Rule Clarification: Sharing a Wall?

[jonesyv]

I'm having trouble understanding what sharing a wall means. Intuitively, I would say it means adjacent rooms, even without a door between, such as

|A|B|C|

Where "B" shares a wall with A and C, even if they all only have doors to the north and/or south.

BUT I've yet to correctly solve a puzzle using this assumption (tho I could have erred elsewhere).

I could see it as referring to the continual line, where

A|
B|
C|

C would be considered as sharing a wall with A, as the same line extends through the east side of both rooms (even though they're not adjacent).

Could I get clarification, please? I think it would be helpful to have the definition in the "Help" section as well, similar to how "Adjacent Rooms" are clarified there.

[admin]

Adjoining rooms = sharing a wall. I can see where your confusion comes from though, and I'll see if I can tweak the wording of these clues to be more clear.

[vandykat]

I had a similar misunderstanding - I thought when the clue reads "share a wall", it specifically meant "no door", but it just means a room next to it.

[Afterburner]

If two rooms share a door, then by definition they also share a wall. Otherwise you wouldn't have any place to put the door!

If the clue says "shares a wall but no door", that means the rooms touch one another along a row or a column (corner-to-corner diagonal touching doesn't count), but there is no way to travel from one room to the other without travelling through at least one other room.

Here are some examples:

temp.jpg

In this puzzle, the following room pairs share a wall but no door:

--Library and Map Room
--Map Room and Grand Hall
--Grand Hall and Theatre

The Library and the Map Room (for example) touch each other, so they share a wall. But you cannot travel from the Library to the Map Room (or vice versa) without going through at least one other room.

[EmmaWingding]

Just adding a +1 here — I had to read these clues twice the first time too, so you're definitely not alone, jonesyv and vandykat!

The mental model that finally made it click for me: "shares a wall" just means the rooms touch edge-to-edge (not just corner-to-corner). Whether there's a door in that shared wall is a separate question — which is exactly why the "but no door" version of the clue exists. Once I treated "wall" as the geometry and "door" as the travel connection, the clues started reading clearly.

Really like the suggestion of spelling this out in the Help section alongside "Adjacent Rooms" — a tiny diagram or one worked example there would save every new solver the same head-scratching. Thanks to admin and Afterburner for the clear explanations!