@wallhackio Pennsylvania Railroad. The card clearly says "advance to," which exclusively means moving ahead, not backwards.

@Alexis @wallhackio intentionally making no one happy by suggesting you "advance to" the Reading Railroad by looping the board and passing GO

but yes, go to Pennsylvania

@IntrepidVector @Alexis this was my position at the time of the argument actually lmao

@wallhackio @Alexis rewriting the card to be "advance to the next station" to put an end to wiseguys like you

@wallhackio @Alexis the other interpretation is to say that because the game is a one-way street, Penn Railroad is the nearest and Rainbow Railroad is very far from you, about as far as you can be across the board from you

@Alexis @wallhackio Agree. The word "advance" is the key here

@coriander @Alexis @wallhackio But you could advance all the way around.

Then again I guess if you can only ever move forward, then Reading is no longer the closest.

@diffractie @Alexis @wallhackio Even if you advance all the way around the board Penn is the closest because you encounter it first

@wallhackio it says advance, meaning that you have to go forward

@wallhackio All normal logic would say Pennsylvania, since dice movement is clockwise. But I can't find a published version of the rules that specifies that all movement must be clockwise (and the current version from Hasbro only mentions direction when in conjunction with the dice roll). So upon further review I'm saying Reading, and well-spotted to whoever pushed that interpretation.

@wallhackio Arguably "go to jail, do not pass go" cuts both ways: it implies people may wish to orbit clockwise, but it also indicates that not all movement must happen exactly that way.

Though the current official rules have holes: they imply you can buy a get out of jail free card from another player but don't include it when discussing sales, and specify that you collect $200 when landing on Go despite the board text requiring passing it. So 🤷🏻.

@aschmitz the game explicitly allows movement in both directions in multiple situations:

1) a community chest card that has you move back three spaces
2) the fact that you go can go to jail without passing "GO" by either rolling doubles three times in a row, landing on the go to jail square, or by collecting certain chance or community chest cards

However, with this specific "Advance to the nearest station" is the fact that the card says "Advance" which many take to imply that you should move counterclockwise. If that is the case then we must clarify the meaning of "nearest." Is Reading Railroad nearest even if you move counterclockwise? Is California still near to Nevada if you fly west to get there?

@wallhackio Well, "nearest" may not necessarily be in the advancement direction either. Does this mean you pass Go?

@wallhackio If you thought taxicab geometry was weird, get ready for Monopoly geometry!

@wallhackio @aschmitz and then there's the fact that the "nearest" station changes as you move. as soon as you get past jail, the nearest station because Penn Stn anyway, so you pretty much have to stop there.

@wallhackio i am fairly certain they purrobably meant “the next” but the pedant in me can never ignore that going to Reading is a valid read

@aescling @wallhackio i see it, but that would mean you're using a different distance metric for "nearest" than the one used for "advance"