BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’d rather see it fixed.

I looked through the proposals, and I’m pretty sure the issue is “Route Switching” being readable as allowing paying 3 Cash and/or manually moving one Route, but I’m too tired to write up a fix, and I’m going to bed.

The relevant sentence:
“They may then pay 3 Cash, and move any one route to any point in the list.”

It could also be read to allow a route to be moved on top of another route, overwriting it. Not useful currently, but I assume we’ll have a way to gain more routes eventually, and then it would be handy to remove the poorly-paying downtown routes to increase the chances of activating better paying routes.

Does this dynasty remind anyone else of Dominion? Build a deck of routes; draw a hand of five each week.

Yeah, that was the bug. Proposal vetoed with great discretion.

Also, this dynasty reminds me of Dominion. I sure hope that’s not a coincidence.

I probably shouldn’t get annoyed over this, and it’s nothing personal, but this isn’t the first time someone has suggested a bug that I can’t see as anything other than nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking.  It’s not a matter of interpreting the rules literally or not—the broken interpretation, “may then pay 3 Cash, and[/or may then] move”, is not more strictly correct than the obviously intended “may then pay 3 Cash, and [then] move” (if anything, the presence of a comma suggests the latter)—the only reason to interpret the rule as broken is if you’re determined, in the face of ambiguity, to go for the most vexing parse!  It would be nice to get rid of all ambiguity, but in lieu of that it’s not like we can’t take context into account.

Though I’m not even sure the rule should be considered ambiguous.  For example, here’s a quote from the Monopoly Rules:

“When a player owns all the properties in a colour-group they may buy houses from the Bank and erect them on those properties.”

Nobody interprets this as allowing players to buy houses without erecting them.

comex. The point of the CfJ of actions is to mitigate stupid interpretation. So if you nit-pick, you have to be fairly sure that other people will agree, otherwise there’s no point. This seems to generally remove the tendency for people to twist rules.