Root

Somebody handed me the Marquise de Cat rulebook first, which I think is the correct way to learn this, because her engine of sawmills and workshops and recruiters is the one faction that plays like a normal game before you understand what “normal” even means here. Four factions, four different rulebooks, four completely different win conditions stapled to the same map, and the box wants you to believe that’s elegant. Mostly it is.

The art is doing a lot of work. Kyle Ferrin’s woodland folk look like they wandered out of a kid’s picture book and then somebody handed them muskets, and that mismatch between cute and violent is the whole hook, it never stops being a little funny that the Vagabond is out here forming trade alliances with raccoons. I taught it to my regular group over two sessions because trying to explain all four positions in one sitting is a genuine mistake, don’t do that, teach one faction deep and let the others learn by watching.

Where it earns the four stars instead of five is exactly the thing a few reviewers flagged and most don’t bother mentioning, the balance depends entirely on having players who can adapt mid game. If somebody picks the Eyrie and just mechanically follows their decree without reading the table, the whole thing goes sideways fast, one faction spirals and the game stops being a contest. I’ve had a session where the Woodland Alliance sat quiet for an hour building sympathy tokens and then just detonated the map, and I’ve had a session where nobody could recover from an early Marquise lead because nobody understood yet that ganging up on the leader is the actual skill this game is testing. It is not a forgiving design for a first-time table, and the teach, done properly, still eats half an hour even when you know what you’re doing.

I’ll cop to a weakness here: I keep eyeing the upgraded pieces, the fatter cat meeples, the metal coins, all the deluxe-ification this game has spawned over the years, and I own a perfectly good copy already. The type on the faction reference cards is small enough that I’ve started keeping the sheets closer than arm’s length, which for a war game with this many icons feels like a real oversight nobody fixed. Still recommending it, factions are genuinely asymmetric in a way that rewards learning the woodland’s whole cast of names instead of memorizing one deck.