Crossroads

Crossroads
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Matthias Catrein‏‎
Card text
Reveal your hand. +1 Card per Victory card revealed. If this is the first time you played a Crossroads this turn, +3 Actions.

Crossroads is an Action card from the Hinterlands expansion. It offers draw based on the number of Victory cards in your hand. Additionally, the first time you play it per turn, it gives you +3 Actions, acting as a limited village.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• First reveal your hand, and draw a card for each Victory card you revealed, if any.
• The revealed cards all stay in your hand.
• Then, if this is the first time you played a Crossroads this turn, you get +3 Actions.
• Subsequent Crossroads this turn will give you cards but not Actions.
• If you use Throne Room on Crossroads, you will play Crossroads twice, getting +3 Actions the first time but not the second time.

Other Rules clarifications

• Cards with multiple types of which one is the Victory type (such as Mill) are counted as Victory cards.
• If your first Crossroads is either enchanted or played as a Way, the second one will not give +Actions.

Strategy

Crossroads provides both a village and a draw effect in a cheap but constrained form. Since the village effect is limited at once per turn, multiple copies of Crossroads cannot be stacked to fuel an engine with arbitrary amounts of +Action, and in fact copies played after your first in order to benefit from the draw require extra terminal space. However, a copy or two of Crossroads can be cheaply added to your deck to supplement another village and provide extra reliability. If Crossroads is the only available village, having one or two copies lets you play two extra terminals per turn, which can be highly impactful depending on the available terminals.

In order to draw with Crossroads, you need to have Victory cards in hand. There are a few problems with this.

• Collision is an issue, and Crossroads can be a very unreliable source of draw, especially in the early game. If you collide it with only one Victory card, it is no better than a cantrip, and if you collide it with none it’s a stop card. Similarly to Shepherd, this may be less of a concern with effects that can enable collision, such as Tracker’s topdecking or Dungeon’s sifting. While encouraging collision at the start of your turn is strong, for example with Duration draw such as Wharf, guaranteeing collision at the start of your turn with effects such as Gear can be even stronger. For this reason, Church synergizes especially well with Crossroads, as Church can set aside some of your Victory cards along with a Crossroads and put them into your hand at the start of your next turn, guaranteeing that you will collide them and draw well from very early in the game. With two each of Church and Crossroads, you can also remove those Victory cards from your shuffle (i.e., pseudo-thin them) while reliably drawing every turn.
• Because Victory cards are usually dead cards that give you no benefit on the turn you draw them, and you would prefer to build by gaining Actions or Treasures, this often means that the only Victory cards in your deck are Estates. For most stages of the game, this limits both the amount of draw you can get with Crossroads and your odds of collision. If you can continue to build by adding Victory cards (e.g., in Kingdoms with Nobles or Inheritance), Crossroads is much more appealing. Crossroads may also be worthwhile in the endgame, once you’ve started greening and have many Victory cards.
• Crossroads draw often compares unfavorably to simply trashing your Estates and drawing via other methods. This is because Crossroads increases the effective hand size you can actually use very slowly, as while it draws a card for each Victory card (thus converting that dead hand size into something possibly useful), it does not draw a replacement card for itself. For example, if you have a hand of a Crossroads, two Estate, and two Coppers and play the Crossroads to draw two Coppers, you’ve effectively spent three cards in hand for two payload cards. Crossroads is thus more useful when you cannot get rid of your Estates, which may be the case if your thinning options are Copper-focused (e.g. Moneylender).

The once-per-turn limit of Crossroads’ village effect means it can be greatly inconvenienced by an opponent’s Enchantress, because if your Crossroads is affected by the Attack you cannot get the village effect by playing another copy. Similar problems can occur if you want to set up your hand to have more Victory cards for draw, but need to play your first Crossroads as a Way to do so.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.

• rinkworks' 2011 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Reveal your hand. +1 Card per Victory card revealed. If this is the first time you played a Crossroads this turn, +3 Actions.	Hinterlands	October 2011
		Reveal your hand. +1 Card per Victory card revealed. If this is the first time you played a Crossroads this turn, +3 Actions.	Hinterlands (2016 printing)	December 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Křižovatka
Dutch	Splitsing
Finnish	Tienristeys
French	Carrefour
German	Wegkreuzung			Decke deine Handkarten auf: +1 Karte pro aufgedeckter Punktekarte. Ist dies das erste Mal in diesem Zug, dass du eine Wegkreuzung ausgespielt hast: +3 Aktionen.	(2019)
Italian	Incrocio
Japanese	岐路 (pron. kiro)			手札を公開し、その中の勝利点カードと同じ枚数のカードを引く。これがこのターンに使用した最初の岐路の場合、+3 アクション。
Polish	Rozdroże			Odkryj swoją rękę. +1 karta za każdą odkrytą kartę Zwycięstwa. Jeśli zagrałeś Rozdroże po raz pierwszy w tej turze, +3 akcje.	(2024)
Russian	Перекрёсток (pron. pyeryekryostok)
Spanish	Encrucijada

Trivia

Official card art.

Crossroads it one of only three cards that directly offer more than two extra Actions on a single card, the other two being Bustling Village and Snowy Village.

Theme

It's at the intersection of your victory cards.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Hinterlands Cards

Preview

The first time you play Crossroads in a turn, it's like a Cellar that only works on Victory cards, plus you get those extra Actions. The second time, you still get to draw cards for the Victory cards you didn't have to discard the first time. I imagine Crossroads looks crazy to some of you and well it's no fun if all the cards just look semi-okay. Crossroads and Fool's Gold both do something different the first time you play them in a turn, but that's not a sub-theme, there are just those two.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Hinterlands Previews #3

Secret History

The first version was +1 Action, +1 Card per Victory card in hand. It looked crazy but wasn't very good. Then for a long time it was, +1 Card per Victory card in hand, +1 Action per Action card in hand (you revealed a second time, so ones you drew counted). People were sad to see this go, but I could not justify having a card that meant you sometimes had no clue how many Actions you had and no way to figure it out either. Then it gave +2 Actions, but that version was too strong. Giving you +3 Actions just the first time is cute, and means you can't go too nuts without other cards helping.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Hinterlands Cards