So I had this interesting Ambush conundrum while playing this evening.
We encountered a villain while playing Plugg's Uglies and decided to temporarily close (among other locations) the Fringes of the Eye (Skull & Shackles, B). To close this location, you need to
Summon and defeat a random barrier; if undefeated, each character at this location randomly chooses a location and moves to it.
There was just one character at this location, and the summoned barrier was Ambush. That character failed to beat the check to defeat, so it was undefeated. We examined the location deck and the first monster was a henchman. That henchman was easily defeated, and since Ambush doesn't summon the monster, we considered we were probably allowed to close the location (permanently, this time). So we summoned another random barrier and… I was in fact very satisfied when we failed to beat it because I wasn't comfortable with these nested resolutions.
What do you think?
(In retrospect, I think the resolution is as simple as "the location card and the barrier card are in conflict over the 'undefeated' consequence, so by the Golden Rule, the location wins and the character is moved to a random location, Ambush gets back to the box, and the location is not temporarily closed. There is no need to examine the location deck to find a monster and encounter it.)
I would assume that you "finish one thing before you start another". Meaning, Ambush went undefeated forcing you to go through the deck and fight the first monster, which was the henchmen. The henchman was defeated, which reads "if defeated, you may immediately attempt to close this location"... this, to me, seems like an effect that is still nested within the result of NOT defeating the barrier.
All that being said, I would assume that you could then close the location. Once all of that is done, you go back to the original effect of the location "if undefeated, each character at this location randomly chooses a location and moves to it". I don't think closing the location nullifies this since you still failed to defeat the Ambush originally.
Of course, we could just wait for someone else to come along and prove all of this wrong, haha.
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Hmm, that's interesting. We know you can encounter cards at other locations (Alahazra), so I don't know that I'd say the two cards are in conflict. I would say you do the Ambush's effect, I just can't decide in what order. Would you move first because the location wins in the hierarchy? Or do you flip through the deck first because the card effects aren't actually in conflict (they both happen on undefeated, but they don't seem to conflict), and you resolve one thing before doing another, and have to finish Ambush before looking at the location effecyK
I see some similarities here to the question about the location in RotR where the closing requirement was to defeat or acquire the next card in the deck. If you were temp closing that location, the next card in the deck could be a henchman. And if you defeated the henchman you would then immediately attempt to permanently close the location.
Ok. So having thought this over, I think you were doing it right. Here is how I'd have played it.
1. Attempt to temporary close Fringes of the Eye, summoning Ambush. (If you defeat Ambush, the location would be closed but you wouldn't get the exploration, since you can never explore on another character's turn.)
2. You fail to defeat Ambush. The location is not temporarily closed. As a consequence of your failure you are required to search the location and encounter the next monster you find. You have to do that to finish your encounter with Ambush, which you must do before you return to the villain (as Raynair said).
3. You encounter the henchman. You defeat it.
4. Defeating it allows you to immediately attempt to permanently close the location. As I mentioned above, precedence from RotR shows you can encounter a henchman during a temporary closing and get to attempt to permanently close. So once you've encountered the henchman, we are basically in that territory.
So, yeah, you might luck out and get to permanently close a location by failing to temporarily close a location.
Not only that, you might get relocated to another location due to the location power (still pending), causing you to go to another location that might need closing.
Oh right. And I'd say that both Ambush and the location trigger when Ambush is undefeated. So you get to decide the order of them. It is a lot simpler to decide to deal with all the consequences of Ambush and then move.
I would have thought that you should finish what you were doing, in the sense of minimizing the nesting that isn't supposed to happen in this gave.
But if you move first, where does the card to encounter come from? If you draw a henchman from a remote deck, does it close your current location due to the Alahazra ruling? (The Alahzara ruling probably also means that you encounter a card from your new current location, but the other situation is fun to think about, in that when I find a can of worms I start looking for a can-opener.)
Moving is a start and end all in its own, so there's not really any 'nesting' to be had for being forced to move. You're still encountering the original encounter, the character is just in a different location than the encounter began in.
This is already being discussed concerning another instance where one might move when encountering a villain before the villain is actually fully finished resolving.