Root Board Game Review

Gideon’s Perspective

Root is a 2 to 4 player game with an adorable veneer that hides a ruthless game of war and counterinsurgency.

Root is a game I put off getting for a long time, and for two reasons. The first is that it’s a game, where the more players you have, the merrier it is. I don’t like to rely on the whims of that many other busy humans to play my games. I did pick up the Clockwork automas, but I’m not exactly in love with them yet.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

The second reason was that everyone claimed that Root was notoriously hard to learn and even more difficult to teach. I didn’t struggle at all to learn it, but I think I was more terrified of bringing Root to teach on game night than any other game. As it turns out, that was all a bunch of crap. Teaching it was almost entirely painless.

The nifty faction boards that highlight your possible actions and in what phase they go off made learning and teaching the game a breeze. I think people confuse the difficulty of learning a game with the challenge of mastering it, because the latter is where Root’s learning curve becomes a flat cliff going straight up.

The reason for that is that while Root is a type of war game, each faction plays almost like an entirely different game altogether. They play by an entirely different set of rules from each other. To become proficient at the game, you not only have to understand your own faction, but every other faction at the table, because if you don’t understand how they work or what they can do, you can’t meaningfully oppose them. That’s where the real complexity comes in.

However, that extreme level of asymmetry is also what makes Root such a great game in the first place.

Gideon’s Bias	Root Information
Review Copy Used: No	Publisher: Leder Games
Number of Plays: 10+	Designer: Cole Wehrle
Player Counts Played: All	Player Count: 1-4
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Heavy
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Loved It	Price: $60

Presentation

Root is a very cute game, to its own detriment. Its colourful, child-friendly design and adorable animal meeples can definitely give the wrong impression about the type of game it is. It’s not just the fact that it’s more or less a war game. It’s a complex, deep, and cutthroat game with a very high skill ceiling. The visual design does not make this clear.

That said, it’s a great-looking game regardless, the double-sided board looks fantastic and is visually easy to understand, the cards have solid artwork, and the meeples and variety of tokens look nice. The rulebook is well written, and you get a much more in-depth Law of the Root book that helps hammer out the details. The custom dice are a little light, but that’s about the only component complaint I can muster up.

The faction boards in particular are the highlight here. Not only do they look nice, but they also feature a very well-designed user space to track different aspects of their faction. Furthermore, these boards feature a phase-by-phase breakdown of what you can do on your turn. The rulebook features a similar, more in-depth breakdown, and cross-referencing those two things together made teaching the game a breeze.

On each player’s turn, I was able to help them run down what they could do in each phase in a step-by-step manner. It was one of the cleanest teaching experiences I’ve ever had.

What I Like About Root

The Asymmetry

The goal of Root is to be the first faction to reach 30 victory points. Every faction can get points by destroying enemy buildings and tokens, but the main way they each get points is drastically different, to such an extent that you’re almost playing 4 different games on one board.

Take Marquise De Cat, for instance. The cats play pretty close to the traditional way you would play a war game. They build buildings, recruit large armies, and move them around the map. The main way they get points is by building Sawmills, Workshops, and Recruiting Stations.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is the Vagabond, a single meeple whom you control much like an RPG character. The Vagabond goes around collecting items and completing quests.

The Woodland Alliance doesn’t start with any troops or buildings on the board, instead, they try to build up sympathy and can eventually blow up into a revolution, wiping out everything in the areas where they revolt.

The Eyrie Dynasty are militaristic like the cats, but functions in a very different way. They have a single building type, called Roosts, and they take turns via preplanned decree. If they screw up that decree, they go into turmoil, which carries steep penalties.

The second half of the asymmetry comes in the form of cards and how each of the factions uses them. Each space of the board has a suite, a rabbit, fox, or mouse symbol. Cards also have a suite, and they can be used for their effects, usually by crafting them or for the suite.

For example, the Eyrie must add cards to their decree under Recruit, Move, and Battle. The suite dictates where that action has to take place. If they have a mouse card under Recruit, the Eyrie must recruit in a mouse clearing or go into Turmoil. The Woodland Alliance, on the other hand, must use cards that match the clearings they want to place sympathy in.

However, cards can also be crafted, but in different ways. The Vagabond needs to be in a matching clearing and use a number of hammer items matching the requirements. The Cats need a number of workshops in matching clearings.

None of this takes place in a vacuum, however. The factions affect each other. Factions can use warriors to battle each other for control of clearings as well as destroy each other’s buildings, but combat is only part of the equation.

If the cats or Eyrie move into a clearing with The Alliance’s Sympathy or remove that Sympathy, they trigger an outrage and must give the Alliance player a matching card. Factions may opt to craft items for Victory Points, but doing so places the matching item on their board, and most of them have no use for items.

The Vagabond, however, can give the other factions cards and to take those items, and the Vagabond uses items to perform actions. There’s an entire ecosystem between the players that is full of pushing and pulling, give and take, and a type of tabletalk that is organically alive, which is fascinating, because the game doesn’t have any mechanical diplomacy rules, so to speak. Instead, the politics of the game form naturally in a brilliant kind of way.

The Mindsets it Invokes

As I mentioned before, Root isn’t exactly a diplomatic game, and you can’t really trade anything. Even the Vagabonds’ “trading” is more like robbing you while leaving something of his behind as an apology. You don’t have a choice, the Vagabond just does it. However, Root is still a game of deals, diplomacy, threats, and coercion.

That’s because the game is designed in such a way that all players at the table are both friends and enemies at the same time. Frenemies, if you will. That means every single player has to keep tabs on every single other player and MUST be willing to keep them in check at any given time. Each faction has strengths and weaknesses, and a single other faction can’t always capitalize on keeping a runaway leader in check, it’s a joint effort. A game of temporary alliances and truces that swap around the entire game.

The Eyrie can’t be allowed too many Roosts, and if the Cat can’t spare the military to take some out or interrupt their decree, the Alliance or Vagabond has to step in. The Woodland Alliance is few in number but has a defensive bonus that makes them hard to dislodge. Perhaps the Eyrie can promise to craft an item the Vagabond needs if he drops a couple of Alliance Defenders with his crossbow.

At the same time, the other factions must keep tabs on the wily Vagabond, if he acquires too many items, he can run away with the game. This all does take some buy-in from the players. You have to go in knowing that this is how the game works. If you just try to do your own thing, you almost certainly guarantee a win for someone else.

The interesting thing is that the mindset can shift based on the dynamics of who is piloting what faction, or even what factions are present. One of the moments it clicked for me was the first time we tried a 3-player game. Generally speaking, without expansions, Root recommends that you remove the Vagabond and play as the other three for a smooth experience.

We stuck our noses up at that and played as The Cats, The Alliance, and The Vagabond. The first go-around went awful. The cats dominated because they had the entire board to themselves, the Alliance was too slow to build up, and the Vagabond couldn’t keep them in check alone.

However, I had an epiphany. What if I stopped thinking about Root like a board game for a second? If you step into the games world, you see a story unfold. Without the Eyrie in the woods, the Marquise has total control. The Alliance is attempting to garner sympathy, but revolutions move slowly, by the time they get the ball rolling it the cats will have already stripped the woods barren.

The Vagabond might have no love for the idealistic Alliance, but he certainly doesn’t want to live under the thumb of the Marquise…so what if the Vagabond and Woodland Alliance went into the game with a fragile pact against the Cats?

The Vagabond could feed the Alliance cards, helping them get their revolution moving fast enough to oppose the cats. Meanwhile, the Vagabond could perform guerrilla warfare, attacking the weaker points of the Cat’s empire and disrupting their supply lines. Once the cats were brought in line, allegiances may shift once again as either the Vagabond or the Alliance becomes too much of a threat to ignore each other any longer.

Going in with that mindset, that to play a three-player game, the Vagabond and Alliance must temporarily team up against the Cats, it changed the whole dynamic of the game. It was a fun experience, but more than that, it was an entirely different experience from playing with all four factions. I like to think of faction combinations as scenarios when I go into them, and it works well. If you add expansion factions, you greatly expand the number of scenarios you can have.

What I Dislike About Root

The Incomplete Feeling

Let me get this out of the way. Root is a complete game. You aren’t being shorted by the contents in the box. It’s a full experience.

The problem is, it doesn’t always feel that way, and what feelings a game invokes can matter. For example, the two-player experience in Root is pretty bad. The only real viable faction combination is to pit the Cats and Eyrie against each other. This can be greatly addressed, however, by purchasing the Clockwork expansions and running the automas in your two-player game.

The three-player experience is greatly enhanced with any faction combo by adding the hireling expansions. Expansions also have an advanced setup that tries to make sure that at least one military faction is present via a special drafting system.

Even the core gameplay of Root itself can feel somewhat limited by the four factions. Each faction is extremely deep, but the thing is, shifting even one of them out for a new one blows the game wide open. The factions don’t just change the game for the person playing that faction, they change it for everyone at the table.

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t yearning for more factions when I started playing Root. I actually have all of the expansions now, they just aren’t part of this review, but trust me when I say that having them all is the ideal experience, at least for me.

The Law of Root booklet itself even heightens the feeling of incompleteness. Leder Games includes the most updated version in new prints, so it includes all the rules for things you don’t actually own.

Now, to be fair, this might be a non-issue for you. I’m something of a compleionist. There’s always a voice nagging in the back of my head whenever I don’t have the complete set of whatever board games I get. But board games are expensive, and expansions are also expensive. I wanted to at least bring that feeling up.

Verdict

Root is an excellent game with some of the best asymmetry I’ve ever seen. Each of the four factions manages to make it feel like you’re playing an entirely different game while still keeping you interactive with the other players on the same board.

It’s a complex game, but I didn’t find that to be an obstacle when learning or teaching it, only to becoming proficient at it, and even now I feel like I’m only scratching the surface of its strategic depth. It definitely has a high skill ceiling, but that’s a good thing.

That said, without expansions, the experience at lower player counts is much more muted. The base game of Root shines the brightest at 4 players, but if you’ve got a solid group to play it with, you’re in for a heck of a treat.