Root\'s brilliant, and I absolutely adore almost everything about it, but there\'s a reason I haven\'t been able to get a group formed around playing it despite working at a LGS that carries it.
Among all the groups of new players I\'ve introduced the game to, the Woodland Alliance always becomes extremely dominant due to its explosive point growth. Even with an experienced player there to guide them, it just isn\'t clear to others how powerful an unchecked Alliance can be (much less how to properly check them) until a few games deep.
Meanwhile, proper counterplay makes those early games miserable for whoever is playing as them. Their small pool of warriors disincentivizes them from interacting with the best quarterbacking faction, the Riverfolk Company (my personal favorite faction for introducing the game), too, so it\'s harder to teach them how to respond to active counterplay from the rest of the table without just coaching them through the game.
Then, once people understand how the Alliance works, they have to learn how to manage the Vagabond (arguably an even stronger, more versatile faction) now that their player understands how their engine works. And, despite being labeled \"the best faction for beginners,\" the Cats are by far one of the hardest factions to actually win with due to their incredibly limited action economy.
Cats are labelled \"easy\" on the principle that their actual gameplay loop is a very straightforward Construction and Management Games (and if no Vagabond is in play, then it becomes even more straightforward). Compared with just about every other faction, it\'s very easy to get into them, and experience from other strategy board games can be handy, too.
Said all that, the game does suffer from the utterly horrible case of board game design where NOT having any expansions is the superior choice, but you find that out only after sinking money and trying the expansions out. Sure, without expansions, it\'s a four-player game, but at least it\'s manageable. With 6 people at the table, turn takes forever, any sort of planning is tedious, and victory is pretty much decided between a semi-competent Vagabond and the Alliance, since everyone else will be struggling against the complexity of their factions (and targeting the Cat player from amassing more than 4 connected clearings). I tried to play a game of six a few times, and it was a total shitshow in every case. The baseline is simply NOT designed to have so many players, but nothing was done with expansions to address this, they just added new factions for the sake of it. I mean, I get the business mindset behind it, but from a pure game design point of view, it\'s just plain and simply exploitative against its own playerbase.
Also: this game is incredibly aggressive. I know wargames set on limited space boards that have less aggression going on. If anyone wants to just chill with friends, this is right next to stuff like Monopoly when it comes to mood killers. I\'ve lost track of how many times a player who got the Eagles just threw their game after two turns, because of how messed up their situation went, and any ganging on the Cats leads to the same result. This game is zero fun in a group of people that didn\'t meet together to just wipe each other out - and the cute imaginary does cause the expectation that it\'s going to be a lighthearted game. And pretty much the only interaction between players is hitting each other one way or another.
Man, now I kind of wish the YMMV page was full of y'all's opinions just so I could satisfy my own curiosity…
There is no trope to say \"The game has bad design, because its expansions exist to fleece people and make the game worse, while it also requires a very special and narrow audience to actually enjoy the sort of experience it offers, expansions or vanilla\".
That\'s what the reviews and comments are for ;)
You can cover the bad design with YMMV tropes, though. There\'s a bunch of related to Character Tiers, for example
... what for? We both know that it's gonna be flagged as "complaining" (which it would be, not even gonna try to deny that) within minutes. And it's not even that the Vagabond or the Alliance are High Tier Scrappy or that the other factions are utterly helpless - it's simply how the basic rules of the game operate. When a Cat player struggles to get 2-3 points per turn until very late into the game, Alliance player can easily just get 4 by merely existing. And anyone trying to decrease Alliance presence will give it extra points. But not doing so in turn means Alliance can effortlessly start its revolution and win the game.
I mean I got now a YMMV trope now that I think about it. Namely: Accidental Aesop: Simple military presence is not enough to pacify and control the land you are occupying. You need a humanitarian effort and strong local government to maintain your presence.
Except this isn't a game about the 20 years of failure to secure Afghanistan
I mean, Uncertain Audience is an obvious one purely on the metric that the expansions don\'t improve the title...
Do we have a YMMV about tabletop games becoming too complex for many players to handle? It should be workable without devolving into complaining.
I would also like to ask: I can see why the expansions add up to make the game unplayable together, but can you play it in four using the added factions?
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
I think he’s also complaining that the internal balance was pretty shot from the word go?
We\'ve got a Sandbox for that - Complexity Creep
And yeah, the game is inbalanced up the wazoo. In 2 out of 5 games, Eagle player, even if left alone by everyone else, will suffer collapse of his government at least once, just because Programming Game is near-impossible in Root, and each additional player means the amount of variables to account for renders any effort moot. Which is also a reason why nobody wants to play that (baseline) faction when given a choice - you are losing by default, even if nobody attacks and you are doing your damnest not to.
Do we have a YMMV about tabletop games becoming too complex for many players to handle? It should be workable without devolving into complaining.
Loads and Loads of Rules is a regular trope
Yeah, except that trope is about a game having a really long list of rules, rather than those rules being complex. Root has a single A5 page per faction, plus another 4 pages of actual text in the rules of the game (since majority of the booklet are just images, with sparse description). That gives us 20 pages of rules, which means 10 pages of standard text. Which is below the average for board games and far less than typical conflict-heavy game.
In other words - trope misuse.
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The Animals of Fighting Wood
Root is a cute and bloodthirsty boardgame of war and domination, as told through bands of little woodland animals fighting for control of a forest. The notable element of the series is that each faction (represented by their own animal and delightful little wooden meeples), has its own structure and goals, achieving victory in their unique way. You could play as an empire of cats who win by covering the map in factories, or as aristocratic birds who obsessively follow their own edicts to the letter, or as Trading Company otters who want to simply amass money. In my game, I played as illuminati crows who avoid fighting and win by carrying out subversive plots.
It is a neat idea that is packaged really nicely. It sets itself apart from strategy like Settlers of Catan or Risk by giving the players these different jobs, and providing a massive scope for replayability. If you want to try every faction out with all the add-ons included that'll take you at least 10 games! But you'll also want to replay the same factions because the first time over you will make a lot of mistakes, and you'll only start to get the hang of how a particular factions is best played by the time the game is already finishing.
Unfortunately, this is the first of the game's problems. Whilst each individual faction is simple enough to play, it is not necessarily intuitive how best to play them. My illuminati crows could barely get a foothold for most of the game because it was super easy for opponents to disrupt my plots whenever I tried to start one. There was only one optimal strategy around this anti-crow bias, and it wasn't apparent until I'd sat through several hours of unsatisfying gameplay first. The others were having similar problems. Another player was stuck with the bird aristocracy, and was constantly getting confused about what he could and couldn't do; it was a huge problem for his faction, because it depends on players being excellent planners, and is severely punishing for people who aren't.
If all this weren't enough, whilst each faction is simple, it is tremendously complicated to keep in mind how all your opponent's different factions work at the same time. As everyone has their own rule set, it's too easy to lose track of what they are trying to, what they can do, and why they are even doing it. That's a bad thing when it comes to strategy.
Root is a frustrating game because it requires all the players to have multiple playthroughs to get the hang of it, and yet it punishes new players and dissuades and them from retrying. My advice for anyone considering this game is to just get the base game and get people to replay only that a few times. It's just complicated and varied enough for people to have a fun time. If you go in with the many expansions, you are in for headaches.