Let's Talk About Root

Root's up on Steam now for Early Access for $14.99. Debating on getting it. Looks like it's just the base 4 factions for now I think.

I think I'm good with TTS? I wonder if they'll pull the TTS module. I mean, if I was the company making the steam game I would make that part of my requirements to publish... but also, the Leder team *tests* all their games with their in house TTS mod so...?

Discounting the fact that I think the animation style looks terrible and I hate asynchronous play, I’m with you.

Also, apparently the cats you save with Field Hospitals don’t show up until the Cat’s Birdsong, which was a concession for asynch, but Ambushes still work as normal and would have the same delay issue? i don’t know.

Ah, I didn't realize that it was asynch.

Ambushes are such a core part of the game (and justification for defense being so bad for most factions).

Patrick Leder said, "Certain changes were made to the rules to allow for asynchronous or pass-and-play. This is one of the changes, it prevents the flow of the turn from being interrupted while the Cat player makes a decision about whether to save troops or not."

Not sure why Ambush doesn't trigger this as well. Also, seems like the Marquise lost the ability to select which clearing the wood comes from.

Someone poking around in the files found this:
Edit: looks like that was user edited. My bad.

More variations of the digital version:

- You can't view the discard pile.
- The game reveals if the defender has a playable ambush card during a battle. If they do not have an ambush, the battle resolves automatically. If they do have a card, game stops to ask the defender if they want to play it and the attacker is informed by the message: "defender is considering options"
- Cards given to the Woodland Alliance for outrage are revealed to all players.

Not viewing the discard pile just seems like an oversight.

So i got my first game in - 3 of us were new and the owner had played twice - I don't know what all the hand wringing about it being a difficult game to learn - We all approached it as a learning game and it was fine - We totally let the vagabond walk with a win, but we were all satisfied with learning the basic game mechanisms and learning how our factions worked - It was probably a wierd board for a first game - We went Marq, WA, Lizards, Vagabond. I played WA. The lizard player had a great time offering us pamphlets every time he entered a clearing, and musing on thoughts of spending eternity in the belly of the great dragon.

So.......For all the anecdotes about it being hard to learn or grok - I dunno - These were medium weight gamers, we knew what we were doing 20 minutes in. It was fun - quick enough to not be soured by being blown out learning faction interactions, and we all wanted to play again "for reals."

Those anecdotes you all shared about groups not wanting to add new players to their games sound miserable. That said, I do know what I'm in for when I'm sitting to the left of someone playing the Puerto Rico for the first time, and that I may have to watch them hand the game to their right hand neighbor. I have a choice, I can be snarky about not being to lean into my own superior knowledge of this little system of pushing cardboard around to it's fullest potential, or I can be an ambassador to a game that I love.

Yeah, it's really not too bad. I taught a 9 year old how to play the cats and birds, but is he really gonna make strong strategic decisions without a bit of help and hand holding? Not really.

I think it's mostly the asymmetry of it throwing some people off and adding to the time. I think if your teacher is brand new too it could be a problem. Yours at least had a couple games under their belt.

The other part of it is that it takes awhile to really get a feel for how close people are to actually winning and how to prevent that. So kinda going through the motions and playing isn't too bad to learn, but making informed decisions while not dunking needlessly on the 3rd place guy is a bit of an acquired skill, which I still make mistakes on now.

Played an excellent game of Root this evening with our TTS crew+friends here on the site, 5 player. It was an interesting mix, lizards, woodland alliance, moles, cats, and corvids. It really did progress pretty linearly pointswise, we beat back the explodey factions well enough (e.g. Woodland Alliance) that we had no clear winner out front. I've never played 5 players before so it sort of makes sense that it did so, there's always someone to beat you down. Some of the factions just have a tough time scoring with this high a player count because it's just incredibly hard to hold territory---cats cannot get enough territory, moles could have a building sniped at any time by the lizards, lizards have no control over their preferred suit, and woodland alliance and lizards are absolutely natural enemies stealing each other's bases.

In the end, I pulled it out as the corvids in longish game (3 hours almost exactly). It was pretty close fought. It's a long time between turns strategically at that many players and I'm convinced the factions are mostly balanced ok but I feel like they were absolutely balanced at 4 players so there's a little weirdness.

A thing I enjoyed about the corvids on my first play was that they really do work thematically as they're supposed to. You want to be hiding just under the radar, like 2-3 points behind the leader, and really set up your plot flips and hope no one is watching super close or that no single player at the table has enough invested in beating you back down. It seems to me being a corvid player who flips like 12 points in a turn to pull out ahead is a very bad place to be, in some ways worse than other factions who pull ahead and get winner painted on them.

It was an interesting game, but yeah, a bit long for Root. The Lizard Cult really did cut into my Woodland Alliance game. I must have lost 3-4 bases. (And I took his garden out at least 2 times). At times I was wondering if I should stick to just one base to reduce the odds that the outcast would come up in a suit I had a base.

Yeah on time... I also want to note that I was player one in this game which I'm beginning to think is a bigger deal than I thought before in equal skill player games.

I've won a couple games where I went first too. I think a rule of "cats go first" probably isn't a bad idea, and maybe sit in the order of the ABCD, etc. In my previous games in person I almost always did this out of habit, since it's a little easier to rearrange people prior to the game starting.

I've always played "Cats go first", for some reason I thought that was just a thing. It's probably because of the setup rules needing to start with them.

I suppose after the first full round there is going to be an ongoing assessment of "how close is everybody else going to be to seizing victory inbetween now and my next turn?" that drives the politicking, so turn order might not matter as much if everyone understands faction capabilities within the current game state at given point.