Fortress

Fortress
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Dark Ages
Illustrator(s)	Marco Morte
Card text
+1 Card +2 Actions When you trash this, put it into your hand.

Fortress is an Action card from Dark Ages. When played, it gives the same benefits as a simple Village but if you trash it, it returns into your hand. This enables a variety of useful interactions, especially with trash for benefit cards.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you play this, you draw a card and get +2 Actions.
• If this is trashed, you take it from the trash and put it into your hand.
• This happens no matter whose turn it is when Fortress is trashed.
• It is not optional.
• You still trashed Fortress, even though you got it back; for example if you play Death Cart and choose to trash Fortress, you did trash it and so get +.

Other Rules clarifications

• When you put Fortress in your hand after trashing it, it is not 'gained': you just put it in your hand. You can't reveal Trader or Watchtower to do something else with it.
• If a Possessed player's Fortress is trashed, the Possessing player chooses whether to put it back in hand immediately, as usual, or to set it aside with other trashed cards, to be returned to the Possessed player's discard pile at the end of the turn.
• If you trash a Fortress from the Supply with Lurker, you put the Fortress into your hand; it still doesn't count as being "gained".

Strategy

Fortress is a simple village with the bonus effect of returning to your hand when trashed. In Kingdoms without any trash for benefit effects, its primary use is to provide +Actions in the same way as the standard Village, and it should be used similarly in building an engine, i.e. by adding it after achieving some deck control and adding some useful terminals. The real power of Fortress, however, lies in how well it synergizes with many trash for benefit effects.

Fortress provides infinite fodder for such effects, and because it returns to your hand, may even act as the draw that you’d typically need to make repeated use of them. Trash for benefit cards such as Apprentice, Salvager, and Bishop allow you to convert that fodder into draw, , or   bounded only by how many copies of the trasher you can play with a Fortress in hand—you can even build a golden deck and aim to score solely via Bishop. Remodel variants become more like unconditional gainers that can continually gain expensive cards. Some good examples of this include Upgrade (which becomes a cantrip gainer with Fortress), Procession (which when played on a Fortress gives draw, lots of terminal space, and a Action card of your choice), and Butcher (which can gain your initial Fortress by trashing an Estate, then flexibly gain cards and Provinces afterwards). Priest greatly appreciates both the village and infinite fodder aspects of Fortress, and you can often play multiple Priests using a Fortress as fodder for a megaturn. Another synergy exists with Advance: every Buy you have with a single Fortress in hand can be used to gain a powerful Action card. Because you need a Fortress in your hand for almost all of these interactions, it’s usually best to use a slightly different play order from other villages, which you would typically play early in your turn. Instead, keep one Fortress in hand as fodder, and aim to play it after your trash for benefit effects; this may mean that one of your Fortresses doesn’t actually contribute to your terminal space, and that you’ll need one more village than you would otherwise.

Fortress also has important interactions with a few trashing effects that aren’t typically considered trash for benefit. For example, Sentry can effectively draw Fortresses from your deck by trashing them, while Lurker can be used to easily gain Fortresses to your hand by trashing them from the Supply. Rats become thinning as you can convert all of your starting junk into Rats, then effectively convert them into drawback-free cantrips by continually trashing a single Fortress. Finally, having multiple Fortresses can protect you from trashing Attacks such as Knights.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Card +2 Actions When you trash this, put it into your hand.	Dark Ages	August 2012
		+1 Card +2 Actions When you trash this, put it into your hand.	Dark Ages (2017 printing)	September 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Pevnost			+1 karta +2 akce Když tuto kartu zahodíš na smetiště, vezmi si ji do ruky.
Dutch	Vesting
Finnish	Linnoitus
French	Forteresse
German	Festung			+1 Karte +2 Aktionen Wenn du diese Karte entsorgst, nimm sie auf deine Hand.	(2019)
Japanese	城塞 (pron. jōsai)			+1 カードを引く +2 アクション これを廃棄するとき、手札に加える。
Korean	요새 (pron. yosae)
Polish	Forteca				Although Polish version is not released, this card is referred to in the Polish version of Empires rulebook
Russian	Крепость (pron. kryepost')
Spanish	Fortaleza

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Originally this also went back to your hand if you revealed it from your deck. In the end that seemed way too wonky. Without that it ends up just being a village in games without ways to usefully trash it, but well it is pretty cool when you are trashing it. Or someone else is. For a long time the card was called Walled Village, but then I needed that name for the Carcassonne promo.

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

Is Fortress problematic?

Donald X. has been forced to change cards (like Way of the Butterfly) because they interact poorly with Fortress.

Fortress is problematic. The best example is Farmland. Farmland was when-gain, and that functionality has no issues, it really should be fine to print. But it wasn't because of Fortress (which hadn't come out yet, but I knew it was coming).

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.