First Look at Foothills

Gentle rolling mounds. Birdsong. The occasional whistle of a train steadily chugging through the valley. And an “Ah bugrit!” or two as your opponent shafts your latest scheme. Foothills is a 2 player game of building rail lines and stations and associated paraphernalia using a similar, er… engine, to Snowdonia. But now it’s all cards.

Instead of worker placement spots, each player has a set of 5 action cards, one of which you’ll perform, and then flip, each round. This reveals a different, and usually weaker, secondary action on the reverse. This system is a joy to play with thanks to some clever design decisions. The action on the reverse of a card is not just a weaker version of the front card, it can be one of the other front actions, or something else entirely. Which means you can be unable to take a certain action for a turn or more depending on how you’re running your engine. Cards can be switched out for replacements, changing up the back action, and unlocking the original card for its end game scoring potential.

Naturally there is a lot of scope for finding efficiencies and accepting inefficiencies at the right time. This timing being influenced strongly by your opponent. What resources they have, what actions their cards currently allow, what things they seem to be going after. Much like Snowdonia, routes need to be cleared of rubble, which can mean gaining points or potentially gifting them to your opponent, but rubble is also a resource.

Train tracks score immediate points and advance the game towards its end. Stations open up the option to upgrade your cards and give you access to special action spots. The central ‘board’ (collection of cards making up the lines) is littered with special actions offering up a borderline ludicrous menu of extras to finesse or focus your strategy. I could not keep all of this in my mind, but that’s fine. That’s something to explore down the line, as it were!

I had tremendous fun just playing with the action card system. Discovering it. Knowing that there are whole dimensions of the game still to explore is fantastic. Foothills is a pretty meaty two player game, but it gives you space to experience that complexity as you choose to. The action selection system is elegant and easy enough to grasp that you can go anywhere from that foundation. Highly recommended so far.

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This first look was based on a demo at the UKGE 2019.