Footprints

• Designers: Eilif Svensson, Åsmund Svensson, Geir André Wahlquist
• Publisher: Chilifox
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Thousands of years ago, near the end of the ice age, humans once again dwelt on fertile land. But a new challenge awaits! The ice is still melting, and that fertile land will soon be flooded. All living creatures must escape to the mountains. Your engravings and cave paintings will stand the test of time, and the skills you have honed will be passed on to your descendants. It’s up to you to leave your “footprints on the ground” for the generations to come.

Maneuver your clan through difficult terrain, improve your skills to advance more efficiently, gather needed resources, make cave paintings and engravings at important sites, and use your leader to inspire your clan beyond their limits, while trying to reach the cairns on the horizon before time runs out… Footprints is a competitive game with asymmetric player powers (each player has their own clan deck) and variable setup through a modular game board. Your abilities in route planning, skill improvement (engine building), and hand management will increase your chances of winning the game.

To set up the board, place the cairn board to the right of the table and then lay out six 5 game boards to the left.  Home tokens are then placed on the leftmost edge of the last board for each player.  Caves are placed on each cave site on the rightmost 4 boards.  The Fire and Footprint decks are shuffled and put nearby. 

Each player gets a random player board, all the bits in their player color, and a clan marker and deck with the same symbol on it.  The deck is prepared and the top 4 cards are dealt face up under your board to serve as your clan display. Each player also gets a player aid card and a random footprint card to start the game.  Footprint cards are end game scoring cards which score you points if you successfully complete them. Of course, if you do not complete them, it isn’t good for you, and you’ll suffer a -3VP penalty.

Players should note that each deck is slightly different and the breakdown of terrain types is summarized at the bottom of their player board.  In reverse turn order, players claim a start space, place their meeple on said space and take the bonus printed on the tile they choose to occupy.

On a player turn, there are 6 phases which are always taken in the same order.  Note that at any point in your turn, if you meet the criteria on one of your Footprint cards, you flip it over showing that you have accomplished it.

1] Play a Clan Card – Play one of the four cards visible in your clan display. If it was NOT your leader card, you can optionally also play a fire card from your hand.  Place the cards above your board in a discard area.  You will only use each clan card once a game.

2] Execute Action – If you have played your leader card, execute the unique action printed on the card.  Otherwise, your card will have two option choices on it, you will choose one of them to execute. The upper action choice is a movement action, showing a type of terrain to move through (the number of spaces you move is equal to your matching skill level in that terrain, noted on your player board).  The lower action choice usually allows advancement in skill followed by some small movement – as you move up the skill tracks, you’ll gain a bonus for each space that your marker moves through or ends on.  In either event, if you pass through or end on an empty space with a bonus in it, you’ll collect all those bonuses as well.  If you choose to play a fire card in this phase, you can use the action of that fire card before, during, or after your main action.

3] Build (optional) – you may build one of your 4 creations; it must be on an empty terrain matching its type and that space must be adjacent to you. The cost is printed on the player board. When you build it, take bonuses from each unoccupied space adjacent to it that has a bonus printed on it.

4] Activate one Engraving power – as you build engravings, you will reveal actions on your player board. Each turn you may activate any one visible action.  They each advance their corresponding skill marker for resources.

5] Discard Fire Cards – if you used a Fire card this turn, discard it to the Fire card discard pile. Also, if you have more than 3 Fire cards, discard down to 3.

6] Draw a Clan Card – reveal the top card of your Clan deck to refill your display to 4 cards. If your deck is empty, skip this step.

The next player then takes their turn.  The game continues until one of the two endgame conditions is met: the end of the round when one player has ended their movement on one of the cairn spaces on the final board or the end of the round when all the clan cards are played.  All players who reach a cairn space take the highest valued unoccupied space on the cairn track.

The final scores are tallied

• Cairn points – if your meeple made it to a cairn space 
• Engravings – points for each per the player board
• Skill Tracks – if you have made it to space 10 or 11
• Footprint cards – +6VP if complete, -3VP if not complete
• Cave Tokens – each Cave has its own scoring criteria
• Resource Tokens – 1 VP per 2 resources left at the end of the game
• Fire cards – 1 VP per unused fire card at the end of the game

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the highest sum of skill levels.

My thoughts on the game

So when I first read about the game, I thought that this was going to be a race game.  While the rules don’t necessarily dissuade you from this – after all, you’re building a track and there is a way to end the game if someone makes it to the “finish line” – the game is most definitely NOT about getting from point A to point B.

The game lets you wander about the landscape, trying to achieve your goals however you feel best.  I actually think that this is an important factor of the game which may not be evident from an initial play, and it’s an important thing to make clear.   I have seen some gamers get frustrated when they ended up with cards which did not allow them to quickly progress towards the end of the track – but the game actually doesn’t care!  There are plenty of ways to score without claiming a cairn… 

The game can end when someone gets to the end of the track. In one sense, the first player is at a disadvantage here as the game ends at the end of that round.  However, the first player has the advantage of theoretically having first chance to move and pick bonuses and cave locations – so it should all equal out.  The cairn score is not insignificant (10-15 points), but at the same point, it is also not insurmountable, and you might do better finding other ways to score points (footprint cards, maxing out a cave score, etc).

Each player has an asymmetric set of cards, but they don’t feel overly different.  I would make sure that each player is aware of the distribution of their 14 cards at the start of the game. But once you get started, you’re a bit at the mercy of your four card hand, and you just have to make the best of your options!  The cards give you two possible options, and you should have enough things to choose from each turn to do something useful.  As you only use each card once, and there are only 14 cards, you really don’t want to squander any of your turns.

You have choices on moving to score versus building your engine to make future turns more powerful. The limited number of turns puts a lot of pressure on you to choose wisely; and it also keeps the length of the game quite short.  It would surprise me for a game to last more than 45 minutes (assuming everyone knows the rules). 

Rules – the rules are quite clear. The overall graphic design is fairly spartan, but I’ll take plain looking rules that are easy to understand with adequate examples over some over produced book that doesn’t give me all the necessary information.  It was easy to read the rules the night before and be ready to teach and play the game on the following night.

Components – the quality of the components is good. The boards are nice and sturdy as are the cards.   I like the two layer player boards which give a nice groove for your pieces to sit in a stable fashion.  I will say that I have a lot of issues with colors, though I’m not colorblind, and man, I needed extra lighting to make sure I could see the drab colors on the cards and the board correctly.  I realize that this is likely a “me problem”, as I have this issue with a lot of games that other people don’t complain about – but I still mention it in case others have similar issues.  It’s hard to tell olive from brown from tan from gray at times…  And, the cards are weirdly utilitarian and use about 10% of the area – things could have been made bigger to be easier to read…

Our first game was not overly well received – I think in part because we all thought it was a racing game, and there are many times when your cards simply don’t allow you to go forward.  The final scores did help us re-align our expectations as the player who moved the least from the starting line ended up coming in second place in that game!  In later games, when we realized that we needed to concentrate less on moving forward and more on figuring out what were the best paths for scoring – the game flowed much better and people were much happier with how the game played.  Sure, there are still times when you’re just going to get hosed by another player or poor card luck, but as the game is pretty short, it’s easy enough to set the game up and play again!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 play): I want to like this game more than I do since the puzzle-y aspect of figuring out how to best use your cards to accomplish what you need to do is interesting. However, my one play was a real drag. This was almost certainly because we had five players, which I don’t recommend; you naturally get more interaction with more players, and generally I like interaction in games, but much of the interaction in this game is in the form of inadvertent blocking, which is not fun. Therefore adding more players mostly just makes the game take longer, while also increasing the chances of essentially random screwage occurring. I’m rating it neutral in the hopes that it will improve with fewer players.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph H
• Neutral. Mark Jackson, John P, Dan B. (see above)
• Not for me… Dan B. (with five)