 Root is the new hotness. It came out last year in 2018 and it like sold out immediately. It keeps getting reprinted. It's unplugged. It's sold out. They even sold out of the raccoon plushies. Yep. The vag, the vague, the vagrant plushies vagabond, whatever. Root got real, real big and popular in a hurry. It is popular big time. Yeah. And that's interesting for a number of reasons because if I had to, before we talk about what Root is like, you have to understand that the designer of Root is Cole Whirrell. And if you don't know who that is from letter games, all the other games that Cole Whirrell is done are the ridiculous, weird, nonsense historical games that we play almost as experiments like John Company or an infamous traffic, which Scott hasn't played, but you should on Pax Pammer, which I haven't played. Oh, one of the Pax ones. Yeah. You played Pax Pammer, I think. No, I've paid Pax Porfiriana. Oh, Piafriana. Yeah. Anyway, those kinds of games, old, crusty war games that you would only expect someone with a long beard and a large belly and a broken chair to take off the shelf at the game store, but not war games that are on the shelf near the Napoleons and the the Rommels in the back. They're not war games like here's a bunch of chips that represent the Rommels. These are more like here is a detailed simulation of the opium trade in China and you play European shitbags who are trying to literally buy fancy hats to increase their social standing and the terrible costs to China and the opium trade. Basically, any game that this person made other than Root is something you would never get on any table of normal non crusty gore gamer, you know, grognard players. Our friend Chris will bring these to the table and I love these games, but they are an acquired taste, right? Mostly because as we've now learned the theme of them is crusty. Root is just another one of those games. It isn't really mechanically different at all. It's just that they put cute animal forest critters on it instead of putting crusty old war generals on it or crusty old. Literally, there's no war involved. It's just training opium. Right. So this game, Root is a combination of a highly political, extremely asymmetric kind of war game where literally every player is playing with completely different rules. There's there are a few rules you share in common with other players, right? Which is that like you're just trying to get to 30 points. That's like the default victory condition. Get to 30 points and win. Yeah. But yeah. And the default rules are like if you do something on the board, like every piece of cardboard on the board, you hit gives you like a point. Yep. And that's like true for everyone, right? Everyone has similar like combat fighting rules because you can just fight your dudes. But like one faction gets points by building things on the board. Another faction gets points by just selling things in their shop. Yep. Another faction gets points. They're just they're not a faction. They're one dude, just one raccoon wandering around in the woods and they get points for helping other people or potentially just fucking murdering people in the night or just getting items. Yep. One of the factions is a lizard called. I don't know what they do. I've never read their rules. I don't know. So it's it's like everyone's playing with these completely different rules. It's like you're playing your own game. Yeah, right? You just happen to be on the same board. And the only thing you share in common with the other players is that board where like the rules are all the same, right? Like that raccoon guy, he's like, you're all right. Your whole your whole game is controlling this one dude. But if you fight, you're a dude. Yep. Now the game's not super complex. Most of the people who say it's complex have just never actually played a complex game before. I think it's complex for normal people. It's complex for normal people. A lot. It is definitely above the heads of a lot of people, but it is not above the heads of someone who was a nerd who can listen to a Geek Knights. But I've also realized having played it a bunch of times now. If you can go to a gaming convention, it is not above your head. Well, here's the more important thing. The reason so many people think it's so complex is that it is a very difficult game to teach simply by the fact that it's so asymmetric. Yes. You teach this game. You have to teach like if you got three players, you know, it's like you teach three games. You teach someone how to be the woodland alliance. You teach someone how to be the cats and someone had to be the birds. So my advice to you, if you want to play this game is to regardless of any other circumstance, even if you don't like to read the goddamn rules yourself to understand how to play and force the people you want to play with to read the rules themselves. And the other thing is that once you've learned one or two of the, the, the, you know, the, the character race is trivially, right? I was able when I played the otters, I never played them before. I didn't get a new rules explanation. All I did was pick up the otter card, which is the trading otters, the river traders. They sell stuff, right? And I just started reading the card. I had already played the game two or three times as other races and reading this card, just reading it, I 90% knew how to play the otters because I had played a few times before and I can read, right? And then I just had, I only needed an explanation of these details that I probably could have got if I had read every single word on the card instead of just reading, you know, the major important words of the card. So we've got this like asymmetric, political, like kind of crazy game, but it's skinned with the cutest animal art. My favorite art in the whole game. Okay, I'm curious. Is the card with the bunny bank. Bunny bank, the, the better burrow bank. Yes. The bunny bank has the cutest bunny inside the bank is the bunny that's in the bank is like, hey, hey, money. I think for me, it's the one, it's the give it a second carrots. Birdie Bindle is really good. Birdie Bindle, not bad. But there's one card. I mean, there's not a lot of bad art at all. But there's one card and the meeples are way good. All the meeples are way good too. It's the rabbit ambush card where the rabbit rise, the rabbits rise up and kill all the troops because it's just these really cute little rabbits like, Hey, but there were a little cloaks and they've just got this big fucking bomb. Yeah. This game is so cute. So all right. So let's go through the race. All right. Let's talk about the real deal with the game. Let's talk about like how it plays out. Right. So you got this map and the maps, depending on which races you got in the game, right, that you're going to deploy dudes onto the map, right? And then you're going to take turns. And on your turn, based on who you are, your turn is completely different. Yep. Right. What you do on your turn. Usually you have some sort of, you know, actions you can take of various kinds and different ways of paying to take the actions. You know, and the actions usually involve moving dudes, fighting, you know, getting stuff there. You have cards and the cards are multi-purpose. Cards have text on them that does stuff. You can like build cards. You can use cards to as to pay costs of certain actions. Or the screenshot is both Birdie Bindle and Better Vero Bank on it. Right. You can get some cards, you know, by doing certain actions. Sometimes draw a card will be an action. Right. And you got to pay for those actions using various resources. Sometimes cards are the resources to pay for the actions. Yep. Right. So of course, you know, everything I said was super vague because every race is super different. Right. So the high level, like we'll go through the races and kind of explain their high level deal. Right. So the first one you got to learn about is the red one. The Marquis de Cat. The Marquis de Cat, which is like, he's basically like the empire. Right. He starts with cats all over the board. Yep. He's got this whole economy going on. He's got this giant castle. Right. He's like deploying like all these wooden structures around and, you know, building stuff. I'm not sure how the cat wins because it's never been the cat. Cat's okay. Whenever I see the... I think it's hard for the cat to win when everyone's skilled. Right. It's like whenever I've played, I've only played against the cat and the cat's always been there. And the feel I get from the cat is they start spread out all over the board. They start strong and slowly decline. They slowly decline as basically everyone else is playing races that come on to the board. Right. Like all the birds start in one nest and spread out. Right. The cat starts out like a blanket over the whole thing and then everyone rises up and pushes them back. But they're still pretty strong because they're all, you know, they're the Marquis. They're like the empire. So they still, they participate in a lot of combat, a lot of making sure other people don't win. Right. While also building up resources and doing whatever their thing is. So imagine like a big empire that starts strong is beset by all sides. Think like Rome almost. Yeah. And slowly collapsing, but they can win by consolidating their power, uh, holding all these enemies at bay and making their own alliances to eventually... They definitely need alliances because if everyone goes against them they got nothing. I guess it's true of anything in a political game. Demo Weasel in the chat points out that the card we all forgot about. Mouse in a sack, might be the cutest card. Oh, that is a good one. I forgot all about that card. It's a good one. So the birds are sort of like the antagonists. Like imagine the story is the cats are the empire and they're in decline. The birds are like the elf, the elves, right? They're the ancient proud race. Right. They're hidden away in this one spot in loveloria. They've been knocked out of the world. They got angered and then they bust out. Yeah. Imagine like they're the old empire that's trying to come back onto the scene now that the cat Romans are in decline. Right. So their deal is they start in one spot and they expand and expand. They have a shit ton of birds in that one spot. So you've got this bird empire and this cat empire. They're at war and that is the the primary crux of the game is the war between these two. You don't have to. You could play without either of these two things, but in most in all the games I've played both of them. If you look in the rulebook, depending on the number of players, there's a list of the options that work. Yeah. Like this many players have the birds, the cats and any of these other factions. It's best if you obey those. Right. It doesn't really work with all vagabonds is not going to be too great. If you have a lot of players, you could have two different vagabonds, two different raccoons that are independently wandering around stabbing people. Yeah. But like if you only have two raccoons and a trading company, that's going to be a weird, weird game. So the crux of the game is in the wood in the woods. There's this big war going on between the birds and the cats. The third main faction is the woodland alliance. These are basically the cute mice. These are the forest communists. Right. So what they do is they start not on the board at all, really. They're just the normal woodland citizens. They're the they're the bunnies and the foxes and all the other people just living in the woods. And they get points by placing basically when other people do stuff, right? They get these cards. Other people's cards end up in the mouse stack on the mouse card. The mouse, the mouse playing that, right? Like other people's cards and they use them will end up over there because they got to pay the mice and then the mice will put will use those cards to perform actions and they'll put their little fists in different cities on the board, like the little little, you know, in insurrection fists. So the might think of the what are they called? I forget the actual name for the woodland alliance know the name for the fist of the sympathy. The sympathy. The war is going on. City is now sympathetic to the rebellion. The war is going on. The more warring nonsense is happening between the birds and the cats, the more sympathy, the woodland alliance, the rebels who are trying to kick everybody out. Right. So the main action that, you know, they put these fist tokens on the board and they get a lot of points and then they put little like, you know, little bases out and they get a lot of points for that too and so they can win just by putting these tokens out so everyone else has to constantly quell the rebellion and if you don't they will win. So the so imagine this. This is how the game gets political. The cats and the birds are at war with each other but they will both sort of tacitly agree to maintain martial law in like the non disputed territories so the woodland alliance can't get a foothold. Right. So I got a war with Scott but we both have to while we're warring with each other keep the communists down. Right. And what happens is it's like, okay, I got a fist here and a little base here. I'm playing green but there's a whole bunch of troops here from the birds. Well, okay. They're gonna not only can I not do much about it but they can totally destroy my stuff and get points and help. Right. But let's say I get my fist up and there's not a lot of guys there is not too strong. Now I can basically rise up in that place and kick ass. So suddenly suddenly there's a bunch of mice on the board in that spot because they revolted. The last game I played I was the birds and Chris was the cats and I did like suddenly the woodland alliance busted out real bad. Yup. So we both cannot let that happen too often. Otherwise they're just going so we basically had a truce to go fuck up the wood communists the woodland communists before they presented a threat to all of us. So we had to pause our war for the greater good. All right. So then you got the vagabond. So the vagabond is we've got three big warring factions and the vagabond is just one raccoon. Literally you got one token that you move around the map individually. You're just a cute raccoon. You're like an adventurer but actually you're not. You can choose a sort of a subclass when the game starts. Tinkerer is OP not even gonna lie. It just is I didn't even know it was OP and then I looked through all the I was the one time I played vagabond I was looking through all the different choices and I was like I kind of want to be this one for theme but tinkerer seems strong to me and then I googled it like which one is best and it was like tinkerer oh my god and I was like oh I guess I was right let me be tinkerer so the tinkerer is about making stuff right so the way that the vagabond works is you have all these items right now other people can craft items in in the game for various purposes they get victory points for crafting items but if you get a vagabond in the game suddenly the items do stuff every all the items the vagabond has let them perform actions the more items they have the more actions they can perform right and do stuff they got hammers they can craft things and make their own items if they got swords they can stab people and do attack actions if they got you know the boot they can move around better right is all the you know they start with a few items but there's more that they get some of them they get by going around equesting and some of them they get by trading with other players but also the main way the vagabond gets victory points is not just by building and getting these items it's actually just by helping other people and other people can't refuse your help you just help them if you want to right you can you can deal with them I guess but I just went around helping people yep and when you help people you get mad victory points so that you got this you're in it like a sole adventurer whether you're a tinker or you know a fighter or whatever you are you're just one little raccoon token you go around the board and you know you do stuff to help people and you get points for that and if you can do more helping before anyone else can win then you can win so think about this you're just this one little raccoon wandering around in the midst of this giant cataclysmic war you're just trying to make your way and you're trying to help everybody enough to where no one quite wins the war and then eventually you come out on top yep so then we got this the otters so I played the otters most recently the otters look real fun I want to play them next I came super close to winning I could have won if I would had just like a couple more victory points here or there you couldn't quite pull it off if I would have micromanaged and thought a little harder I could have gotten two points somewhere right I could have built a card or something right yeah but at the same time if you'd been doing better I was gonna just pause my war you had no idea that I had that many points in the pocket yeah I did I put out I pulled out like what like eight points in the last turn like bam yeah but I could have destroyed basically all of your things yeah but if I was you would you I was 10 points away from winning if I was eight away from winning you would have destroyed all my things come on anyway the otters the otters are traders there's a river on the board and you can't really the river doesn't really mean anything unless the otter it means a little bit but if the otters are in the game the river means a lot the otters live along the river they can help people travel on the river they can travel on the river kind of right basically the otters put up their prices like hey it'll cost you X to use the otters have various services that they sell the services that they sell are like river traveling they sell the cards in their hand face outwards on a little thing and they set those cards are for sale you can't deny some you you set a price every turn you set your prices for your services but if someone wants to buy one of your cards you can't say no they buy them right uh and what's the other service you have that you sell I think oh it's fight it's we fight with you you can hire us as mercenaries and we'll fight with you so the otters have some people on the board and I need like say they're on a place and there's some cats there and on the birds I got to deal with the cats I could just pay the otters and now it's like I just I just on the otters I just leave some otters standing around in a city that I know is going to have some warring and someone else comes along and my services cost whatever I set the price at that turn someone pays the price suddenly the otters get their spears and join the fight right uh so the thing is what the otters is that when you pay the otters you pay them with your own dudes you you don't pay them with like money or cards you're dudes that are not on the board right now just like your wooden meeples you give them to the otter player right so it's like okay I want to buy a card from you Mr. Otter all right give me three of your dudes that aren't on the board okay well first of all your dude supply starts running low if you do this right you you only have a limited number of dudes so for example in our last game the cats got got kind of desperate and they gave you basically all their dudes to pull off a big play which means even if they want to put a bunch of dudes on the board well I'm holding on to those dudes too bad and then when you're the otters and you want to perform actions you spend the dudes that you've got not only the dudes other people gave you but also your own dudes if no one gave you any dudes you basically get two of your own dudes into your into your purse for for spending right uh and then it's sort of like buying nothing from yourself for two dudes automatically right so you're gonna be able to do stuff and you spend these dudes in various actions some actions that you might perform just sort of put the dudes into a holding pen and then they go back to the purse next turn and sometimes went for certain actions you actually have to give the dudes back to the player they came from in order to spend the dudes so basically imagine like I don't know Corsica or Venice you know if there's a big war going on and you're outside like not in the forest you're like hey there's a war going on and you slide in along the river and start selling weapons to everybody and then eventually everybody fighting the war owes you so much money that you are in fact control of the control of the country the primary way you score victory points when you're the otters is you know the same way everyone else scores victory points but the number one way is building trading posts which give you mad points when you put them out on the board so I basically and building a trading post costs you other people's dudes right you just like every all your other actions building a trading post costs dudes so I basically had a bunch of dudes and it was getting close to the end of the game and I put out like three or four trading posts all at once I got a pile of points and was too short of winning if I had just gotten two points earlier in the game boom I would have had it but you only had that capability because the cats who were desperate spent a ton of money with you well they right they would have had to either right if they they would have still done that if I had two more victory points right I don't know yeah maybe they maybe you would have looked carefully but that's the thing the game but also if I looked carefully I would have had two more points by then so basically what this comes down to is it's a pretty like well abstracted asymmetric kind of realistic war gamey game with cute animals and the theme works really well and the game is just really fun to play it doesn't even take that long yeah it's like people were so hype about root when it first came out and I was like my mood on it was like I like the cute animals you know but I'm not unlike why is everyone so excited how great can it be and I saw other people who weren't our friends playing it and their games were taking like four hours right you know I was like I was like all right I got to see what the deal is obviously right and then I played it once and I was like all right, all right, all right and then I played it again and I was like all right the second play through is when you see the fun of this game and then the third time I'm like you know I think you know the first few games of it that I played it was sort of like all right I'll play root the the time I played most recently with the otters that was the first time where I was like bust out the root Scott wait until you try the birds I next time we play I really want to be the birds because they have that whole failing thing so so here's an example of like a detail because I've played the birds twice and I really like the birds they're fun their deal is that they're a proud decree so you choose a leader depending on there's two there's four things you can do on your turn you can recruit like make more birdies you can move your birdies around you can fight people with the birdies and you can build stuff and depending on the leader you pick you have a wild card in two of those spots so say I start with a wild card and recruit in battle every turn you must do everything in the decree or your government collapses right so in the first turn I recruit and I battle the next turn I have to add another card to the decree so now every single turn so your decree keeps getting bigger so you have to do everything you did last turn and more every turn so now I have to recruit move in battle the next turn after recruit move battle battle and I have to recruit recruit move battle battle and even better a decision you can make at the start of your turn you must add one card to the decree right now this is basically each turn it's like wow I get more actions every single turn it's like you just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger but then you're in a situation oh no there's no one to fight this turn it's like I have to do all right recruit recruit oh I don't have enough guys to recruit recruit recruit move I don't have any legal moves recruit recruit move battle battle there's no dudes in a spot that can battle because I didn't have enough move and as soon as you can't do all of the actions you fail your government just collapses you lose a bunch of points you got to pick a new leader and fun stuff happens yeah uh so usually people fail a couple of times every game except for the game I just talked about where I never failed my decree somehow managed to play the whole game and never failed the decree and therefore won the funny thing I think if you're the birds and you never fail the decree you're gonna win yeah that is real hard to pull off it's sort of like a foregone thing I got to a point to where I literally needed someone to attack me to give me an opportunity to attack them back or I was gonna fail in the decree you would have failed the next turn I would have definitely failed the next turn there's no way you could have maintained because I had built everything I could possibly build all my roosts were on the board I literally could not have built another roost yep so my government would have collapsed I think even if you fail just once with the birds you're still likely you're still close to winning you need to so you need to fail twice for people to keep you down I feel like a normal strategy for the birds is to pick a leader have a strategy push it hard fail strategically at the right moment start your decree over and then use that to win the game the thing is when you if you start the decree over too late it will it won't become big and strong enough the right you're you're taking too few actions you're gonna lose a bunch of points right when you're trying to push yourself over the edge when you fail right it's like oh shit I don't have enough actions it's late game and I'm taking like piddly actions there's no good I think you need to get big and fail fast so that way you could the second decree that I got reset the weak actions are still early enough in the game and you'll have strong but barely doable actions towards the end but it also assuming you can't pull off a miracle like never fail yeah but then when stuff gets interesting is like other players like maybe the cats will work hard by buying the otters support to make it impossible for the decree to work at a point when the birds did not prepare for that and that can be fun and weird so I think the the thing with this game is right is like even though I've played it three or four times it's still like a low level like understanding even though I understand everyone's but the lizard folk and the little the cats kind of how they work is that you have this so such an asymmetric you're playing your own game thing going on that until you completely understand everyone else's thing and everyone else understands everyone else's thing then you can get into the play of like aha I know how decrees work because I've played birds like three times yep I'm not the birds now but I know how to fuck those birds up let's make sure rims decree fails next turn I don't think he can make three moves if we do this because like a watcher rims like shit watch a first play through with naive players and three or four players like the Woodland Alliance just always wins because the Woodland Alliance is very straightforward gets a lot of points and automatically wins if it's not quelled if yeah so you watch advanced players play this game and like the cats and the birds will both be like all right let's pause hostilities we're gonna take out the communist the first order of business is like always don't let green win now let's see who else will win but then say assuming green's in the game you might have a green yeah you could play red you know you could play otters and red and blue I forget the list of like what are all the combinations that work yeah but don't let any this game only takes a super long time to play if the people at your table just suck at playing games I'm sure there must also be teaching videos on youtube to help you learn yeah you know because it is you know like I said if you're a gamer if you're listening to a podcast if you're going to a gaming con if you play other board games you can play this game don't be scared away by it the cute animal creatures should help you but it's not the simplest you do need you know some help learning it but someone to teach you read the rules read them again watch a video do what you gotta do but one thing I noticed that works that I like about this game like a big part of why I think it was fun even though there's learning games and I've never seen a game do that well I've seen a few games do this well but it's rare you only need to to like to have fun with the game you only need to fully understand how to play your character and you only really need the flavor text of the rest of the characters to have a vague idea of how to handle them yep like just knowing that you can trade with the otters and the otter player will explain how to trade with them it's really straightforward knowing that if you do this that will help that play yeah if I play if I trade with the otters too much it'll make them strong is enough for me to play in a game where there are otters if I do this stuff I'll be giving too many cards to green stop giving so many cards to green yep oh if I do this then you know the birds decree will be too easy don't do that and that's the thing the game the fiction of the game don't give don't give the vagabond all the good items that they want and this is what I think Cole Ware brought to that where I'll brought to the table that the fiction of the game itself and the flavor text gives you reasonably effective heuristics to play the game absolutely like that is a rare thing in games treasure that when you find it yep so yeah this expansion which adds the the otters and lizards right yep uh the game's super hot yeah the lizards are literally like cultists they just keep printing these things as long as people keep buying them the only reason I'm not buying one is because anytime I would play the game I would be with someone who already owns it so there's no reason for me to buy my own coffee uh you know unless suddenly I've got like some people who want to play it with me who don't have one yep and if you find the game takes way too long like even after teaching games get better at games yeah find better people to play with yeah it doesn't take that long for us to play I'm sure someone's implemented this in tabletop simulator or something sure