Closing A Location Discrepancy

[Charles Scholz]

I just noticed a discrepancy with the Rule Book for closing a location. Here is the rule from the book. The bold print is what I am talking about.

When you have the opportunity and want to close a location, do
whatever the location's "When Closing" section says. (If it says you
may close the location automatically, you don't need to do anything
else.) If you succeed at meeting the "When Closing" requirement,
search through the location deck, take out the villain if it is there,
and banish the rest of the cards. If you find the villain, it becomes
the entirety of the location deck, and the location is not closed—but
at least you know where the villain is! If you don't find the villain,
perform the "When Permanently Closed" effect and flip the location
card over. The location stays closed for the rest of the scenario, so the
villain may not escape to that location (see Encountering a Villain on
page 18). Characters may move to closed locations and, if there are
cards there, may explore and encounter those cards as normal.

As you can see, the first line say you bannish all cards at a location when you close it, but the second line says you may explore the cards at a closed location.
So which rule are we supposed to follow? Do we leave cards there when we close the location or not?

Edit: Or are we supposed to leave the cards in place except when the Villain has escaped from another location and if found hiding at this location that is when all cards but the Villain are banished?

[Polyphemus]

Some locations, like the General Store, leave certain cards at the location, even after closing.

[Markon]

A slightly more detailed answer: For the majority of locations, the last bold line(Characters may move to closed locations and, if there are
cards there, may explore and encounter those cards as normal) won't apply, because the closed location won't have cards. In cases like the General Store, the closed location will have cards, hence why they left the last line in, just so people would be clear that you are allowed to explore a closed location, if (through some sort of special effect) there are cards there.

In short, there is no discrepancy, just a clarification for unusual cases, which appears to have confused you. I know a few things are a bit unclear (thought most of them have been fixed in the FAQ), but in this case, it seems you just over-thought it.

[Fromper]

This question actually comes up a lot, so I'm hoping they change the the next edition of the rulebook to make it clearer.

As already explained, you do banish all the cards when you close a location. The key phase in your second bolded sentence is "if there are cards there". Usually, there aren't, so that sentence won't apply. But some locations (I can think of two offhand) have special wording that allow them to have cards there after being closed.

[Bidmaron]

Well, if you go to a closed location (with or without cards), what about the "at this location" power? I had assumed that it no longer applied, but I noticed that some of the location cards have that echoed on the side of the card you flip over when the location closes (while most of them don't have an "at this location" on the closed side).

[Vic Wertz]

Rulebook wrote:

At This Location: These are special rules that are in effect while the location is open. Some of these remain in effect when the location is permanently closed; in that case, they also appear on the back of the location card.

[Bidmaron]

In my full-time job, I'm an idiot too

[Fromper]

As I said above, the initial question in this thread is fairly common. This is one of those cases where the rules are completely accurate, and say exactly what they mean, but without the extra knowledge that some locations are exceptions to closed locations not having cards to explore, it's easy for newbies to think that there's conflicting information here.

Here's my recommendation for an FAQ to cover this:

The rulebook says to banish all cards from a location when closing it, but then it talks about encountering cards at a location. Do we banish them or not?

You do banish location deck cards when the location is closed. However, certain locations instruct you to leave cards there, or put new cards at that location, in which case you can explore and encounter those cards like normal.

Resolution: On page 13 of the rulebook, replace the last sentence of the "Closing a Location" section with the following:

"Characters may moved to closed locations. While most closed locations won't have any cards to explore, some locations instruct you to leave or put cards there after closing the location. Characters may explore and encounter those cards as normal."