Chests in corridors

[Zenithfleet]

Zenithfleet made an excellent post on this topic with examples under the How Treasure chests work in the EU rules (LONG) topic.

Your use of the word 'excellent' is much appreciated! Although some readers may prefer to substitute the adjectives 'long', 'obsessive' and 'boring'.

For reference, my old post has been moved to page 5 of the 'Chests? How do they work?' topic. (Note that the pictures are only visible when you're logged in.)

HispaZargon adds some more evidence later in the thread.

Short version: The EU rules don't explicitly say anywhere that opening treasure chests is like opening doors. But they heavily imply it. The rules and the quests are written as if that's how the game works, from the base game through all the EU expansions.

The language is always about 'opening' chests. Traps are placed on the squares in front of chests. More than one treasure chest can be found in the same room, with different contents, one with a trap and one untrapped. You can't search for treasure in the very first Quest (The Trial) and yet you can ask to look inside chests, teaching players that this is how you interact with them. And so on.

It's also probably how children intuitively play it--which might be why the designers never bothered to specify it. I can imagine kids in playtest groups just going right ahead and opening chests by moving up to them and saying, "Can I open it?"

By contrast, searching for treasure is a more abstract mechanic that I personally had trouble getting to grips with as a kid. It was considered an 'advanced' rule in the EU second edition. "What, so I stand still and don't move my playing piece around the squares, yet somehow find treasure in the corners of the room, or all the traps down a long corridor?"

The North American edition changed how treasure chests work for its own inscrutable reasons. Possibly to simplify things under one mechanic, or possibly because the designers didn't actually twig to the unspoken rule of 'chests are like doors' in the EU game. In the base game (Game System) this caused zero problems. However, it did cause a few snafus in the expansion packs--like the topic of this thread, where corridors with chests in them need to be reclassified as 'special rooms'.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

#9 Handling Chests
Chests are handled in the same way as Doors. A hero on a square adjacent to a chest may open the chest and loot the contents as part of their turn, this does not count as an action. As with doors the EWP will declare if they are trapped, and the hero must make a disarm roll.