“…To continue our efforts in this project (Liu et al, 2017a; Wang J.-Y. et al, 2017; Li et al, 2018a,b; Sha et al, 2018b; Wang et al, 2018), we attempted to employ indoles 2 to be subjected with the reaction of yne-allenones 3 under our previous conditions (Li et al, 2018a) to assemble naphtho[1,2- a ]carbazol-5-ols 4 (Scheme 1d), owing to indoles with C2 and C3 reactive sites could acted as C 2 synthons for the synthesis of fused indoles (Haibach et al, 2011; Li et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2016; Ozaki et al, 2017). Unexpectedly, a double [2 + 2] cycloaddition relay did not occur.…”