Page
| Page | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Info | |
| Cost |
 |
| Type(s) | Action - Traveller |
| Kingdom card? | Yes |
| Set |
Adventures |
| Illustrator(s) | Alayna Danner |
| Card text | |
|
+1 Card +1 Action When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Treasure Hunter. | |
Page is an Action-Traveller card from Adventures. A simple cantrip on play, it is the first in a line of five increasingly powerful cards. It can be exchanged for a Treasure Hunter when discarded from play.
Page is the first step in its line of Travellers: Page - Treasure Hunter - Warrior - Hero - Champion.
FAQ
Official FAQ
- See the section on Travellers.
- When you play Page, you get +1 Card and +1 Action.
- When you discard it from play, you may return it to its pile and take a Treasure Hunter, putting it into your discard pile.
Strategy
The Page line of Travellers is strong and often centralizing. Since Champion offers two powerful effects in the form of complete Attack immunity and unlimited terminal space, getting one into play as quickly as possible is usually a high-priority goal. This means that it is typically advantageous to open with Page and devote significant resources to managing your Travellers in order to exchange them as quickly as possible.
Ideally, exchanging up the Page line quickly will mean that you can be the first to attack with Warrior and get your Champion into play quickly to start playing large amounts of terminal draw and payload. Rapidly achieving good deck control, usually by thinning and adding non-terminal draw, is even more important than usual to help with this, and effects that provide sifting alongside rapid cycling, such as Warehouse or Scouting Party, can be particularly helpful. Effects like Star Chart that provide strong control over a single card in your shuffle also speed up the process significantly. In contrast, terminal draw is generally difficult to use before you have Champion in play, since some of the Page line Travellers are themselves terminal and drawing terminally risks drawing your Travellers dead. Paying attention to reshuffles is also very important: exchanging just before you reshuffle rather than just after speeds up your Traveller progression by an entire shuffle, so there are many scenarios in which it's best to avoid triggering a shuffle when you want to exchange a Traveller.
Even though you will never need more than one Champion, advancing multiple Pages can still be useful, since you may want to build towards a deck that also contains one or more Warriors for draw or Heroes for payload. It also has the advantage of mitigating delays caused by bottomdecking a Traveller or having one trashed or discarded by an opponent’s Warrior Attack. However, these considerations need to be balanced against the potentially prohibitive downside of gaining many Silvers from Treasure Hunter plays.
Page
Aside from its primary purpose in providing access to Travellers further up the line, Page is a cheap cantrip with rather low impact. As such, it is rarely relevant in its own right outside of synergies with effects that generally work well with this type of card, such as bonus tokens or decks that want many Actions for effects such as City Quarter or Vineyard. A specific minor synergy that is always available is with Warrior: since its Attack scales with the number of Travellers in play, it can be readily scaled up by playing a Page or two first. Since this is only relevant before your opponent has played Champion, and your earlier priorities are likely to be focused on advancing your own Travellers, this interaction has a fairly narrow window where it is useful.
Treasure Hunter
Treasure Hunter is mostly relevant as a step in acquiring Warrior and the later Travellers. If it gains a single Silver, this can often be a welcome addition of payload to your deck, since it's likely that you've concentrated on Traveller advancement in the opening. However, gaining two or more Silvers is less likely to be desirable, because adding multiple stop cards to your deck reduces your deck control and cycling speed, slowing down your overall Traveller progression. As such, it’s fairly important to consider how many cards your opponent has gained before you play Treasure Hunter. Gaining multiple Silvers is most likely to occur because your opponent has played their own Treasure Hunter on the previous turn (in addition to buying a card); in this situation the downside of delaying your overall Traveller progression very likely outweighs any benefit you might get by avoiding multiple Silvers. Later in the game, however, it can often be preferable to avoid playing Treasure Hunter, since the need to exchange subsequent Travellers is usually less urgent and the number of Silvers it adds to your deck can become very large. The availability of a Way is sometimes an important factor in considering whether to advance additional Pages, since this allows you to avoid the Silver gaining while still exchanging for a Warrior. In some cases, you may be able to impede your opponent’s ability to play their own Treasure Hunter by making extensive use of gainers, notably Horse gainers.
Occasionally, Treasure Hunter's ability to gain very large numbers of Silvers can be an asset, turning it into an important payload card. In some cases, a second Treasure Hunter can be useful to ramp up your overall payload in the late game once you have deck control. In others, it can help with scoring, e.g. with Conquest or Triumph.
Warrior
Warrior combines terminal draw with a trashing attack whose impact is often relatively small due to two factors:
- There is usually only a small window of opportunity before your opponent gets attack immunity via Champion.
- Warrior's attack will often only reveal a single card, making it that much less likely to find a useful card.
In many cases, Warrior will either reveal a card outside of its price range (thus providing free cycling for your opponent) or hit an unimportant card such as Silver. However, Warrior does have the potential to disrupt an opponent's Traveller progression. Notably, Warrior can trash both Treasure Hunter and other Warriors: while on average this is fairly unlikely to happen, when it does it can be a major setback to your opponent's Traveller advancement, which in turn can play a significant role in deciding the game, particularly if they have only advanced one Page or if thinning and cycling are very difficult. Higher-tier Travellers are too expensive to be trashed, but discarding one of these can also be highly detrimental: in particular, the impact of delaying your opponent’s Champion can be significant. For these reasons, playing your Warrior as early as possible is usually very desirable, both to increase your chances of trashing an opponent's Traveller and to reduce the chances that your own Travellers will be trashed.
While in most cases Champion’s attack immunity puts a time limit on Warrior's effectiveness as a general-purpose trashing attack, Warrior's attack can be made more impactful in the following ways:
- The attack becomes better the more Travellers you have in play, so whenever possible, Warrior should be played after other Travellers you have in hand. In this context, extra Pages can be useful if acquiring them has a low opportunity cost.
- Cost reduction reducing prices by
or enables you to trash more valuable cards, including more advanced Travellers.
Beyond its attack, the fact that Warrior offers a small amount of terminal draw can make it relevant later in the game, once you have Champion in play. Depending on the availability of other draw, it might be reasonable to buy and advance additional Pages for this purpose. However, since doing so requires playing Treasure Hunter, this will only add net draw to your deck if you have a way to handle or avoid any Silvers it gains. Combined with the fact that Warrior draws only two cards (equivalent to Moat) and that acquiring it takes multiple turns, there are often better options for draw.
Hero
As a terminal silver with a Treasure gaining effect, Hero is most often used as a stepping stone to Champion. However, it is sometimes a sufficiently useful card that it's worth acquiring a second copy that you can keep playing. Whether to do this depends largely on the strength of the available draw and the relative value of the cards Hero can gain. Strong draw enables your deck to handle gaining multiple Treasures, and Hero is a reasonably fast way to add payload once you can make use of this draw. Hero's available targets are particularly desirable when the alternatives for payload are weak or when the available Treasure options themselves are strong cards, for example Platinum, Horn of Plenty, or Crown.
In some cases, Champion may be skippable and obtaining a Hero may be the primary goal of your Page line. This is usually only the case if the Kingdom favors a money-based strategy, which is most likely to occur when there is no practical way to build towards scoring multiple Victory cards’ worth of 
per turn, either because the draw is weak or because the Kingdom lacks +Buy or other relevant sources of gains. Another important factor is how threatening any Attacks are, and occasionally you'll still prefer to advance Hero to Champion primarily for the attack immunity.
Champion
Champion is a very powerful card, and is usually the main reason the Page line is such a high priority. The more important of its two effects is the permanently unlimited terminal space: with Champion in play, you can easily draw your deck using terminal draw cards and play as many terminal payload cards as you can draw, without spending resources on village support. This allows you to build much more quickly and draw your deck more reliably. The complete attack immunity always has at least some relevance, in that Warrior is available to your opponents in Page Kingdoms, but can be more important if other strong Attacks are present as well.
The sudden access to unlimited terminal space that you gain by playing Champion creates something of a dilemma in how to build your deck. Although you now have the capacity to make use of large amounts of strong terminal draw and payload, it is usually impossible to add this instantly in order to take advantage of this newfound capacity. Conversely, gradually adding these cards earlier (while advancing your Travellers) is usually difficult: it necessitates either spending a certain amount of resources on villages whose value will fall significantly once you play Champion, or accepting that these cards will be difficult to use (which impedes your Traveller progression) until Champion is in play. The best option is often to strike a balance between adding terminals early (before you can play them) and adding them later (when you already have Champion and the end of the game may be approaching). This generally means gaining terminal draw cards once your Traveller is fairly well advanced (perhaps to Warrior or Hero) and avoiding playing them until you have Champion in play (unless you can be certain that your most advanced Traveller will neither be drawn dead nor miss the next shuffle).
Methods to alleviate the above dilemma may be available in some Kingdoms. For example, Silk Merchant and Lackeys provide Villagers that are likely to be sufficient to meet your temporary need for terminal space. Ways can also be helpful, either because they let you play your terminals before you have Champion (such as Way of the Pig) or because they allow you to extract some value from your villages afterwards (such as Way of the Sheep or Way of the Owl).
In a Kingdom with Tournament, the very large number of +Actions that Champion generates means that Diadem can often be worth extremely large amounts of 
. However, this is often still insufficient to make it more desirable than some of the other Prizes.
Versions
English versions
| Digital | Text | Release | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
+1 Card +1 Action When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Treasure Hunter. |
Adventures | April 2015 |
|
 |
+1 Card +1 Action When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Treasure Hunter. |
Adventures (2017 printing) | August 2017 |
Other language versions
| Language | Name | Digital | Text | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dutch | Wapenknecht (lit. squire) | +1 Kaart +1 Actie Als je deze kaart vanuit het spel aflegt, mag je deze tegen een Roofridder ruilen. |
(2015) | ||
| Finnish | Kisälli (lit. journeyman) | ||||
| French | Page | ||||
| German | Page |  |
+1 Karte +1 Aktion Ist diese Karte im Spiel, darfst du sie gegen einen Schatzsucher eintauschen anstatt sie abzulegen. |
(2015) | |
| Page |  |
+1 Karte +1 Aktion Wenn du diese Karte aus dem Spiel ablegst, darfst du sie in einen Schatzsucher eintauschen. |
(Nachdruck 2021) | ||
| Japanese | 騎士見習い (pron. kishi minarai, lit. apprentice knight) |
+1 カードを引く +1 アクション これを場から捨て札にするとき、これをトレジャーハンターと交換してもよい。 |
|||
| Polish | Paź | Although Polish version is not released, this card is referred to in the Polish version of Empires rulebook | |||
| Russian | Паж (pron. pazh) |
Trivia
Secret History
