REWIEW: Root - by Cole Wehrle (Leder Games)

Root – by Cole Wehrle, Leder Games

Root is a fantasy-themed card-assisted asymmetric wargame seating 2-4 players (with its first expansion, this shifts to 1-6). It's really quite good, but beyond that there are some specifics which are worth some thought and analysis. Particularly, I'm thinking about (1) asymmetry in design – particularly in wargame design – and (2) the fantasy theme in wargames.

Design Overview

First, it's worth giving the design as a whole an overview. It's not super rules-heavy; BGG gives it a moderate 3.45/5 rules weight, but it's fair to say most of the difficulty experienced is in the asymmetry, not in the rules any one player has to learn to play the game. There are two rulebooks – they use the Fantasy Flight nomenclature to a degree, with one called the “Learning to Play” book, but the second book, the “Law of Root” (aka the rules reference manual) does suggest reading one or the other on the basis of your learning style – the LtP book is programmed instruction in a Euro style, whilst the Law of Root is a case-system wargame manual, with full numbering. The rulebooks are both adequate and I appreciate the dual approach, though the Law lacks contents or index, which is a faux pas for a wargame manual.

The other components are uniformly gorgeous, with decent cardstock counters, linen-finish cards, wonderfully cute screen-printed wooden warrior pieces, and a beautiful double-sided map depicting 12 clearings connected by paths, with each clearing matching one of the suits of cards (Fox, Bunny, Mouse; there's also a Bird suit, which is wild). The aesthetic effect cannot be underestimated – though the design itself is very good, it is made maximally enjoyable via its beauty and tactility.

There are four core factions, each looking to either be the first to score 30 points, or in 3-4 player games alternatively secure a “Dominance Victory” (essentially, fulfil given map control conditions). There are two universal ways to score points – destroying enemy buildings or tokens (but not warriors, the military pieces) and crafting cards from your hand (which can also be special abilities for you to use, or items which you can potentially sell to one specific faction). Each faction also has unique ways to score points. There are also unique ways to score points, which naturally leads us to examine the factions themselves. I'll do so in some detail, partly to win over the hoary grognards amongst my readership by the beauty of the design, and partly to explore the game's asymmetry.

Faction 1: The Marquise de Cat. The Marquise starts in control of all but one of the 13 clearings on the map. She has warriors all over, plus one of each of her three types of building – the sawmill, the recruiting station (or as my buddy has nicknamed it, “the Friendship Barn”), and the workshop. Each of these fulfils a different function; the sawmill produces wood each turn to use in constructing more buildings, the recruiter is where the Marquise places new warriors, whilst the workshop contributes to her ability to craft. She scores points by building more buildings, though each type of building costs increasingly more wood the more she builds (i.e. 1 wood allows you to build the second instance of any type of building and scores 1 or 2 VP depending on type, but the third instance requires 2 wood and scores 2 or 3 VP). Buildings can only go on empty spaces in clearings – of which there will always be a limited number. The Marquise has three actions per turn (with the ability to gain more via discarding wild cards from her hand); this is a low cap but her actions are pretty efficient, with a Move action moving two groups, for instance. The Marquise needs to control territory to get her economic engine going and efficient, including maintaining lines of supply for her wood to be used to build. I've seen the Marquise summed up as a Euro economy faction – but there's far more to it than that, with a fine balance needed of economy, military buildup/action, and secure area control.

Faction 2: The Eyrie Dynasties. These guys used to rule the forest, but are now restricted to one clearing, albeit in strength. The Eyrie is usually the most explicitly “militaristic” faction; most of the time its ability to score from crafting cards is limited, its main way of scoring points is checking how many of its Roost buildings are on the board at the end of each turn (so you need to expand to score higher numbers of points), and its internal politics drive it forward to conquer territory and make war. What do I mean by its internal politics? Oh, just that the only way the Eyrie takes actions on the map itself is via a card-driven programming game, where it must fulfil all the steps in its programme or fall into chaos, and its programme is partly defined by which Leader of the Eyrie currently rules. The Eyrie's programme is called the Decree, which has four consecutive steps: Recruit, Move, Battle, Build. These are parallel to the Marquise's actions, though each instance is less efficient. That's fine, because where the Marquise has that semi-capped 3 actions, the Eyrie can have as many as it can fulfil; you will see functional Decrees with 9 or 10 cards in them, for example. However, you HAVE to add 1 or 2 cards to the Decree every turn, and HAVE to take actions in a clearing matching the “suit” of the particular card. Oh, there are no enemy pieces in a Bunny clearing and you have a Bunny Battle card? Sucks to be you, Eyrie – time to go into Turmoil, lose some points, replace your Leader card, empty your Decree, and lose the rest of your turn. Like the Marquise, the Eyrie wants to build buildings, and it wants to control territory, but it feels utterly different – the Eyrie is made up of aggressive birds of prey who are able to strike with a rapidity and ferocity unknown to the calculating Marquise, but they're also prone to squabbling themselves to defeat. A functional Decree is a scary sight, and is about the most powerful thing in the game, but it's a fine line between a relentless machine of war and an ugly car crash.

Faction 3: The Woodland Alliance. For those familiar with the COIN series, this is the IN faction, with the Marquise and Eyrie acting as CO factions. The Woodland Alliance are the common animals/people of the forest, sick to their eyeteeth of the cats and birds bossing them around. They don't start on the board, or with any ability to undertake military operations; instead, their first few turns will be spent spending cards to spread Sympathy across the Forest, before sparking a Revolt and setting up a Base in a given clearing. They score points via Sympathy tokens, and they can craft cards based on the “suits” of the clearings they have Sympathy in – so Sympathy is a very powerful thing; however, if the CO factions march their troops into a Sympathetic clearing, or destroy a Sympathy token, they have to surrender cards to the Alliance, representing more supporters joining the Alliance in anger at the heavy-handed enforcement. Now, that's the soft war, the hearts-and-minds stuff. The Alliance also have a limited ability to wage war – much more limited than the Marquise or Eyrie, but nonetheless significant. They're more limited because they have fewer warrior pieces than the CO factions (10 Alliance, 15 Eyrie, 25 Marquise), and what's more, to take any military actions they have to set aside some of those warriors as Officers – kept off the map, allowing one military action (Move, Recruit, Battle, and the special Organise action which removes a warrior to place a Sympathy token) per Officer. This means that in a normal situation, they might have only 7 warriors available to put on the map, and 3 actions to do stuff with them. They are also vulnerable to having their operations seriously disrupted if they see their Bases destroyed – they lose cards and Officers in such an event. On the other hand, the game for the Alliance isn't total map control, as they can only build three Bases anyway. The game is spreading Sympathy and crafting, using the Bases as hubs of power to secure Sympathetic pockets, enable Organise actions, and disrupt opponents. By the end of the game the Alliance superficially resemble the Marquise and Eyrie; they have buildings, they have warriors, they have crafted stuff. However, they play completely differently, relying much less on main force and much more on strategic use of soft power.

Faction 4: The Vagabond. To the wargamer, the Vagabond is the most distinct and strange faction. Basically the Vagabond is some little dude wandering round playing their own RPG. The Vagabond only has one piece on the board, representing themselves; they can't be knocked off the board by battle, and they can't control clearings. They do score points for crafting and destroying buildings and tokens, and in a 4 player game can win via a Dominance card – but in the latter case it actually just allows them to ally with a different player and share their victory. How on earth does the Vagabond win, then? They have three unique ways of scoring points: (1) the Aid action, which involves giving cards to other players (potentially in return for Items that player has crafted) – the higher your Friendship rating with a faction, the more points you score, and if you reach the maximum level you can also treat that faction's pieces as your own, moving and battling with them; (2) killing Hostile warriors scores you 1VP per warrior removed – a faction is Hostile after the first time you attack them; and (3) via Quests, which are cards which require you exhaust certain Items in a particular suit of clearing – as the reward of a Quest, you can either draw 2 cards from the main deck, or score VP by the number of Quests you've completed in that suit. If that wasn't distinct enough, the Vagabond undertakes actions not via a default cap, a programme of cards, or a number of Officers, but via using Items. The Vagabond starts with four Items, and gains more either by buying them from other players with Aid actions, Crafting them himself, or exploring the four Ruin markers dotted across the map. There are different types of Items, allowing different actions – for instance Boots allow movement, Swords allow combat, Bags allow you to carry more items, and Hammers allow crafting or Item repair. Item repair is relevant because you take hits in combat by damaging Items. So you have your own little action economy based on having bought/made/discovered specific Items. There are also multiple Vagabond “characters”, one of which you pick before the game, which defines your starting Items and gives you a special ability. The Vagabond may seem the odd faction out, but as the player count rises, the chaos factor they represent, and the value of their friendship – whether in terms of Aid or in terms of them attacking your enemies – can be a decisive element.

Asymmetry and War

Root is an asymmetric wargame. There's a presupposition nested in that statement – that war can be, or is, asymmetric. The main series of wargames that investigates this concept is the COIN series from GMT Games. One game in that series has as its four factions the Colombian government, Marxist guerrillas, right-wing deaths squads, and drug syndicates. Another has the Romano-British military, the Romano-British civilian government, Celtic tribes, and Germanic invaders. You can see how the abilities and objectives of such factions might vary. COIN games do give different factions mechanically distinct options – e.g., Faction 1 can place “troop types” A and B (which can act in slightly different ways) but no special markers, whilst Faction 2 can place troop type B but has access to the special markers. This style obviously suits strategic faction-driven games; some might argue that it applies less well to other types of wargames. I think I'd observe that all wars and all battles are somewhat asymmetric, in a strict if limited sense – troop numbers vary, command ability differs, industrial capacity is higher or lower, and so forth. You do see other fairly “straight” games experiment with this in mechanical terms – for instance, again at a strategic level, The U.S. Civil War by Mark Simonitch provides different victory conditions, point-scoring methods, and recruiting rules for each side. It's far more uncommon for battlefield games to represent actual mechanical asymmetry – the two sides use the same rules, with the asymmetry being numeric within the mechanics – the Old Guard have Morale A, the pike-armed Russian militia have Morale E. Table Battles by Tom Holland does use significantly more asymmetry in its mechanics, though this is arguably due to a significant abstraction – it's not a map-based game, but is at core a dice pool game, with different units (cards you place dice on) having quite distinct abilities.

All these are forms of asymmetry – whether it's serious factional asymmetry as in COIN, or “logistic” asymmetry as in The US Civil War, “numeric” asymmetry as in the typical battle game, or asymmetry-via-abstraction as in Table Battles. It's an obvious point, but a significant reason people play historical wargames over, say, chess or Go is that it represents actual situations, with two or more sides with leaders and troops of different quality and use fighting over terrain that may give each side different advantages. The flavour of historical wargames relies – usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly – on an asymmetry of competence, opportunity, and capacity between the combatants.

Root is a game with as much if not more asymmetry as any COIN game; it is mechanically smooth and comparatively easy to learn; it is compact in terms of time (30-120 minutes, depending on player count) and box size (more important than some think!). Most of all, it's just very good fun. It's fun for the reasons stated – playing a real game of discovery in a relatively short time period with grokkable rules is rare and great – but it's also fun because it's cute and it tells great stories.

Why hasn't it achieved the same sort of success with my fellow “traditional” wargamers as the COIN series? Sure, the latter gets some sniffs from grognards over how like a Euro it seems to them, but that hasn't stopped plenty of greyheads getting into the series, and one need only look at the speed of release of new volumes by GMT to see how commercially viable it's been for them. Root is, in most respects, a “bigger” game – it's already in the BGG top 100, it's gone through three printings, with the latest in five figure numbers, it's got massive industry coverage. Why isn't it more popular with wargamers?

Because it's a fantasy game about cute little animals.

The Fantasy Theme and Wargames

The fantasy theme is not terribly well respected by traditional wargamers. This isn't surprising; if one is interested in history, then fantasy wargames do not cut the mustard. In a way, this is an unanswerable criticism. Fantasy wargames – whether War of the Ring, Wizard Kings, or Root – simulate no actual conflict, offer no actual historical insight.

This probably explains why none of the three games I've just mentioned are hex-and-counter, and scarcely any fantasy wargames are. The most traditional, the most simulatory of subgenres has no place for entirely ahistorical fantasy (though you wouldn't know it based on some of the World War 2 games I've played...).

The best way to frame any argument for grizzled grognards to play fantasy wargames (Root, in this case) is instead, I think, to explain why I enjoy it. It won't convince those most focussed on games-as-history, but it may sway some fence-sitters.

Well, Root is fun, it's not super-weighty, it has a quick playtime (30 minutes per player once players know rules). But it's also, definitively, a wargame – even within the narrower definitions you sometimes get, it involves plenty of direct conflict based on armies. That action is relatively simple and the tactics abstracted (affected chiefly by card-use, both passive and active), but it's a big part of the game. Indeed, it's here that the least wargamey faction, the Vagabond, becomes the MOST wargamey – once he's committed, and is scoring points off killing off warriors from a faction, he becomes the faction who most directly benefits from conflict.

Of course, “involves direct army conflict” is a very limited definition of wargame, and does mean that, yes, Risk is a wargame. More importantly, Root does actually offer light but compelling simulation of a number of wargaming norms, which add up to make it an interesting lens through which to see the hobby's subject. (Also – a non-traumatic lens for some who would find actual war, especially modern war, disturbingly close to home.)

The game offers up one of the cleverest simple supply systems I know. You can only move over a particular connecting path if you control either the clearing you are moving from or the clearing you are moving to. For the Marquise, her supply system of wood to build industrial buildings relies on paths of controlled clearings. As a way to get you thinking about the value of control of space – especially in the context of space with particular connections and routes – this is good. It's a lot simpler than Zucker!

Root also leverages its asymmetry with incredible elegance to model two elements of war which plenty of traditional wargames look at – doctrine and war aims. Doctrine is a nearly universal concern of games at the grand tactical and (for WW2) operational scales. This can be modelled via OOBs, or via special rules for one side or the other, or via the simple expedient of combat strength (Panzer divisions get 5 attack whilst French DCRs get 3, or whatever). Root effectively uses the special rule system, but in a way that is organically determinative of play, which I appreciate but which isn't always the case. The Eyrie are very aggressive, skilled in combat, but not very interested in non-combat tech – their limitations on crafting, the Decree forcing them to fight or Turmoil, and the three of the four leaders who incentivize warfare all not just represent that ludically, but also inform your play. You can play around their limitations, or seek to develop other strengths, but the standard combat doctrine of a nation of falcons and hawks is definitely there – and it's very different from the Marquise, who is mostly aggressive to find space to build (to score points via building and via Crafting) and is otherwise more defensive of her territory, and they're both very different from the Woodland Alliance, who scores points not via territorial control or expansion or combat, but via gaining soft power through Sympathy, with their military bases as a hub from which to spread propaganda.

Which brings us to war aims – though this is chiefly a concern of strategic games in the traditional sphere, it's nonetheless a key area of simulation design. How do you show the player why Germany invaded Russia in the two world wars? Do you, as a designer, simply think it was the “arrogance of princes”, do you think it related to a perceived need for flank security, or do you think it was really about the resources of the Ukraine and the Caucasus? Your design will follow from there. Root does the same, and does it asymmetrically – as mentioned above, each faction scores points differently. The Marquise is concerned with industry and makes war to aid that, the Eyrie has a domestic audience who demands success and expansion, the Woodland Alliance wins by surviving its battles and winning hearts and minds, and the Vagabond defines their own objectives in their wanders through the forest.

Elegant, intelligent pieces of wargame design – here I've considered supply, doctrine, and war aims, though there are other similarly clever things in this game – can give us insight even where they apply to no actual conflict. Modelling a fantasy situation allows us to consider how certain needs or ideas drive both battle and war, without immediately needing to argue out whether it was in fact some bloke called Franz Ferdinand or the grain of the Ukraine that was the real reason for the whole thing. Root presents, at a fairly simple and approachable level, an Ideal form of war, its motives, and its means. It simulates no particular war – and in doing so, I think, gives insight on every war.