2

As a followup to this question, what happens in the following two scenarios? In each, the turn order is Green -> Red -> Blue -> Yellow, and no pictured player has any fences left.

1) Is Red allowed to play the purple fence? If so, what happens over the next two moves?

A Quoridor board inset where Yellow and Green are in a dead end and Blue may be forced to move downward and block Yellow's escape.

2) Is Red allowed to move their pawn downward? If so, what happens over the next two moves?

A Quoridor board inset similar to the above.

In both scenarios, it seems like if you allow the move in question, Blue is forced to move downward as the next move, and then Yellow has no legal moves. The options I see are:

  • Escape both scenarios through increasingly tortured readings of the existing rules. For example, in scenario 1 say that the fence placement is somehow banned by the fences-can't-completely-block-people rule (even though in a different turn order it would be ok), and in scenario 2 say that Red and Blue can move down and then Yellow can somehow use the diagonal jump rule to move to Red's former location (even though that rule only applies if there's a fence in the way, not a player).

  • Accept that the current rules aren't quite sufficient and change them. My vote would be for "In the rare event that a player has no legal move, their turn is skipped."

1
  • 1
    My design principle behind my objection to banning either of Red's moves: finding all good moves should be hard, but finding all legal moves should be easy. You shouldn't have to look multiple turns in advance to figure out your move is illegal.
    – Benjamin Cosman
    Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 1:06

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

It’s another interesting problems that you submit here For the First one, you're right, in this situation yellow must skip his turn, the rules with all the differents explanations implied that.

For the second case, It’s quite easy when you refers to the rules and it’s not a tortured reading of the rules you just have to follow the legal move in the Fig 10 (fig who show the legal move in a case of a jump with two pawn in front of you ) Yellow can escape in jumping in the upper square of the red pawn.

1
  • I'm happy to accept both parts of this answer as Word of God rulings, but I do think they're missing from the printed rules. For part 1, the rules imply that yellow has no legal moves, but then don't say what to do about it - skipping their turn is quite reasonable, but many other games resolve it differently e.g. by declaring the game a draw. For part 2, you mention the "legal move in Fig 10", but Fig 10 shows just one illegal move and no legal ones at all? Has this been changed since the Oct '03 rulebook we've been looking at?
    – Benjamin Cosman
    Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 17:29
0

Is Red allowed to play the purple fence?

Yes. There's still a path from each player to their goal.

If so, what happens over the next two moves?

Blue moves down, then you get into a situation where Yellow has no legal moves, so the game can't legally proceed. This question is a duplicate of an earlier question.

Is Red allowed to move their pawn downward?

Yes. It's one square away along an orthogonal axis, it's unoccupied, and there are no intervening boards.

If so, what happens over the next two moves?

After Red moves down, Blue must move down, and then Yellow must take over Red's current location. Fig 8 of these rules[1].

  1. While it's not explicitly stated in the rules that a jump blocked by the borders of the board or by other pawns allows one to take a diagonal jump, this seems obvious like an obvious omission.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .