Skillful Renovator, Hewer, Stone House Reconstruction

[Logic2718]

I have two questions involving the cards Skillful Renovator, Hewer and Stone House Reconstruction.

I have all 3 cards of these cards in play. I have a clay house and I only need 1 more stone to renovate. Assume that my Hewer will trigger at the end of the turn. Is it possible to use the stone I receive from Hewer to renovate before the next round begins, so that I can get the wood from my Skillful Renovator?

I assume the answer is no, and that it can be explained in terms of the sequencing of various game phases and what actions you're allowed to take during each phase. So, I would appreciate an answer that also explains how the game phases work in this example.

Now let's say the round ends with a harvest. Then, I assume I can use my Stone House Reconstruction during the feeding phase to renovate (I have turned off auto-feeding). If I do that, will I still get the wood from my Skillful Renovator? I suppose this question boils down to: is the harvest considered a part of the round preceding it?

[alexwjb]

I was interested in this so I did a solo game to test. The answer is no, if you renovate in the harvest, Skilful Renovator does not proc and you do not get extra wood.

Instinctively I didn't expect it to work, but on the other hand, Lumin's unofficial compendium says in defining "Harvest phase":

"Harvest phase - Rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, & 14 end with a 3-phase Harvest"

"End with" here is a bit ambiguous. If I say "the document ends with a signature", the signature is part of the document. But if I say "the match ends with everyone leaving the stadium" - Leaving the stadium isn't part of the match. So the phrase "end with" could be read either way.

The official rules also say that the relevant rounds "end with" a harvest.

In general, the game implementation is right. So I think the right answer is that harvests are not part of the rounds preceding them. But I have to say that's a bit unsatisfying! For example, I believe cards that you let you do things "once per round", like Pellet Press or Mandoline, will work in the harvest. But if the harvest isn't part of a round, it's not clear they should.

I'd be very interested to hear from someone with a better explanation.

[alexwjb]

On your other question - can you use Hewer stone to use Stone House Recon? - the answer, in theory, should be yes.

Hewer: "From round 3 on, at the end of each work phase in which all clay accumulation spaces are unoccupied, you get 1 stone and 1 food."
Stone House Reconstruction: "At any time, you can renovate your clay house to a stone house without placing a person. (You must pay the normal renovation cost.)"

There is another phase after the work phase in each round - the returning home phase. So, in theory, it should be possible during the phase.

The problem is, in practice, I don't know if the implementation will allow you to do anything in the returning home phase, or if all the people will just fly home immediately.

[Acerbic]

Harvests certainly do count as part of the round they occur in. What's happening here is that the code for Skillful Renovator isn't tracking how many people have been placed, it just checks how many of your people are on the board when it's played. I imagine this was initially fine, but perhaps this needs to be reconsidered due to corner cases such as this one.

[Logic2718]

Thank you alexwjb for doing the testing and also for your explaination, it is much appreciated.

Based on Acerbic's answer that harvests are part of the rounds they occur in, it seems like this behavior with Skillful Renovator is not intended and should be fixed. Should I submit a bug report?

But I'm still unclear about the general case, when the round doesn't end in the harvest. At the end of the work phase, I get the stone from the Hewer. Then, the returning home phase happens. So, the question is, can players take actions during the returning home phase?

Well, at any rate, I'm glad I didn't risk it in my game and instead took the stone with an action!

[alexwjb]

Yes, it should be sumitted as a bug report (unless there is already a bug filed for this).

@Acerbic do you know whether it is possible to use Stone House Reconstruction in the returning home phase, in the case where Hewer makes it possible? I think not but maybe there is a setting I'm missing.

[Acerbic]

Rules-wise this should be possible, but I'm afraid it won't work on BGA unless there's something else that introduces a prompt or pause for that player.

This is a general limitation of the implementation that I don't see a solution for. There's a ton of timings in Agricola and it's not feasible to stop during each phase and subphase to give players a chance to trigger actions. For a short time, we forced a confirmation every time someone received resources outside of their turn and under this system you would have been able to reno off the Hewer stone. Unfortunately this slowed down games significantly, in particularly turn-based ones, and had to be reverted.

[alexwjb]

Thanks Acerbic - that was what I expected. It's the right trade-off overall and this is just one of those cases that falls in the gap.