At a board game night with some colleagues, we ended playing a game of Saboteur 2. While it was a lot of fun, we ran into a seemingly very basic rules question that we couldn't find a clear and definite answer to:
If the treasure is discovered by a member of one of the competing teams (blue or green), and there are no doors of either color blocking the way to it, do members of the other team also count as winners and share the gold?
Obviously, this question should be trivial, since it's very clearly answered by the rules. The problem is that it's answered in two different places, and the answers seem to be different!
Specifically, the section describing the dwarf cards reads (emphasis original):
"A team wins if:
- a dwarf from that team creates the connection to the treasure and the way there isn‘t blocked by a door of the other color, or;
- a dwarf from the other team creates the connection to the treasure, but the way there for his or her own team is blocked by a door of the wrong color
Both teams win (along with all other “non-Saboteurs”) if The Boss, The Geologist or The Profiteer creates the connection to the gold and the way there isn‘t blocked by a door of the other color."
However, further down, the Splitting the Treasure section instead reads:
"Depending on whether there is an uninterrupted path from the start to the treasure or not, the Gold-Diggers or the Saboteurs win the round. If the path to the treasure is blocked by a door, only the dwarves from the team of the same color win."
We were actually using the Finnish language version of the rules, but they say pretty much exactly the same thing in both places as the English rules I quoted above. We also checked the Swedish translation included in the same booklet, but that didn't say anything substantially different either.
The first section I quoted above seems to very clearly and explicitly say that, if a player in one of the teams plays the tunnel card that reaches the treasure (and that team is not blocked by doors from reaching the treasure), then only that team wins. On the other hand, the second quote (from the section actually dedicated to describing this phase of the game) seems to be saying that all gold-diggers (i.e. both teams) win, unless the path to the treasure is blocked by a team-specific door.
There's also a worked "example for the distribution of Gold Pieces at the end of a round", but it doesn't really resolve this question either, since in the example the path to the treasure is blocked by a blue door. One could maybe interpret the parenthetical note at the end of the example as kind of supporting the former quote (and thus contradicting the latter, which appears just a few lines earlier!), but that seems to me a bit of a stretch at best.
(The note specifically addresses the case of what would've happened if a green team member had found the treasure — a case that arguably wouldn't really need to be called out separately, if the intent was that it didn't matter who found the treasure anyway — and notes that the blue team would still have won due to the blue door. But one could also argue that the note was included simply for the avoidance of any lingering doubt the reader might have of the role of the finder making any difference to the outcome.)
FWIW, a similar earlier question here from 2011 has an accepted answer by thesunneversets that quotes the same text from the Splitting the Treasure section as I did above, and goes on to say that:
"I think from that paragraph it becomes pretty clear that an uninterrupted path unblocked by any door would be a victory for all Gold-Diggers. I think your initial instincts were right and you shouldn't worry too much about the sloppily-phrased earlier paragraph."
However, I find the argument given in that answer somewhat unsatisfying, as it seems to completely dismiss the text in the Dwarf Cards section on no other basis than the author's personal opinion that it is "sloppily-phrased" (an assessment which, as it happens, I also don't really agree with; to me, the text I quoted from that section above seems quite clear and explicit).
Thus, at the risk of asking a near-duplicate question, I'd like re-ask this with an emphasis on official sources. Specifically, I would like to know:
whether there are any officially published errata to the rules of Saboteur 2 that would definitely resolve this apparent self-contradiction; or, if not,
whether there have been any statements by the game's creator and/or publisher clarifying the issue?
FWIW, we ended up playing the game with the ruling that both teams win if they can reach the treasure, regardless of who found it. However, in hindsight we also agreed that this was probably the wrong choice, as it makes the endgame too cooperative, and that for future games we should instead house-rule this case the other way. But this ruling at our table is not what I'm asking about here; what I want to know is whether the official rules have ever been clarified one way or the other.
