Can you make a stronghold in the squares at the edges of the board? Such a stronghold would have certain corners that were on the board edge itself. You can obviously do this in either of your opponent’s back corners to win, but it’s not clear whether you can do it other places.
Corollary question: If you can build a stronghold in one of those squares, and you do, and your opponent uses Diplomacy to unstronghold you, can they capture your piece by unstrongholding you to one of the corners on the board edge?
Related to that: The rules say you can’t capture by making a stronghold, but don’t address whether you can capture using diplomacy either with the situation above or in other situations (for example, if there are two strongholds that share at least one corner, a Diplomacy card could hypothetically force one of those strongholds onto the shared corner, which would capture the piece being pulled out of stronghold). There is the rule that says: “You may not push with normal movement. Only sword moves and building strongholds can push another pawn,” but this Diplomacy move is not pushing and is not normal movement, so it doesn’t seem to be covered.
Hi Patrick!
You can make strongholds in the edge squares.
That is quite and edge case you’re looking at for Diplomacy. Has this happened in your games? A mouse pulled out of a stronghold by diplomacy would obey the subsequent standard procedure for capture. IIRC, only swords can capture a mouse pawn.
Thanks! For us the “diplomacy someone’s strongholded mouse into a second nearby stronghold to capture it” has come up a bunch (i guess we build more strongholds than most people?). We haven’t tried to build on the edge squares, so that (and the related “diplomacy them off the board” issue) hasn’t been a point of disagreement yet.
Thank you for the clarification that “only swords can capture.” The lines I could find (I may not have found the right one) said that swords can capture and strongholds can’t capture but I couldn’t find a ruling on whether diplomacy could capture, or an active statement that only swords can capture, so I wasn’t sure. I appreciate the extremely prompt and definitive reply!