4

I recently played a game of Catan with Cities and Knights. We had a situation like the following (excuse the horrendously crude art). enter image description here Where an Orange Knight (A) is breaking up some roads between two Red Settlements (B & C). My question is if orange played a diplomat card, would they be able to take either of the adjacent roads (indicated by the green arrows)?

The C&K rules say this under the Diplomat card details:

You may remove an “open” road (without another road or other piece at one end). If you remove your own road, then you may immediately place it somewhere else on the island (following all the normal building rules) for free.

An “open” road means a road that is at the beginning or end of a chain of roads which does not have any knight, city, or settlement of the same color at one end. If you remove an opponent’s road, it returns to his supply. If you remove your own road, then you may place it immediately on the board, free of charge (following the normal building rules—connected to your own road or settlement/city). You may remove your own road and choose not to replace it.

My contention is that yes, orange could take either road. I think this is the case because a knight has the ability to break up longest road, which to me, seems like a knight placed like this would break up any road into two separate parts. But I'm asking because the almanac is not explicit as to what a 'chain' in

An “open” road means a road that is at the beginning or end of a chain of roads

is. So although the roads would normally not be at the beginning or the end, now that there is a knight there, I believe that they are both 'ends' of a 'chain' of roads, which would mean they are eligible to be taken.

However, some of the other players disagreed. Is there anything that explicitly clears this up in the almanac or even in the FAQ's?

Improve this question
3
  • 1
    The tag edit seems wrong to me; as Cities and Knights is an expansion to Catan; shouldn't both tags be used?
    – GendoIkari
    Jan 28, 2021 at 6:10
  • 1
    I agree, not sure why that was done. I rolled back the changes to add the tag back
    – jpthesolver2
    Jan 28, 2021 at 15:19
  • It looks like it was done for a bunch of different Catan questions. I didn't want to do a mass rollback without verifying first; wasn't sure if a Meta question is warranted.
    – GendoIkari
    Jan 28, 2021 at 15:23

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Oddly this is clarified in the FAQ under When is a ship “open”?

The full answer is that a knight will interrupt a continuous road, but will not make the road "open", while this is a slightly confusing aspect of the rules it's there to prevent "orphaned" roads, which were not handled in the rules until the advent of volcanoes.

Essentially a road is only open if it is at the end of a trade route, not if both ends are connected to other pieces from the same player.

Improve this answer
0

You must log in to answer this question.

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