by Antistone
It wasn't clear to me that the purple glow was meant to block sea routes at all. It doesn't obviously extend onto land, and the board is clearly playing loose with the "must be on water" limitation (see e.g. the predrawn routes connecting to Lagos). Seemed like a similar amount of space to the Straight of Gibraltar.How you rule that is significant for the Sail/Charter Boat actions, but makes much less difference in December than Jack F suggests above, because
[o]You still can't draw a route that crosses another sea route, and there are predrawn routes from Kolkata to Jakarta to the ruined haven to Wellington, and Wellington is on land that extends to the southern edge of the map. So you can't draw any routes that cross that line, even with the event card. (This makes me think you probably are intended to be able to sail past the glow, because it's fairly coincidental otherwise.)
You can potentially draw a line from Jakarta to Dar es Salaam, but more realistically you connect both Jakarta and Kolkata to the Indian haven.
You save one city (New Mumbai, black) from the optimal route. The difficulty can plausibly vary by more than that just based on what choices you made in drawing regular routes in Asia.[/o]