I'm playing solo at the moment to get a grasp of the rules and flow of the game. I've just got to a situation where I have a villager standing on an entrance tile. This entrance tile is a possible reinforcement point for my Shadow Dragon next OL turn.

Now, the Shadow Dragon couldn't fully fit onto either tile anyway, villager or no, so I'm assuming you'd have to get as much as him onto the tile as possible and that the villager in its current position wouldn't prevent the dragon being placed here as a reinforcement? (fig A in my amazing diagram below).

But that made me think; what about if I move my villager forward one space, thus making it impossible for the dragon to be placed touching the entrance tile at all (without illegally being partly off the playing area)? (fig B).

What happens is the monster is still reinforced but must place it's base on any open available spaces closest to the exit. In this case, the dragon would appear in front of the villager.

Could it potentially happen that the layout of creatures and heroes is such that the reinforcement is place several tiles away? It seems like you could intentionally do that to drop a reinforcement very far away from a reinforcement zone in quite an annoying way (for the heroes).

Yes, if your reinforcement is large enough and you have enough small pieces to move around, you can sometimes positiom reinforcements 6 or 7 spaces away (or more.) The fact is that often there aren't enough monsters to do that, so the OL would be counting on the heroes to play along.

As weird as it may be to drop a shadow dragon in the middle of the map, it is far better for gameplay than the alternative ('oh yeah, I'm holding the door shut- no new monsters for you. We win.')

In one of the most memorable (and probably infamous) quests I played (solo) this actually happened to me. During Cardinal's Plight, the first encounter, I used Shadow Dragons. Parking the master in the two lane pathway leading towards Merrick, the heroes had to hack and slash their way past it. They managed to defeat it, but when it came to the OL's turn, he had to reinforce the Dragon. there was no empty six spaces on the ruin Tile as all figures were pretty dispersed. So the Dragon dropped the only place it go- in the two lane pathway. So the heroes had to hack and slash another Dragon before they could continue on, which pretty much cost them the time and the quest.

I heard about some people who had the issue of not having at all space for reinforcing a Shadow Dragon on the first encounter of Castle Daerion. With doors closed, is not hard blocking the space for such huge monsters (and possibly a little help of OL's bad positioning).