Had a situation come up during a game of Escape from Umbar tonight.

Narrow Alleyway has this text:

Response: After the player travel here, choose a non-unique enemy engaged with a player and place it faceup under this location. While an enemy is under this location, that enemy is considered to be out of play.

Forced: After Narrow Alleyway leaves play, put the enemy under it into play, engaged with the first player.

Stage 2B has this win condition text:

While at least 1 player is engaged with an enemy, the players cannot defeat this stage. If the players defeat this stage, they win the game.

So the question is: if Narrow Alleyway has an enemy under it and is the active location, and you clear the location and quest to 15 progress tokens at the same time, will those enemies engage you and prevent you from winning? Or have you won before they engage?

I went back and read some old threads about resolving location card effects and quest advancement, and it seems that quest card effects come before location Forced or Response effects. So we would win. But I wanted to see what you all think. Is that the correct interpretation?

Incidentally, through card effects, Narrow Alleyway can get multiple enemies underneath it (I had 3 under a single copy), so I don't like that the Forced effect says "put the enemy under it into play..." It should say " each enemy!" (CardDB lists the text as saying "each," but the actual card says "the").

Relevant threads that I looked at are here:

when does a location response happen vs quest completion

elf-stone + long defeat

helm of the stormcaller in thing in the depths

Doesn't seem like there is an official ruling on the matter, but we know you resolve the quest card before the any response on the active location. I would interpret that to mean you would also resolve the quest card before a forced effect on the active location. It wouldn't hurt to get an official clarification.

Yeah I agree that you should try and get an official clarification because you never know with this game but it seems as though you would surely win in this situation.

We know that if at any time all criteria are met to beat a quest stage you IMMEDIATELY advance to the next quest stage before doing anything else so it makes logical sense that if you have fulfilled all win conditions on a final stage you immediately win that quest before anything else happens. There are 15 progress tokens on the main quest and no enemies engaged before you have to trigger the forced effect on the active location that has just been explored so instant victory before those enemies are put into play engaged with the first player.

It makes plenty of sense thematically too because you travel down a narrow alleyway to escape an enemy/enemies but then manage to escape the city altogether via that narrow alleyway so before the enemies are able to catch up to you have already escaped the city walls (with the 15 required progress and no enemies engaged to stop you/slow you down/bar your way).

Yeah, based on the rulings we've had in the past (leaving aside my opinions of those rulings) I'd say you win before the enemies turn up again.