Footpad

Footpad
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Cornucopia & Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Jessi J
Card text
+2 Coffers Each other player discards down to 3 cards in hand. In games using this, when you gain a card in an Action phase, +1 Card.

Footpad is an Action-Attack card from the second edition of Cornucopia & Guilds.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• This changes any game it's part of, even if no-one has gained a Footpad.
• For that entire game, any time you gain a card in an Action phase, you draw a card.
• For example if you played Remake to turn two Estates into two Silvers, you'd draw two cards.
• Drawing isn't optional.
• This doesn't draw you cards in Buy phases or Clean-up, just Action phases.
• When you play a Footpad, you get +2 Coffers, and the other players discard down to 3 cards in hand.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+2 Coffers Each other player discards down to 3 cards in hand. In games using this, when you gain a card in an Action phase, +1 Card.	Cornucopia & Guilds Second Edition	March 2024

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
German	Straßenräuber			+2 Taler Jeder Mitspieler legt Handkarten ab, bis er nur noch 3 hat. In Spielen mit dieser Karte, wenn du in einer Aktionsphase eine Karte nimmst: +1 Karte.

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Kieran suggested doing another thing like Charlatan: an attack with a rules change on it that involves the attack. First we tried having a larger hand size, but well you never got to have it, because of the Militia. I tried making the attack conditional, so there was a window in the game where you actually got to have those 6-card hands. Then I gave up there and put in this card-drawing that happens on your own turn, so the Militia doesn't hit it.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Cornucopia & Guilds 2E

What if there's no gaining?

It's a concern when the card is absolutely nothing without the interaction, e.g. Tomb. For landscapes it seems sufficiently tolerable that I went ahead and made Tomb anyway. For kingdom cards, well they do something at least; Moat is relevant sometimes with no attacks. And of course cards that do everything they do are sometimes going to go untouched just because the board has something better to do.

For Footpad itself it's not much of a concern; it's always got the top, and that's what you buy it for anyway.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.

Memory issues

When asked whether he had considered making Footpad's rule-change effect more prominent on the card so that players would remember to follow it, Donald X. wrote

No-one in playtesting ever said "hey we should add a word to these cards." I mean it's that simple; lots of things never come up, that's one of them. Possibly the cards should have been a unique color, to draw your attention at the start of the game; it didn't come up, and they sure aren't.

The precedents are Baker and Young Witch! Two cards in the same box as Footpad. In the old days on isotropic, it was easy to miss Baker; one player would say "Baker Alarm!" And later Doug added that as an automatic thing. I can imagine online wanting a little box at the start of the game that reminds you of Baker / Footpad. And I mean maybe that will happen; not due to me going over there now and seeing "hey" but I sure don't need to rule it out.

From my perspective, everything modifies the rules. Woodcutter modifies the rules. It's easier to remember because you have to buy it to start getting the effect. But I broke this with a whole mechanic eventually, Landmarks, and no-one ever says, "we can't remember Tomb." So it seemed fair game. I think with Footpad the issue is that the bottom isn't sufficiently related to the top (it's related, but it's very mild). This in turn was due to, the bottom rule was different (an unforgettable "you have 6 cards hands this game"), and that didn't work out (it's not at its best on a Militia, would you believe).

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.