Had a bit of a discussion with my gaming group about map setup the other day.

The rules state that "players may not place tiles so that a mountain(red) or water(blue) border is touching another parallel mountain or water border". This is followed by an illustration which shows that a mountain border touching a water border is a no-no.

The question we have been discussion is then wether or not a mountain border is allowed to touch another mountain border and likewis with the water borders. From the text it can be interpreted both ways. It does make sense that you can´t place mountain and water next to each other as this would make that border impassable for all practical considerations (only the elves´ pegasus riders would be able to bypass it). However 2 mountains or 2 water adjacent to one another would make it passable using the normal rules (winter freezes water and mountain pass tactic card).

So it does seem to me that the only practical reason to ban mountain-to-mountain and water-to-water would be to assure that the map does end up with a certain amount of features which must be "worked around" so to speak and to avoid people from just placing mountains back to back to maximise the open board approach where armies can go where they please (which is as good a reason as any to keep the borders apart, in my book).

Any and all thoughts are appreciated.

End of rant...

mountain-mountain and river-river have been in allot of my maps and they all worked out fine.

Over on BGG, the consensus is: no impassable boundary, regardless of color, may be placed parallel to another.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/504234/borders-set-up

I agree it's not worded as precisely as most of us want. I'll post a the question to FFGs rules question link.

TK

I think the rules as written are clear enough, they say that none of the borders are allowed to touch face to face. There's no exceptions for two borders of like kind, so I would say such set ups are disallowed. Per the rules.

I also don't think it's a terrible travesty if you choose to allow like on like border connections. It just means you're reducing the number of barriers in your game. Putting two mountains or two rivers against each other effectively turns two barriers into one; for all rules purposes there may as well only be one barrier there. Even if you chose to allow mountain on river connections, the mountain would trump the river and it would play as if the river barrier weren't there. Nothing breaks, per se, you just aren't getting as much as you could out of your barriers.

I strongly suspect the reason for this rule is to encourage more barriers in the field of play, as the OP already speculated. If you want fewer barriers, or don't really care, then allowing such connections as a house rule is fine. As long as everyone at the table is cool with it.

The way the rule reads is actually as follows:

"When creating the game board, playesr may not place map tiles so that a mountain (red) or water (blue) border is touching another parallel mountain or water border." (page 8, right column, 3rd paragraph of "3. Place Map Tiles")

It doesn't say no mountain-to-water only; it says mountain or water cannot touch mountain or water. The image is just an example of an illegal placement, not the ONLY illegal placement. This means you cannot do:

- Mountain/Mountain

- Mountain/Water

- Water/Mountain

- Water/Water

Basically, you cannot have two colored borders touching each other like that, regardless of which colors they are.