I believe this was discussed a while back, but I had a Hero with the Skill Card that allowed him make an attack when a figure moves next to him. He opened a chest and I played Mimic. Should he have gotten an attack when the chest was "moved" next to him?...

No, unless as part of the mimic's activation it moved next to him. The playing of the trap is not movement.

The card makes you move the chest out from under the hero. That is where the question lies...

Titeman said:

No, its doesn't count towards that skill. That is simply done so that you don't get into a pesky "two figures occupying the same space" rules nightmare.

Also, alertness only triggers when a figure moves into a space next to you. The chest is not a figure, it's a prop (even though it has the same stats as a figure).

The Mimic card doesn't say the chest has the same stats as a beastman, it says "treat it as a beastman," which suggests to me that it would have to count as a figure (since beastmen are figures), regardless of the component used to track its position.

However, the instruction to "treat it as a beastman" is given after the instruction to move it to an adjacent space, so you could make something of that.

Otherwise, we have the problem that "move" has a technical and a non-technical meaning in Descent, and they're different, but the writers do a poor job of distinguishing them. One meaning is the thing where you change your position to an adjacent space during your turn by spending a movement point. The other meaning is the more colloquial "any change in position for any reason" (which includes Knockback, being moved due to a trap card, etc.). So you'd have to decide which definition of "move" is intended on the Mimic card and on the Alertness card.

easy answer is just to leave the hero on top of the chest but let the chest roll the same dice as a beastman, and have the same stats.

We would rule that nothing has actually moved closer to the hero and therefore alertness is not activated. (ie you can see a creature moving toward you, but the chest attacks when you open it, its not a beastman, just has a beastman stats.

Just a funny one, in our last session I was holding a trap card for opening a chest (exploding chest), and decided to play spiked pit against another moving hero, so threw away a card to get threat, and thought I'd chucked away exploding door and played my spiked pit. when I went to play exploding chest on the hero opening the chest I was rather put out with myself to find the exploding door card instead still in my hand . was able to kill the hero next turn, but I did feel a bit of a prat.

mordak5 said:

So your "easy answer" is to disregard the text on the card, force the pieces into an illegal situation, rob the chest of a movement point or two, and then create another rules question when the players ask whether the chest has to move away during its activation (which would mean that the hero still gets to use Alertness when it moves away)? How exactly is that easy?

If you're going to make an arbitrary decision that doesn't bother trying to follow the exact wording on the card, just decide either that Alertness applies here or it doesn't and move on. That's easy.

We ruled that the movement was not the type of movement that activates the alertness skill, problem solved. My last post noted what should happen if the rules had been written correctly, and these type of problems play tested before the game was released. Sorry if you didn't understand that.

We play loads of board games, and I have to say that while we all enjoy the game, these are the worst set of rules when it comes to having to get clarifications due to badly worded rules, cards etc. And judging from the amount of requests and queries on the forums, I am not alone in having problems with them.