Locations are a new type of card introduced in Shadow Era's fourth set, Lost Lands.

Location Deckbuilding & Board:

• Location cards are included in your deck. You can choose to include none or up to 4 of each.
  
• Locations are played in the centre of the board, between the two ally rows, in a single stack, shared between all players.
  
• At the start of the game, the stack is always empty.
  
• All locations in the stack are considered in play, but only the top one is active, meaning that the text on all the covered locations is effectively blank.
  
• When a location is summoned while there is already an active location, the active location immediately becomes inactive and the newly summoned location takes its place on the top of the stack as the new active location.

TWO EXAMPLES OF LOCATION CARDS

Location Summoning:

• Locations have no summoning cost, so they are effectively played for "free" (even in the presence of cards that increase summoning cost).
• Locations always have a turn number associated with them, which denotes the earliest that the location can be summoned. In other words, for a location to be summoned, the current turn number for the active player must be at least equal to the turn number on the location (e.g., T2 means the active player must be on their 2nd turn or later).
• A player may not summon more than one location per turn.
• To help players adhere to these two requirements, within the digital game, a location card will not be highlighted in green in your hand before its turn number requirement has been met or if you have already summoned a location that turn.
• A player may add a new location to the stack even if their own is currently on top.
• A player may summon a location even if another copy of that location is currently on top unless that player controls and owns the active location. (In play-testing and earlier versions of the live game, we allowed players to summon a second copy of a location directly over their first copy of that location, but this proved to be too limiting on the effects we could put on the locations without them being broken/OP.)
  

Location Abilities:

• Locations have two separate ability text boxes, with each considered speaking to the player it is closest to (or the team it is closest to, in the case of 2 vs 2 play). Text for the opposing player(s) is written "upside down" to facilitate this.
• Each ability text box can have passive abilities and/or activated abilities.
  

Location Control:

• As with every other card in Shadow Era, each location has exactly one controller at all times, which is the player who summoned it by default.
• Some locations have built-in effects for the opponent to take control of the location. This causes the location card to rotate, switching the abilities on offer to each player.
• If you take control of a location on your turn, you may still activate the controller ability even if you have already activated the non-controller ability.
• A single location can repeatedly change control throughout the game.
• If some effect causes the top location to leave play, the next location in the stack becomes active again, with the same controller as it had when it was covered.
  

Gondorian's explanations

Cards that are related to locations: