Root First Impressions

So for Christmas Danielle got me a game that has been on my radar for quite some time - the Kickstarter success story that is Root.

I still have not gotten a chance to play a proper game yet, and indeed still do not quite understand how the Vagabond works. More thoughts will follow when I finally get to play a full game, but I wanted to take a moment to jot down some first impressions.

First up, the art for this game is fantastic. As I've long said to Danielle, I'm a sucker for a game with a good art style, and this game has some of the most distinctive and engaging visual design I've seen since getting Scythe.

Asymmetric strategy games are by definition extremely hard to do, especially when working from a non-preset map (which in the case of Axis and Allies, can quickly act to calcify optimal opening strategies). I've yet to ascertain if Root succeeds in this, but the online reviews and our two player game are promising. I recently was introduced to the game Vast, and the boards with unique player mechanics are very similar to those in Vast. On the whole I think this mechanic is promising, although I do worry that it will seem prohibitively complex to new players (even if its not). It also strikes me that games of this ilk must be a nightmare to playtest.

At any rate, I played the Eeyrie and Danielle played the Marquise de Cats. Right off the bat, I love how different factions have very different uses for cards, and the core decision to be made on a given turn (do I use this card for the effect or use it to save a cat/give an order/etc.?) is a solid gameplay element - giving the player clear choices to make on a regular basis with clear pay-offs and costs.

I really love the Decree system for the Eeyrie. It allows just enough flexibility while still inducing the player to make hard choices regarding their hand and incentivizing faster card acquisition. I managed to avoid turmoil this game, although if the Alliance had been in the game I'm fairly sure it would have happened. However, I found myself towards the end almost wishing for it, as optimal Eeyrie play would seem to be based around swapping in the right leader for the right moment. In the two player set-up, however, losing a turn would be a death knell for any chance of winning, so I was more or less stuck with my starter. That being said, the charismatic leader seems like a more or less obvious first choice to snowball your recruitment off the bat. The cats have such a significant advantage when it comes to deploying huge armies, that I can't imagine not recruiting every single turn. With this in mind, any leader without a vizier there feels like they are at an immediate disadvantage.

Root felt small to me when I first looked at the map, with only 12 clearings. I quickly discovered this was not the case, as you simply have to be dominant in a clearing to do most of the things you want to do with it. Indeed, after an initial push to completely clear the cats out of clearings, my style leaned towards sending in just enough troops to secure it (yay winning ties) and building a roost.

I thought Root's combat system would be far too punishing for the defender, and while it does squarely incentivize attacking (and indeed, clearing out opponent's armies on your turn to preclude their attacks), it was not as suffocating as I thought. In practice, the ambush card and the fear of ambush cards dominated battle decision making. I also discovered how hard it was simply to uproot the cats once they got recruiters into a grove (although I need to check if they can recruit into a grove they do not control).

The other thing that surprised me was how quickly the limit of building sites came to matter, as Danielle was able to rocket out to an explosive start by spamming sawmills, but stalled out for a little bit before winning because she had to take building slots from me. For my part, I simply could expand fast enough, assaulting a grove she had built in and failing to take out the structures two turns in a row thanks to a heroic defense on the part of the cats. Once the cats built a feline horde up and could begin pushing back into the 5 groves I had occupied, it was GG.

Finally, it amuses me no end the extent to which this game replicates the characters and setting of Brian Jacques's Redwall series, and throughout the game I referred to the cat stronghold as Kotir.

Simply put, this game so far succeeds on every level for me, and I can't wait to play again.