Root: A Woodland Game of Might and Right

or, brutality slathered with cuteness

Jul 11, 2023

The biggest boardgame of 2016 was my biggest game of 2022.

I love it.

If you’ve ever paid any attention to boardgaming, you’ve probably heard of this game. You may have even played it. Probably you own it, honestly, or someone you know owns it and a handful of expansions.

It’s even spawned a Tabletop RPG.

But for those reading this who haven’t played a boardgame since the first time someone asked you if you want to play Monopoly, here’s a quick explanation.

Root is an asymmetric war game where cute creatures fight for control of the Woodlands.

In the base game, you can play as the Marquise de Cat, the Eyrie Dynasties, the Woodland Alliance, or the Vagabond. Each of these have their own unique mechanics and starting positions, but the goal is always the same: be the first to 30 points.

How you gain points depends on who you’re playing as, and this makes all the difference.

Now, before I played Root, I’d heard about it, of course, but I’d also played Vast. Both games are from Leder Games and both are asymmetric, meaning each player has their own rules and mechanics.

And I really did not enjoy Vast.

For anyone who’s never played complex boardgames, the best way to learn is to have someone who knows how to play teach you. Depending on the complexity of the game, this can take anywhere from five minutes to literally an hour (or three1). Typically, no matter how long the rules explanation is, the rules apply to everyone in the same way. Sometimes a game (like Cosmic Encounters) has a few rulebreaking mechanics unique to a card or a specific class/player and so on. These are easy enough to account for because the text is quite plainly there before you, and since you know the base rules and the framework for the structure of the game, you don’t need to spend inordinate amount of time explaining these.

Not so with Vast!

Each character has a fairly long rule explanation. Like, a pamphlet of the rules per character. And none of the rules in one pamphlet apply to the other players. What this means, from a practical perspective, is that the person teaching the game doesn’t teach it once, but teaches it instead four times. And some of the rules aren’t as intuitive as you’d like, which leads to confusion even once you begin playing. Add to that the fact that everyone else is doing different stuff that seems to matter a lot to them but is opaque and borderline nonsensical to you. Worse, sometimes their goals are in direct opposition to yours or even involve them fighting you, and you’re not really aware of why or what you should do to stop them.

It’s messy.

Honestly, the first time you play should just be considered a trial run. The problem, though, is that this trial run isn’t particularly fun and the promise that it will be fun on your second or fifth time isn’t the most inspiring.

And so I wanted to play Root but also wasn’t that invested in getting there. Especially since it sounded like—from chatter on the world wide web—that Root is best played with a consistent group.

Now, like any boardgaming adult, I have a regular group that I meet with to play games. The problem is that we tend to play a wide variety of games and don’t typically replay games over and over. This makes Root sort of a hard sell to people like me, no matter how much praise it received.

And then I finally played Root.

The biggest advantage over the asymmetry of Vast was that while each player had their own rules and ways to score points, we were all interacting with the map in similar and intuitive ways. More importantly, the rules individual to each player were laid out in a way that could be taught in about five minutes per player.

That probably sounds slow, but, trust me, it’s actually pretty fast!

To sum it up quickly, here’s how the game breaks down per faction.

Marquise de Cat - They begin with a dominant position on the board, owning all but a few spaces. They score points by building structures, which they can do once they’ve acquired wood, which they can increase their production of through building structures.

Eyrie Dynasties - They begin on a single space opposite the Marquise but they have an aggressive expansionist playstyle, quickly gobbling up the map. They score points through making nests, which must be built in new spaces. And so the expansion tactic is necessitated by the scoring.

Woodland Alliance - They spreading tokens over the map by gaining cards. Cards are gained when another player enters an area where you have a token. These supporters can also be used to essentially blow up a space owned by the Marquise or the Eyrie, which establishes a Woodland base.

Vagabond - The Vagabond gains points by completing quests, building tools, and providing aid to other players.

The Vagabond is the strangest inclusion here since she is, in many ways, playing a different game on the same shared map as everyone else.

The rest of them can be summed up this way:

Marquise de Cat - Capitalism personified

Eyrie Dynasty - Monarchy personified

Woodland Alliance - Revolutionary insurrectionist personified

The Marquise is trying to build more and more, dominating the Woodland through trade. The Eyrie is trying to conquer the Woodland through violence. The Woodland Alliance is trying to free the various woodland animals living in the Woodland through guerilla warfare against both the Marquise and the Eyrie.

In my first playthrough, I was the Woodland Alliance. I understood what I needed to do but, honestly, I felt helpless and useless for the first half of the game. Because I gained cards from the other players entering my spaces, they all dutifully did everything they could to never enter my spaces.

This hamstrung me because I needed cards to perform actions, and the best way to get cards was by people entering my spaces. And so I was barely even a factor on the board while the Marquise player tried to consolidate power and the Eyrie player kept expanding.

All of us were playing for the first time and we honestly had no idea what the Vagabond player was doing. Well, except, presumably, the person playing the Vagabond.

The Marquise and Eyrie eventually locked themselves in a war of attrition, which slowed down their rapid race up the score marker. I believe they both had around 20 points when I had, like, five. The Vagabond was somewhere between.

But their intense focus on one another allowed me to slowly build my network of support. Because I had been such a non-factor in the game and because competition between the Eyrie and Marquise became so hot, I was able to do a few explosive moves that catapulted me from hilariously behind to winning the game in three or four turns.

Honestly, for the first hour or so of this first game, I knew I would never play it again. I felt handcuffed by the game, with no way to make meaningful moves or decisions.

But then, slowly, as attention heightened on the two power factions, the game opened up to me. And the fact that I was able to carefully construct a string of moves catapulting me to victory showed me what was special about this game.

Now, I don’t want you to think I was only having fun because I won. Winning, honestly, is rarely the point of a game. That may sound backwards to you, but I think it’s fundamentally true to the boardgaming experience.

If a game is only fun when you win, it means that two to five people that you’re playing with are not having fun. And that would suck!

And so a good game, to me, is one where even losing can be a lot of fun. This is done through giving players agency and meaningful actions that impact the game.

At first, this seemed to be how Root was failing. In the end, I realized that I just imperfectly understood how to play, because the toolkit was there for me the entire time.

Your first game of Root, though, is best viewed, I think, as a tutorial. Like any good tutorial, it’s still fun, even when imperfectly apprehended—I wouldn’t understand the Vagabond until I eventually played as her, for example. It also makes you excited to play again.

I’ve now played Root about a dozen times. We’ve each played every one of the base factions, but also experimented with the various expansions (excepting the most recent Marauders). What’s fascinating about Root, once you get a grip on the mechanics and understand how the game works, is the way it transforms when you swap in different factions.

Cleverly, the rules also give you a guide of which combinations to include together, because there are some that would break the game, honestly, and in a very bad way. We played one borderline bad game because we had too many factions that didn’t preference expansion or begin spread over the board. It caused the game to feel a bit loose, which led to it taking about an hour longer than normal2.

Because the various factions weren’t constantly pushing against one another, it neutralized some of the abilities of the factions as well. For example, I was the Riverfolk Company, which we discovered relies on a well-populated map, and most of what they were designed to do fell apart because the map was too sparse.

But most variations of combining the factions leads to a real good time. Sometimes there are real frustrations and sometimes there are huge surprises that delight the whole table, not only the person who pulled off an impressive move.

And that’s the magic of this game. When someone is able to harnass the full power of their faction underneath everyone’s noses, it feels exciting for everyone. When the Lizard Cult launched itself from last to within points of the win over two great turns, we all pumped our dang fists, even as we watched our carefully laid plans collapse.

The Lizard Cult didn’t win that game, but seeing how a seemingly underpowered and abstract faction could conjure astonishment made the game feel enormous, full of endless possibility.

And that’s why I play boardgames.

For that joyous surprise, for the perfectly calibrated sequence of moves that you’ve been coordinating for literally a dozen turns just to get to that sequence.

And Root allows this more often than many games. I have a theory that sloppily designed games allow for more emergent narrative3, but Root is anything but sloppy.

Yet each game creates its own narrative of war. And you feel it in your bones while you play. You see how your marshalled troops begin taking control and you can see the Woodland falling under your control. But then something upsets that plan and your hand stretched out to grasp control takes hold of nothing as some other faction sweeps over the board to take what you believed was yours.

It’s why, I think, fans of the game created a TTRPG.

It felt natural because the gameplay itself, of competing factions, creates its own narrative tightly packaged in two hours.

But those two hours are more fun and exciting than most movies.

Despite all that, this isn’t going to be for everyone.

If you’ve never played a boardgame, I wouldn’t recommend starting here. Even if you like boardgames, some people don’t respond well to competitive games like this where, for lack of a better word, you sometimes need to be mean to one another. Killing each other’s plot while they’re still in the crib to keep them from winning the game.

But if you like competitive games with a lot of flexibility and room for experimentation, Root is such a glorious success.

A few stray thoughts:

Despite a dominant starting position, I think the Marquise de Cat is the most difficult to win with
The Vagabond has the potential to be the most dangerous faction and also the most fun
The Woodland Alliance is the faction that wins most often among the basegame factions, as measured by self-reporting
The Eyrie either wins real fast or not at all, in my experience, and the mechanics preference this kind of play
Really, treat your first game as a tutorial. Ideally, you know someone who owns the game who can teach you and/or let you borrow it. Try to play at least one more time with the exact same group and swap the factions you played. Too, stick to the base game for at least a few plays.

Now, if you’re one of those kind souls looking to get into my fiction, here are the novels I’ve released recently:

Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Coming 7/25/2023