Triggering traps
As an explorer, you can trigger traps in the following ways:
- Activating a trap lever — spend 2 stamina to activate an adjacent trap-lever action space.
- Effects — resolve a trigger traps effect through an explorer event, one of your items, or an ability from the current chapter.
In all of these scenarios, you attack all units on your map tile using 3 high attack dice.
Then — a secondary attack added in 4.0 — for each other explorer adjacent to a trap lever on any map tile, that explorer attacks all units on trapped spaces on their own map tile with 3 low attack dice. To be clear: it is the adjacent explorer who makes this attack, not you — the explorer who triggered the traps.
Exploding barrels
Hitting a barrel follows similar mechanics: you attack all units adjacent to the barrel. This has two significant implications, covered below.
Modifying attack rolls
Since the attack is considered yours, you’re free to modify the roll by losing essence to increase your attack roll. And any adjacent explorer — or an explorer adjacent to the trap lever or barrel — can also lose essence to boost the attack, thanks to the contributing explorers mechanic.
Resolving triggered conditions
All your abilities from equipped and consumable items apply when traps or barrels explode. For example, an item with the effect “When you hit…” triggers whenever you hit a unit via a trap or barrel explosion. Passive conditions like “When you kill…” apply too — so it’s crucial to think ahead about the items and abilities you’re carrying into these situations.
FAQ
If a horror event causes trigger traps to resolve, no specific unit is activating the effect — so all units on trapped spaces across every map tile are affected.
If a monster triggers the traps, it becomes the activating unit, and only units on trapped spaces within its own map tile are affected.