Edited with revised text and pictures.G'day all,
This thread is about getting gold 'n' stuff from treasure chests in the original EU ruleset, as opposed to the North American (NA) rules.
Players of the North American edition may have noticed the occasional odd thing about treasure chests. For instance, in the first Kellar's Keep quest, there is an empty chest surrounded by pit traps on adjacent tiles.
KK quest 1 chest EU.png
What's the point of that? In the NA rules, you just have to search for treasure to get whatever is in the chest--and you don't move when searching. It's as if the designers expected you to walk over there and actually open the lid of the chest or something.
As a matter of fact, that's exactly what the original designers of the EU edition intended--and the maps were largely ported over to the NA edition.
You might not believe me, though. In the Sir Ragnar thread, Kurgan made this comment:
http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5531&start=30Kurgan wrote:Zenithfleet wrote:I've been reading through and comparing the layouts of KK and RotWL in the EU vs NA editions. They're mostly the same basic maps, but the NA occasionally tweaks something like changing the position of a door, or adding an extra secret. The NA generally has more traps and more monsters too. Sometimes reuse of a map caused problems e.g. with treasure chests--the EU rules assumed you had to move to a chest and open it, so the map would have pit traps next to them and things like that, which the NA maps kept even though those pits are now pointless.
Thanks. Isn't this part (having to move adjacent to a treasure chest) some kind of brain bug? I know a lot of people insist that's how they played as kids, but the rules don't actually say you have to do this. The only version that says this is how it works is in the Japanese rules. Search a room for treasure, and you find the treasure. I think at a certain point I reasoned people were thinking Searching "tells you what the treasure is" and then walking up to the chest lets you physically "pick it up" (as a free action when you're adjacent to it), but where is that in the rules?
It just so happened that I had already cooked up a great big enormous wall of text all about how treasure chests work in the EU edition. And now I have the perfect opportunity to inflict it on you all. Muhahaha, etc.
Short version:
In the EU rules, treasure chests are treated like doors. You open them by moving to them and saying you're opening them. It doesn't count as an action.
The rules don't spell this out anywhere, but it's heavily implied by the way the quest maps work.
Because it's only implied, it's going to take me a bit of work to amass the evidence. It's a bit of a treasure hunt in itself. Here goes ...
(I include examples from EU quest maps near the end, if you want to skip all the rulebook stuff.)
Intro
Having grown up with the EU 2nd edition (the Australian release in my case), we always assumed that you had to physically move your character next to a chest and open it, the way you open doors. Therefore, the pit traps next to the chest in the first quest of Kellar's Keep made perfect sense to us.
However, there is no actual rule about this in our EU 2nd edition that I know of. It seems to be an unspoken assumption. If you look at how the quests are designed, it soon becomes apparent that the designers created the quests
as if you were supposed to move to chests and open them, rather than searching for treasure.
The reason we (Aussies playing the English-language EU 2nd edition) assumed chests worked like doors came from two things:
a) the way the first quest worked (see below)
b) the instinctive tendency of us as children to interact with the furniture on the board by actually moving over to it.
However, was this just some mistaken assumption? Let's see ...
Note: I've deleted some paragraphs about the release order of the editions, as it's not really relevant. Rulebook clues
The EU 1st edition (Morcar) In the rulebook for the EU 1st edition, there is an interesting line on page 13:
"Traps - Traps are triggered whenever a character moves onto a trapped square or
opens a treasure chest without searching."
(Emphasis added.)
Note how the rules describe 'opening a treasure chest' as something you do without searching for anything. They might have meant 'searching for traps', but that's not what they actually wrote.
The EU 1st edition had players learn the search rules before their first quest. In fact, there are secret doors in the first quest, 'The Maze'.
The 1st edition uses some interesting wording for searching (both types): "If there is anything to be found, the evil wizard player must reveal it." (p12)
Note the word 'reveal'. It doesn't say that the searcher automatically gets the treasure. That's left up to the quest notes. Strictly speaking, Morcar just
tells the player what is in the room.
This is also seen on p13: "Some of the Quests provide details about specific treasures which can be found by searching. If a character searches for treasure in the appropriate room or passage, the evil wizard player follows the instructions in the Quest Book."
And yes, the instruction to actually give the special treasure to a player comes from the quest notes. For equipment, Quest Treasures and so on, the quest notes will say something like, "A player who searches for treasure will find a shield. The player may take a shield card from the Equipment deck." ('Lair of the Orc Warlord')
The EU quest notes are generally consistent about this, but they do forget sometimes--like the Star of the West in the Zombie's hand in 'The Stone Hunter', or the four gems of King Agrain in Return of the Witch Lord. Neither of those mention searching.
But the quest notes use different language for treasure chests. They never say "A player who searches for treasure in this room will find ..." Instead, they always say "the chest contains X" or "a player who opens the chest ..." The same language is also used for the rare cupboard containing goodies.
Compare the Quest Notes for the cupboard (A), chest (B) and armoury (C) in 'Lair of the Orc Warlord':
HQ Lair Orc EU notes.png
So there seem to be two different ways to interpret the 1st edition rule above. Neither seems to cause any actual gameplay issues.
EU 1st edition interpretation a): 'Specific treasures which can be found by searching' only means things that are called out in the quest notes as 'a player who searches will find ...' If it doesn't say that, it's not technically a 'treasure which can be found by searching'. That would mean that searching for treasure won't find anything in a room with a treasure chest full of gold--or a cupboard for that matter. You wouldn't know there was anything in the furniture unless you actually went over and opened it. It would also imply that the Star of the West, the gems of King Agrain and so on are just meant to be read out to the players when it seems to make sense, rather than anyone needing to search for treasure to find them. Which shouldn't cause any problems.
EU 1st edition interpretation b): If you search for treasure in a room with a treasure chest, you are TOLD what is in the chest. But you don't get it. You have to go over and open the chest for that. This is how we used to play it as kids. It's quite a weird concept, making a search like scanning or X-raying the room. (Maybe the Dwarf can smell gold?) Yet as odd as it is, in gameplay terms it actually works pretty well. You might search for treasure, learn that the chest contains 200 gold coins, and use your move to hurry over there and open the chest before someone else does. But since you didn't search for traps first, you didn't find or disarm the trap. Ouch! That's why you might fall into a pit trap sneakily placed beside the chest.
Both ways to play seem to work reasonably well in the EU game. It's just a matter of which one you find intuitively makes more sense. But the EU game from the start seems to be operating on the assumption that 'opening chests' (and cupboards) is like opening doors, and not connected to searching. The quest maps are generally made with this assumption in mind. I'll include some examples later on.
In the EU 1st edition, 'The Maze' had no treasure chests. That means the first time you encounter a treasure chest is in 'The Rescue of Sir Ragnar'. There are two of them, and the one with a trap (A) says "This treasure chest is a trap. Any player who
opens the chest without searching for traps first will lose 1 Body point. The chest is empty."
NA edition (Zargon)Note: I'm not entirely sure whether the NA edition came out before the EU 2nd edition or after it, as I think they were both released in the same year. Therefore I'm not sure whether 'The Trial' was created for the NA version or the EU version. For my purposes here it doesn't really matter.The NA edition's rules are different in many subtle ways from the EU edition. For one thing, they're clear that you get treasure from chests by
searching for treasure.
(page 16 of the NA rulebook)
As in the EU version, you don't move your hero figure when searching for treasure. It follows that if there is a treasure chest in a room, it's a hint that there could be a special treasure there ... but you don't actually walk over to it and 'open' it like you would a door. You stay where you are and search the room.
The NA version of 'The Trial' follows this procedure. The quest notes say for chest D: "The first Hero who
searches for treasure will find 84 gold coins in this treasure chest." (emphasis added) Same for chest E.
However, chest B says, "This treasure chest is empty." I guess this raises the question of whether the Hero who searched draws a Treasure card, or whether he finds nothing.
The same rule is followed in 'The Rescue of Sir Ragnar' (NA version): a Hero searching for treasure gets the gold, or gets hit by the trap on the treasure chest.
EU 2nd edition (Morcar revamped!)This revised edition of the EU rules, which I believe sold many more copies than the 1st edition, makes several changes, such as removing the old 'no backtracking' movement rule and generally tightening up the wording of many rules. The old 'Maze' first quest is chucked out in favour of an EU version of the legendarily hard 'The Trial'. I'll get to that in a moment. But first, the boring rulebook stuff!
The 2nd edition tweaks the wording of how searching for treasure works.
The 1st edition said, "Some of the Quests provide details about specific treasures which can be found by searching. If a character searches for treasure in the appropriate room or passage, the evil wizard player follows the instructions in the Quest Book."
But the 2nd edition revises this as follows: "Some of the Quests provide details about specific treasures which can be found by searching. If a character searches for treasure in the appropriate
room the evil wizard player should reveal what treasure is hidden there." (Emphasis added.)
It's not entirely clear to me why this change was made, but it might be an effort to clear up the issue of whether you're meant to tell players about what's inside chests and cupboards or not. The quest notes may not have 'instructions' for chests--they usually just say "This chest contains 100 gold coins"--so you can't really 'follow the instructions' in all cases, as the 1st edition rule had it. But you can at least tell the players about the 100 gold coins.
From this I gather that the 2nd edition is favouring
EU interpretation B above. If you search for treasure in a treasure chest room, you are TOLD what's in the chest. You don't get it until you go over and open the chest itself, though.
(You might also notice that the 2nd ed has dropped the reference to 'passage' when searching for treasure. That's another controversy for another thread.)
Now here it gets a little strange.
The curious case of 'The Trial' in the EUThe EU 2nd edition reorganises the rulebook itself, splitting the rules into 'Basic' and 'Advanced' rules. Spells and searching are advanced rules, and players are told NOT to use them in their first game. What is the first game? ''The Trial'. This meant that our first experience of the Elf and Wizard was
without their spells, making many of us kids hate the Wizard with a passion because he's so feeble without them.
But wait, doesn't 'The Trial' feature several treasure chests? If you can't search during this quest ... well, that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever in the NA edition.
However, the quest notes for the EU version of 'The Trial' use this phrase:
"If the character player asks to look inside the treasure chest, he will find X."
In this first quest you can't search, but the game expects players to want to find out if there is treasure in those chests, so it has a sort of informal rule to deal with it. Unfortunately for my purposes, though, it's not quite saying that 'opening a chest' is an actual thing in the same way as opening a door.
The rest of the EU quests aren't changed from the 1st edition as far as I know. 'Sir Ragnar' still uses the old wording about 'opening the chest'.
The result is that anyone whose first game of Heroquest is the EU edition 2nd edition will learn (more by instinct and osmosis than by any explicit rule) that 'opening a chest' or 'asking to look inside a chest' is a special thing you do that doesn't count as an action, and is NOT connected to searching--a mechanic players aren't meant to know yet. It seems more like opening a door.
But are they learning the right thing? It's possible that this is an unintended consequence of telling players not to learn or use the search rules until after 'The Trial'. Asking to look in chests might have been meant as a stop-gap solution until players learned the 'real' way to interact with chests.
However, in the absence of any search rule, players--especially kids--are probably going to move their character over to the square beside the chest when they 'ask to open it'. What makes more instinctive sense to any new player of a game like this, with squares and cool furniture? Walking over to the chest to open it, like you would in real life, and which you've just done to open the doors on the board ... or doing some weird 'search' action in which you don't move your figure at all, and which you're not even supposed to know about yet?
The search mechanic was quite a strange concept to 10-year-old me, and it took a while to get my head around it. I can see why they made it an 'advanced rule' in the 2nd ed. I would certainly never have thought of it on my own. EU Heroquest was aimed at a slightly younger audience than the later NA edition. The idea of standing still, yet somehow magically opening a chest on the other side of the room, is a very abstract one that might have been a step too far for many kids in their first game.
There's also an odd rule in the EU 1st edition that says "Monsters may not move treasure." In the 2nd edition it's altered to "Monsters may not move treasure chests." This again implies that there is something special about the physical placement of chests on the board. Maybe some playtest kids were making the monsters grab the chests and run off with them into the depths of the dungeon? Then again, it could be specifically intended for use in 'Prince Magnus' Gold'.
Examples from the EU quest mapsAll this talk about ambiguities in the rules probably hasn't convinced you (assuming I haven't cast a sleep spell on you by now).
So here are some examples from actual EU quest maps to demonstrate that the designers assumed you opened chests the same way you opened doors. Notably, these are found in the expansion quest pack. The base game doesn't really provide any obvious examples. I suspect that this may be why the NA designers changed the rules. It wouldn't cause any hassles with the Game System quests. If they only looked at the base game before adapting the rules, they might not have realised that problems would arise in Kellar's Keep, Return of the Witch Lord, etc.
Note that I can only show screenshots for a handful of these because I'm limited to five attachments.
Kellar's Keep The Great Gate There are pit traps around the empty chest near the start.
KK quest 1 chest EU.png
There is also a very weird secondary example in this quest. Chest D is one of those infamous Gargoyle-statue rooms, where the Gargoyle won't move or attack until a player opens the chest.
There was one of these in the base game's 'Bastion of Chaos', but in that case the room is so small that the player is adjacent both the chest and the Gargoyle as soon as you step into the room. Therefore, whether you open the chest by standing next to it or by searching for treasure, the Gargoyle will be able to attack you immediately, like a wandering monster.
However, in 'The Great Gate', the Gargoyle statue is in a larger room. In the EU map, it's positioned too far away from the chest to be adjacent to anyone standing beside the chest--so if it springs to life it will have to move in order to attack, which strictly speaking isn't allowed in the quest notes. It doesn't say it can 'move and attack immediately', only 'attack'. (It can be assumed that it's allowed to move, though.) It
is in just the right place to attack anyone who stands in the first square of the room and searches for treasure, though!
Conversely, in the NA map, the Gargoyle has been repositioned so that it will be adjacent to anyone standing beside the chest. But in the NA rules you don't have to move over to the chest to open it--and the Gargoyle is now too far away from the secret door entrance to attack the searching player unless it moves first.
In other words, the Gargoyle in the EU map is placed as if for NA rules, while in the NA map it's placed as if for EU rules.
Belorn's Mine The top-left room has three chests and three pit traps. The EU version has no enemies in this room, so the space after the door is free to move onto safely. Under NA rules, a hero could step into that EU room onto the first square and search for treasure to grab everything without moving any further. In the EU version, though, the implication is that the player must physically move to the chests--and probably fall into the pit traps or need to jump them.
Also, keep in mind that if treasure chests are like doors, they can be opened
one at a time--by different players, or the same player. That means more than one player might fall foul of the pits in this room. "Ow! Pit deep!" "The Wizard will help! Ow! Pit indeed deep!"
By contrast, multiple treasure chests in the same room are just decorative overkill in the NA ruleset. See the Witch Lord examples below.
Also note that the NA rules adds a poisonous gas trap here that will hit every hero in the room if triggered.
KK belorn's mine chests EU.png
The East Gate Small 'cell' room. Empty chest with a pit and two spear traps on either side. (Though to be fair, this would also catch anyone using treasure-search rules, since they would have to move into the room to search, so it doesn't really count.)
Another odd detail: The NA version of Kellar's Keep adds a couple of chests hidden in short corridors. The quest notes have to call these 'special rooms' so that the players can search them. Ironically, these chests in passageways would work perfectly well in the EU edition without needing to call them special rooms.
Return of the Witch Lord
The Silent Passages A subtle one here. In the EU map, there is a room in the upper right with two chests in it, labelled B and C. B has gold and a potion in it. C is empty and has a trap on it.
RotWL double chests EU.png
This setup only makes sense if you open chests one at a time. It's intended for a player to move to B and open it with no penalty, or move to C and open it and get hurt, in either order. One player might go for B while another goes for C.
My understanding is that in the NA rules, that wouldn't really work. Well, it would get results, but in an odd and peculiar way. The first hero to enter would do one treasure search and get the contents of both chests at once, plus triggering any traps on both chests at once. You'd simultaneously get the gold and potion from B
and the dart shooting from the wall due to C. There is no way to recreate the intended effect, which is that two players can each try a different chest.
In the NA rules, having two chests in the same room, one with a trap and one without, is a bit pointless. Why not just have
one chest in the room with the gold and potion in it, plus a trap on it? And that's exactly what the NA revision team did. Chest C has been moved to another room to the upper right, which is completely bare and featureless in the EU map.
Halls of the Dead Another subtle one that appears to have been intended to work in a certain way in the EU edition, but now works differently in the NA. This doesn't constitute evidence per se, but it is interesting.
The chest C is in the Witch Lord's central chamber, where the Barbarian and Elf start chained up. The Witch Lord has approximately fifty bazillion skellies ready to pounce after the Dwarf and Wizard enter the room and free Barbie and Elvis. The gold and equipment of the Barbie and Elf are in chest C. It's easy to get to from the entrance door.
If players must physically move to and open chests, then EU players have a big advantage here. They can get the drop on the enemies. As soon as the heroes enter and B&E are free to move, they can move to the corner, open the chest, and grab their swords, armour, etc.,
before Morcar's turn starts and all those Skeletons and Chaos Warriors surround them.
In the NA edition, however, the heroes will (I assume) have to wait until
after defeating all 14 enemies in the room before they can search for treasure and get the equipment back.
Against the Ogre Horde 'Lair of the Ogre Horde' This quest includes two chests in the same room--one trapped, one not. This wouldn't make much sense if searching for treasure was how you got the goods from chests.
'Fortress of the Ogre Lord' This quest features a room with
three chests (room C), each of which has a one-die spear trap on it. They're clearly meant to go off individually each time a player opens one of the chests. If the chests were meant to be cleared out with a single search, the design here would make no sense.
No doubt the NA edition would have changed these traps to a single 'poison gas cloud' effect that hits everyone in the room, or similar, just as in the Belorn's Mine quest with three chests in one room.
'The Pit of Chaos' has a cheeky room to the right of the pit, with a zombie and an unmarked chest inside a mini-room of rubble tiles. It's designed so that a player walking into the room will see the chest, try to move toward it, and trigger the falling block trap ... which falls on the arrow
in front of him or her, sealing off the inner chamber and leaving the hero outside. More of a troll room than a zombie room, really.
HQ AtOH pit of chaos zombie room.png
If searches were required, the player could just search after moving onto the first square of the room, without proceeding onto the falling block trap (assuming he disposed of the zombie with a crossbow or fire spell first). It would also raise the question of whether a search in the outer part of the room still works once the chest is sealed off behind the rubble. It would still be in the same room, right?
(I haven't checked Wizards of Morcar, sorry.)
ConclusionThe weight of evidence is that even though the EU rules never explicitly say so, the rules and quests are written as if you open chests the same way you open doors. If you assume this is how they work, then everything about chests in EU quest layouts makes sense and runs smoothly. Well ... maybe not unmarked chests. But you can just assume they're empty and the quest notes are saving space by not mentioning it, like empty cupboards.
Furthermore, treating chests like doors happens to be how, in my experience, new players tend to instinctively try to interact with treasure chests on their first play. The designers may not have bothered adding a rule about it because kids did it automatically anyway.
As for searches in the EU game, you can either
tell players what's in the chest when they search for treasure (but not give it to them), or stay silent about it because it's hidden/locked away until they physically open the chests. Either way seems to work OK in practice.
(As the quest packs go on, though, the wording for OTHER kinds of treasure--on the alchemist's bench, under thrones and so on, clearly meant to be found by searching--gets increasingly ambiguous and sloppy, like the gems of King Agrain or some of the stuff in Ogre Horde.)
The NA edition tried to clarify things by making all treasure findable only by searching. It's understandable, especially given the EU game's coyness on the topic.
Also, virtually all of the base game quests work without a hitch whether you're physically moving over to chests and opening them like doors, or if you're standing in one spot and searching. There are a few minor differences (like the two chests in one room in 'Race Against Time', which two different players could open), but nothing serious or obvious. Because of this I suspect the NA designers looked at the base game quests, observed that the treasure chests would work just as well if you got their contents by searching, and made a sweeping change for consistency so that all special treasure worked the same way.
However, doing so caused a few problems and glitches with the maps in the expansions--because the original game didn't actually work that way for treasure chests, and the EU designers were creating KK and RotWL and so on with a different mechanic in mind. It only became obvious once more devious tricks and traps appeared in the quest packs, relying on unspoken rules that weren't too important in the base game.
Hey! Hey, you can roll a six and wake up now!
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