Art De La Guerre

[SteveR]

So a road that runs "along" a table edge must be "entirely" UD away from it.

but.......

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Consider a road that runs from 4 to 5. Today my opponent placed the road from the side edge of 4, about 3 UD in. And then exited the table where 4 meets 5.

This had the effect of eliminating the ability to deploy baggage in sectors 4 and 5 and to his credit when I pointed it out he adjusted it to be more reasonable.

But I cant seem to articulate a limiting case. Any diagonal road will eliminate some ability to place baggage. Can anyone define a logical specification as to how narrow of an angle is too much? Or is this going to be a case of "I know it when I see it"

[KevinD]

Good point.

The back table edge is 30 UDs wide. Most other terrain features can take out 5-6 UDs of potential camp deployment space, If the road takes out more than half a dozen or so worth of potential camp deployment space of these I’d say it’s excessive. Depriving the opponent of one flank sector or half the central sector of potential camp deployment space is ok, much more than that is not.

[Hazelbark]

If I was umpiring and perceived a problem with this, I would adjust the road to perpendicular to the side it enters and then a 90 degree turn at the exit point. That is probably the explicit rule interpretation any way.

The standard is don't do excessively gamey stuff that explicitly tries to violate the rules intentions. I know that is a hard thing for all of us (including myself) that had the Reigate/WRG/Litigation of rules culture injected into our veins. It may be unsatisfying as rules standard, but it is a marginal gain that is not worth the very thin marginal gain.

The good news is you and you opponent solved it amicably

As Kevin suggests anything eliminating more than a few UD should be suspect.

[Ballista]

Pardon my ignorance but I'm missing something here.

Why does the placement of the road limit where the camp is able to be placed?

[Mark G Fry]

[AlanCutner]

A solution to this potential for gamesmanship (that I've never seen tried!) would be to state along the lines of "a road must exit the table at 90 degrees to table edge, and otherwise cannot go closer than 2UD to a back edge". This means any bend put in must iteslf be over 2UD from the table edge.

BTW what happens if an nasty player puts a road across all three sectors so its impossible to place the camp? Apart from refusing the play against that git?!

[Andy Fyfe]

[Mark G Fry]

[Neep]

I'd suggest that a road that enters a section and then leaves the table must remain 2 UD away from the edge for at least half the width of the section (i.e. 5 UD), using the "single bend" if necessary. That would make it roughly equivalent to other terrain pieces obstructing the camp.

[Zoltan]

Has anyone actually experienced an opponent trying to place a road to deliberately restrict where your camp can be placed?

[KevinD]

I’ll very occasionally use one to attempt to restrict where a camp can be placed, but not by approaching the back table edge at a shallow angle.

However, I much more often see one used to allow my opponent to redeploy quickly along their baseline.

[Ramses II]

I agree that this is not really a problem, since the rules cover this adequately in my view:

[SteveR]

Sorry Ramses - you cant wish it away.

The word "entirely" if applied to the road would not allow it to exit anywhere on the base edge. Even if perpendicular. Because the exiting section is indeed within 2 UD of the base edge. And something that is within is not entirely more - they are mutually exclusive in fact.

The perpendicular is a nice solution, but does not appear anywhere in the rules.

It is how I intend to play it though and I appreciate everyone weighing in on the question and coming up with a decent limiting argument.

I would summarize it as once a road reaches a point 2 UD from the opponent's base edge it must have a turn to exit perpendicular. Too wordy of course, and leaves open what to do if it already has one bend, but good enough.

[Three]

Well that's a number of terrain manufacturers with obsolete road representations

[Ramses II]

Steve, I understand your point, though the chances of this happening are fairly remote. However, perhaps we need “El Kreator” to modify the second bullet, possibly like this