What does hut wording mean?

Question

Here are some relevant threads on BGG:

• The hut
• The Hut = Most Pointless Card in the Game?!
• Hut – explanation needed

Here is the hut card wording from the rulebook:

In the trader phase, the owner of a hut draws one card from the supply if no good was sold by any player during this phase.

The last linked thread and this post in the first linked thread ask the question I'm going to ask, but I feel that no satisfactory answer was given.

Let's say Alice sold no goods in a trader phase. She is definitely a player, and thus falls under "any player" description. Which would mean that the hut rule should trigger. If the rules meant to say that it would trigger if no player sells any goods, they would probably have said just that.

Yet, most of the posters in the threads above, feel that the trigger is only when no selling occurs at all, not just by Alice, a player, but by all players.

I'm looking for a clarification referencing an authoritative source. I understand that it's likely that there is none, but I have been surprised before.

Answer 1

The hut owner only draws if none of the players sold a good.

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So the rules say the following:

[The hut owner draws] if no good was sold by any player during this phase.

The check uses the passive voice.^[1] Let's change it to use the active voice so it's in terms of players, not goods.

Unfortunately, the use of "no" complicates things. So let's work with the opposite check.

The hut owner draws unless any good was sold by any player during this phase.

This is easy to convert to the active voice

The hut owner draws unless any player sold any good during this phase.

So if a player sold a good, the owner of the hut doesn't get to draw.

In case that's not clear let's negate the check again to remove the "unless".

The hut owner draws if none of the players sold any good during this phase.

All of the above instructions are equivalent.

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If they wanted to check to see if the hut owner had sold goods, they could have used the following:

if no good was sold by this player during this phase.

if this player sold no goods during this phase.

if this player didn't sell any goods during this phase.

("Them" and "they" could be used in lieu of "this player.")

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1. "X was verbed by Y" means the same thing as "Y verbed X".

   The former phrasing is called "the passive voice".

   The "the passive voice" is what people call the former phrasing.

   Using the passive voice is usually weaker than using the passive voice. Notice how I was able to hide who calls that phrasing the passive voice in the former? With the active voice, I was force to say who did calls it the active voice, and this reveals the fact that was hiding the authority, hiding that it's English grammaticians that call this the passive voice.

   You might have noticed this if you used grammar checker while composing a document. They will frequently suggest replacing the use of the passive voice with the active voice.

   However, using the passive voice focuses on the thing on which the action was performed (by placing it first in the sentence) rather than focusing on what performed the action, and that can be an advantage.

Answer 2

The French-language version of the rules address this problem.

In the French version, as of 2018, the card game is named Puerto Rico, like the board game

French version of the rule concerning the Hut

Hutte

Si aucune marchandise n’a été vendue par aucun joueur durant la phase du marchand, le propriétaire d’une Hutte peut piocher 1 carte.

The French version cannot be clearer. It literally, and nearly word for word, translates to :

If no good was sold by any player whatsoever during the trader phase, the owner of a Hut may draw 1 card.

The words «aucun joueur» literally mean : «not a single player».

Source : Rules for Puerto Rico - le jeu de cartes