Fountain

Fountain
Info
Type	Landmark
Set	Empires
Illustrator(s)	Lynell Ingram
Landmark text
When scoring, 15  if you have at least 10 Coppers.

Fountain is a Landmark from Empires. It gives a large amount of   to players who end the game with at least 10 Coppers in their deck.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• You either get 15  or 0 ; there is no extra bonus for having 20 Coppers.

Strategy

Fountain offers a tradeoff of a large amount of   for a large amount of stop cards. While 15  is 2.5 times as much as a Province, Fountain is far less efficient in terms of   per stop card, at 1.5  per card. Most engines will be unable to draw the deck with ten additional stop cards, and would much prefer to be using other, more efficient payload anyway.

Fountain’s relevance in a Kingdom depends on three factors:

• How much 15  is worth relative to other scoring options. If a megaturn gaining all eight Provinces is available with Bridge Troll, 15  in exchange for carrying around ten stop cards is very much not worth it. If the Kingdom only offers a money strategy of moderate speed that can only score a Province a turn, Fountain is much more relevant.
• How bad Copper is for your deck, and what your options for getting rid of it are. If there’s good payload, Copper is inefficient by comparison. If the draw is somewhat unreliable or dependent on collisions (e.g., Village/Smithy engines), Coppers are junk getting in the way of that. A strong trasher such as Sentry can solve both of these problems and enable a strong engine that will make Fountain less relevant. If, however, there is no Copper trashing, the first three Coppers bought are effectively worth 5  each, which may be worth buying if you miss Province in the greening stage, even in single-buy Kingdoms.
• The availability of additional gains, particularly +Buy and Copper gainers such as Banquet and Treasure Trove. Without these options Fountain is much less appealing as the high opportunity cost of spending your one Buy per turn on a Copper comes into play, and in many cases spending three turns buying a Copper is both less efficient scoring than buying Province and does not improve the quality of your deck. In games with plentiful +Buy, it’s often viable to trash your starting Coppers with the plan to rebuy them in the endgame for scoring with Fountain.

Fountain synergizes with effects that can keep your starting Coppers around for scoring purposes but outside of your drawable deck. Exilers such as Sanctuary are strong for this purpose, both thinning your deck in the early game and allowing you to more easily pursue Fountain later. Effects such as those of Island and Miser can also be suitable for this purpose.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		When scoring, 15  if you have at least 10 Coppers.	Empires	June 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text
Dutch	Fontein
Finnish	Toivomuslähde (lit. wishing fountain)
French	Fontaine
German	Brunnen			Beim Zählen der   Punkte: 15  wenn du mindestens 10 Kupfer besitzt.
Japanese	噴水 (pron. funsui)			ゲーム終了時、あなたが10枚以上銅貨を持っている場合、15 。
Polish	Fontanna
Russian	Фонтан (pron. fontan)

Trivia

Official card art.

Preview

Fountain is a simple one. At the end of the game, if you have 10+ Coppers, you get 15 . Bam. If you don't, you don't get anything; if you have 20+ Coppers, sorry, still just 15 . Okay? So, you decide: do you want the   enough to have the Coppers? If you do, you probably don't want the extra Coppers until later, but you don't want to wait until it's too late. Sometimes you may even try to trash your starting Coppers and then buy them back later.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Empires Previews #4: Landmarks

Secret History

Stef Meijer suggested this one. It was one of the first Landmarks and so started out weaker, at 8  for 10 Coppers.

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