there folks-
We were playing through Skull and Shackles 5-1 last night ("An Unforgivable Act") and something felt wrong about what happened. Here's the situation, tell me if we did something wrong. This is a 4-player game, 6 locations.
3 Sentinel Devil Henchmen
2 Named Henchmen (can't remember the names, we will go with "Conan" and "Harley Quinn")
1 Villain "The Diva"
Special rule goes like this: If "The Diva" would be defeated, check to see if "Conan" and "Harley Quinn" have been defeated. If they have not, "The Diva" is undefeated.
Location #1 is the first to be closed, encountering and defeating a Sentinel Devil
Location #5 is the next to be closed, defeating "Conan"
Location #2 is next, encountered and defeated Sentinel Devil
At Location #4, we encounter "The Diva". #6 is then temp-closed, leaving only #3 open during the Villain battle (and of course #4, the villain's location)
We "defeat" the villain, but of course, we haven't found Harley Quinn yet, so she is "undefeated. We take the top card of the blessings deck, shuffle it together with the villain and split them between #3 and #4.
#6 is the next deck closed, it contains a Sentinel Devil.
So at this point we know that either
1) The villain is back in #4
2) The villain and Harley Quinn are both in #3.
Using the Farglass, we discover the Villain in location #3, second card down. This means that Harley Quinn is also in location #3.
We close location #4.
Here's the question:
Hasn't this created a situation wherein the team has to keep encountering the villain, "undefeating" her and shuffling her back into the location afterwards until such time as Harley Quinn ends up *above* the villain so that she can be defeated first?
That's what happened, and we ran out of time. I couldn't find anything wrong with the rules of all this, but it seemed pretty brutal.
We spent a decent amount of time after the game strategizing about how to prevent this the next time, and I think we will either
a) Empty a non-start-of-turn-penalty location and leave it open as a planned "trap" for the villain (50/50 shot)
or
b) Perm close 2 locations, and then temp close every time to make sure the villain stays put in her current location until we can close her in. The problem with this is that the Check-To-Close in this scenario are downright nasty (*banish 2 blessings?- ouch!)
Thanks-
Tim (aka Wu Shen the nearly-dead-rogue)