As your character treks across Eastern Europa, they will encounter a number of local people and situations. Each encounter will present you with three options to determine how you want to interact with the people. The choice you make will often impact the peoples’ view of you, represented in the game by your popularity.

When you move your character onto a territory with an encounter token on it, their movement ends and they cannot move again this turn. When your Move action is completely over and you’ve resolved all combats (but before you take a bottom-row action, if applicable), discard the encounter token and draw an encounter card. Only characters will trigger an encounter.

Show the art to the other players and read the thematic text (the text in all caps) out loud. Then read through the various costs and benefits on the options and choose one (you must choose one and pay the cost if applicable, though you may gain as much of the benefit as you’d like). After you make your selection, discard the encounter card to the bottom of the encounter deck face-down. A maximum of 11 encounters will be revealed each game, so you can play multiple games without shuffling this deck between games.