#riverfolk company

[x-damian-x]

Playing Root!

[wolfofartblock]

Keep seeing clips of the Uprooted Legends of Avantris campaign and also played the boardgame itself again yesterday, and felt like making a little drawing

Minnie Coates, a fishing mink who clashes often with the Riverfolk Company

[nickythehickey]

uprooted progress update i've finished ep5 and jesus the riverfolk company (see: otter mafia) is actually kinda scary

im ngl the scene with scampi and booker made me feel personally threatened somehow

[obsidiancreates]

Okay so the Riverfolk company don't own the barge but Uproot-ified Remy or Kremy does.

God I hope it's just Mikey doing a Kremy impression.

[cosmicharmonyoc]

my partners are both addicted to the board game root and so: what factions would the ch characters play:

aria: woodland alliance

violet: eyrie dynasties

den: marquise de cat

london: corvid conspiracy

mariana: riverfolk company

everest: vagabond

honeycomb: underground duchy

flora: lizard cult

pluto: keepers in iron

izzy: lord of the hundreds

[rootisms]

A small and far from complete list of why every root faction is problematic and should be cancelled:

Marquise de Cat: They literally wanna industrialise the woodland. Kaczinsky would be seething if he knew what these kitties were up to (I do not support the unabomber in any way shape or form)

Eyrie Dynasty: Their claim on the woodland is entirely built upon them ruling it before. They are textbook conservatists yucky.

Woodland Alliance: Revolts are indiscriminate and hurt a lot of people involved. Their radicals with no clear goal after they win.

Vagabond: They're an egomaniac out for blood.

Riverfolk Company: Capitalism.exe

Lizard Cult: T-theyre a cult? Like what else do I have to say.

Underground Duchy: They are actual colonisers.

Corvid Conspiracy: Terrorism doesn't always win the day and they are trying to take control of the woodland via less than moral tactics if we read their plots.

Lord of the Hundreds: Ontologically evil.

Keepers in Iron: Visist the British Museum.

[mozillo]

Firmly Rooted In The Enjoyment of Root

Firmly Rooted In The Enjoyment of Root

Behold, Board Games! Something new for this blog and my many ventures, and what better game to start with than Root from Leder Games. An exceptional asymmetric war game, from designer Cole Wehrle, that’ll see you tense up with dread as your great plans fall apart and then immediately ease up as you set your eyes once again on the…

[farshores]

So what exactly is ROOT?

Root is an asymmetric wargame where the player(s) would control certain anthropomorphic factions to control the board & reach the winning goal of 30+ points. Each faction has their own special tactics/gameplay (especially in the case of the Vagabond - which have 9 different "subclasses" to pick from) & players need to essentially strategize for the win.

Said factions are: the Eyrie, Marquise de Cat, Woodland Alliance, Vagabond(s), Riverfolk Company, the Lizard Cult, Underground Duchy & Corvid Conspiracy. There's also the Clockwork versions of the first four - but they are bots/non-playable...and a pain in the ass to play against. These + latter 4 factions are from addons - which there is/will be another addon for the boardgame itself introducing the Lord of the Hundreds & Keepers in Iron factions!

There is currently a digital version of the game available on mobile, PC (via Steam), & the Switch! They don't have the latest expansion nor the Duchy or Conspiracy factions - but other than that, this version is pretty up-to-date compared to its physical boardgame sibling.

There's also a TTRPG version of the game that more-so takes the lore behind the factions + characters of Root & runs it with a PbtA-framework. It's the most recent of releases - so it hasn't caught on in TTRPG circles yet (from my knowledge), but hey! It looks fun, even adds some extra Vagabond "classes" for players to choose from.

TL;DR - Root is essentially fuzzy (& not so fuzzy) little critters fighting for control of the Woodlands that comes in 2 flavors: Boardgame (phys + digital) & TTRPG. I'd highly recommend trying out the boardgame first before the rpg, but it's not required to understand the world of the games!

Also play ROOT, if you got the time & funds, it's fun!

[battlersexual]

Board Game Showcase #4: Root

Hey! It’s been a while since I did one of these: Six months, to be exact. In that time, I’ve been playing a lot of board games. The old college club moved online for the pandemic, so we’ve had plenty of opportunities. So, I have a new one for today. This is actually going to be a wargame, which means I have to talk a bit about wargame mechanics. I’ll do a more in-depth discussion of them at some point, but for now I’ll just leave space for a link here and mention the basics.

So, Root. This game came out of absolutely nowhere and won a bunch of awards back around 2017-18. It certainly flew under my radar at first - I was more interested in a different wargame, which I will be making a showcase of very soon - but the moment I started playing in earnest, I realized how brilliant it really was. So let me tell you why Root is so great.

Story:

Root’s story is typical of wargames - more about factions and empires than individuals. You and up to three other players - five in the expansion - play as different groups vying for control of a thriving forest. The forces of the Marquise de Cat, an imperialist hailing from tamer lands, have seized control of almost the entire forest and are gearing up to industrialize the place. The forest’s old masters, the proud Eyrie Dynasty and their squabbling bureaucracy, have united under a new leader and are gathering their forces for reconquista. The citizens of the forest, the mice, foxes, and rabbits of the underbrush, have decided to throw off the yoke of oppression and band together as the Woodland Alliance, engaging in sabotage and guerrilla warfare to take the forest for the people. And in the midst of it all is the Vagabond, a traveler seeking to find a place in this new status quo taking shape, with the potential to play kingmaker or even seize power for himself.

Also, they’re all cute animals.

Mechanics and more under the cut. 

Mechanics:

Oh boy, this is gonna be a big one. In fact, for the first time in Board Game Showcase history, I have to split up the mechanics section. See, Root is an asymmetrical game, much like Cosmic Encounter was, but unlike Cosmic, Root’s factions have differences that go far beyond a single ability. So instead, I’ll summarize the major mechanics here and go into detail on the factions in their own section.

Root is played on a board representing an autumn forest, with twelve “clearings” connected by paths and separated by thick forested areas.

Each clearing has a suit, represented by the color of the trees as well as a small symbol (you can see it on the prior image: this one is just the art) next to the clearing. The suits are Fox, Mouse, and Rabbit. Each clearing also has small white squares, which represent building slots: different clearings support different levels of infrastructure.

The denizens of the forest are represented by a 54-card deck with four suits: the aforementioned fox, mouse, and rabbit, as well as a bird suit that acts as a wild card for the board: any bird card can represent any clearing.

Cards are mainly used for their suit, but can also be crafted: if the cost on the bottom of the card is paid (using crafting pieces, which are different for each faction but all in some way represent infrastructure in clearings), you get the benefit. Sometimes this is an upgrade, sometimes it’s points and an item, but it;s usually worth considering, and some effects can make certain factions exceedingly powerful. There are also “ambush” cards, which are played from the hand directly in battle, and “dominance” cards, which unlock alternate victory conditions.

Most factions have three kinds of piece they can place on the board: Warriors, Buildings, and Tokens. Buildings are always square, and tokens are circular.

Moving warriors around is highly dependent on who rules each clearing, which is determined by how many pieces a faction has there. Ties default to nobody ruling the clearing.

Battle is simple: When a battle is initiated, the attacker rolls two dice numbered 0-3. Once rolled, the attacker takes the higher number and the defender takes the lower one. The number is dealt to the opposing side as hits, each of which removes a warrior. If there are no warriors left, buildings and tokens start being removed. You can only deal as many hits as you have warriors.

The goal of the game is to reach 30 victory points. You earn points by crafting item cards, destroying buildings and tokens, and completing your faction’s goals. Each turn consists of three phases: Birdsong, Daylight, and Evening.

And that’s the end of the basic rules. If it seems like there’s a lot missing, that’s because...

Factions:

Each of the four factions in Root has completely different rules for how they play. I’ll have to present each one individually. I’ll be leaving some things out: each faction has a LOT going on, and I’ll try to convey what they do at the core.

The Marquise de Cat starts out controlling almost the entire forest, and gets points from building sawmills, workshops, and recruiters. She plays the most like a traditional 4x game, taking territory, building, and using resources. Sawmills make wood, which make more buildings. Workshops are used as crafting pieces, and recruiters make more soldiers and let her draw more cards each turn. She takes three actions each daylight, plus more for each bird card she discards, and can both pump out troops quickly and move across the map at a good pace. She starts with a heavily defended keep, and can spend cards to either overwork her sawmills or save troops from death with field hospitals.

The Eyrie Dynasties start stuck in the opposite corner from the Marquise’s keep, but with a good army and a Roost, which acts as a combination crafting piece, recruitment area, and point generator. They have a choice of four different Leaders:

All of the leaders have different abilities and affect the Decree. The Decree is the Eyrie’s political system: It’s got four columns (Recruit, Move, Battle, and Build), and each turn, the Eyrie player adds a card to the decree, then resolves it from left to right. For each card, the player must perform the corresponding action in a clearing of the same suit. This means the number of actions the Eyrie can take ramps up each turn, but the catch is that if any action can’t be fulfilled, the government falls into turmoil, the leader is replaced with a new leader, the decree is reset, and the player loses points for every bird card in the decree.

The Woodland Alliance don’t start on the board at all, but rely on sympathy tokens and supporters. Supporters are cards in a special supporter zone that can be used to spread sympathy or revolt. Sympathy tokens represent popular support for the alliance: it’s used to craft, it scores them points, and if another faction takes aggressive actions in sympathetic clearings, they make even more supporters of the cause from the general outrage. With enough support, they can revolt, setting up a base on the map and gaining warriors and officers, which allow them to take military action at night. They have fewer troops, but are much stronger: their guerrilla warfare means they always take the higher number in all conflicts.

The Vagabond isn’t a faction, but an individual. While the rest of the players are busy warring, this guy is over here playing D&D, complete with character classes.

The Vagabond wanders around the map with his pawn (not a warrior), searching ruins for items, trading with the other factions, questing, and building up a relationship meter with the other players. He doesn’t take territory, and he can leave the clearings and hang out in the forests. His items determine his capabilities, and everything he does helps or hinders the other players, directly or indirectly. He can ally with a faction by giving them cards, which earns him points, or he can go hostile and earn a point for each warrior of another faction he kills.

The expansion introduces two more factions, but we’ll go over them in that section.

Flavor:

Amazing. The different playstyles really get to the heart of the political game here, where you often can’t easily predict what other players will do and how the forest will change in a single turn. The art on the cards and board is also gorgeous, and really brings this little forest to life.

Replayability:

It’s a wargame, there’s almost infinite replayability by definition, but Leder Games went above and beyond. On the back of the board is another board, this one depicting a winter forest.

The clearings on the winter board don’t have fixed suits: instead, you place suit markers in whatever configuration you like. This is admittedly more for advanced players, but it’s nice that it was included in the base game at all, and adds even more replayability out of the box.

Expansions:

There are several expansions coming out, but only two finalized for release: The Riverfolk expansion, and the Clockwork expansion.

Riverfolk adds several things, including a board and rules for a second Vagabond player, and two new factions: The Lizard Cult and the Riverfolk Company.

The Lizard Cult is a dragon-worshiping cult that cares about the outcasts of the forest, and by that I mean the discard pile. Each turn, the most common suit in the discards is marked as the “outcast”, and the lizards perform conspiracies in the clearings matching the outcast suit. They don’t discard cards themselves to use them, instead only revealing them from their hand each turn, but to compensate, they have to radicalize their followers into acolytes before actually performing their conspiracies.

The Riverfolk Company are riverfaring merchants and mercenaries. Their goal is to set up trading posts in the forest and make a tidy profit. They act as merchants in-game as well: everything is for sale. Their hand is always visible, and other players can buy cards from them. They can sell their warriors as mercenaries, and ferry other factions along the rivers connecting some clearings, and they set the prices of all their services turn-by-turn, so they can react to the market. In exchange, they get more things they can do on their turn the more people buy from them, and if the other players aren’t careful they can become a terrifying force.

The Clockwork Expansion is very different from Riverfolk. It doesn’t add any new factions: instead, it compensates for players not having a large enough gaming group by making automated versions of all the base game factions. I can’t give much more detail, as I don’t actually own this expansion at the moment, but I love the idea.

There are a lot more expansions in the works, including new boards, a new deck, new vagabonds, and a new riverfolk-style expansion featuring two new factions, the Corvid Conspiracy and the Underground Duchy, but those aren’t fully released yet.

Criticisms:

Root can be a difficult game to learn, since you have to keep track of everyone’s different playstyles and rules to really play well. It can also be a bit snowball-y, with the winner often being very obvious several turns in advance. In terms of actual defects, the Lizard Cult have a special rule that isn’t listed on their faction board and only exists in the rulebook, which is frustrating. It’s also not a great two-player game, only really shining with three or more players.

Availability: 

Root is pretty easily available, since it’s still in the process of release to this day. You shouldn’t have issues finding a copy. It’s also got some good mods on Tabletop Simulator.

Conclusion:

When I first played Root, it was two-player, and I got stomped. I thought that would be the end of it, and I decided I probably wouldn’t like the game. Then, a week passed, and I wasn’t able to stop thinking about it. I tried it again, and again. I played it against myself to refine my strategy. I bought my copy and taught it to people.

It’s been months since then, and Root has become one of my favorite games. So don’t be discouraged if it’s hard to get started with. Give it some time, and some thought, and you’ll see the appeal. There’s a lot of great design here, and I thoroughly recommend Root.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

Today we played a 6-player game of Root (which I don’t necessarily recommend; the chaos wasn’t that bad but it can be a long time between your turns), which meant my first time teaching and using the Lizard Cult and the Otter Riverfolk Company.  I played the Lizards, and I think it is fair to say that I learned what not to do as the Lizard player; the final scores were something like 30-29-18-16-15-5, with me being the 5.  

In other news, there is a Kickstarter currently to add in the Corvid Conspiracy and the moles’ Underground Duchy; its seems like Root is getting played enough that it was worth backing those, too.

[ehronlime]

Trading and conniving as the Riverfolk Company in Root https://www.instagram.com/p/BshEXrpDY1b/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1rpdmfyfxq3gs

[ghostpalmtechnique]

Haven’t had many new games that I could do overviews for in a while, but I am expecting several that I have pre-ordered to show up in the next couple of months.  The common thread, it seems, will be games that look adorable but involve being exceptionally mean to your opponents (or look like cinnamon rolls, will actually kill you, if you prefer).  First up, we have Root, which is sort of a  streamlined assymetric COIN (counterinsurgency war) game featuring a Redwall-like setting.  (This was the semi-surprise hit of the board game side of GenCon, so I pre-ordered to make sure I get a copy at all.)

The coming Riverfolk expansion includes some more species, including proselytizing lizards, which invariably makes me think of that “would you like to hear about our lord and savior, Voldemort?” image.

Then we have The Estates (a prettified new edition of the game Neue Heimat), considered the meanest auction game in existence.  Also players in this are competing construction companies who are just as corrupt as real life land developers, which is fairly amusing.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

After a first play of this, I certainly have thoughts, though I should probably get some more experience before giving a real overview of it.  According to the box, the playing time for this is 60-90 minutes.  Which is probably true for four players who all already know what they are doing.  Figuring it out and playing it for the first time (even though I’d read the rule books twice ahead of time) actually took us four newbies a bit over three hours.

The game was great, mind you. I’ll definitely be ordering the expansion with the Lizard Cult and the Riverfolk (Otter) Company.  But the game is highly asymmetrical, which means there are a lot of rules and lot of rules exceptions.  And by asymmetrical, I don’t just mean little bonuses here and there (although there is that). I mean everyone is using completely different mechanics.

The cat scores points by spending wood to build sawmills (for more wood), workshops, and recruitment centers, and must maintain control over the network of clearings between where the lumber is produced and where he wants to build. He starts all over the map, but only gets three actions per turn, unless he spends cards from the bird (valuable wildcard) suit for extra ones.

The birds only start in the corner, but their mechanism is action programming, beginning with three actions on their first turn but adding one or two more to the program on each subsequent turn, so they tend to snowball.  The catch is that if they ever can’t fulfill every card in their program, the government collapses, they start back from a program of three actions, and they lose a bunch of points.

The Woodland Alliance doesn’t start anywhere, and they have far fewer warriors to potentially recruit than the cat or the birds.  But they score points for spreading sympathy tokens around the board, and any time another faction either moves warriors into a sympathetic clearing or destroys a sympathy token, they have to pay a card to the Alliance player.

The vagabond isn’t even trying to rule the forest; he just wants to be a legend in his own time. He scores points completing quests by using the right combinations of items in the right locations, and also by aiding other players giving them more cards to take items from them.  

For the first game, the Alliance and vagabond players in particular are going to need half the game just figuring out how their factions are supposed to win. But it definitely seems worth the investment of more plays to figure every thing out.  The trouble is gathering the same group of people more than once....

I haven’t gotten to play Root yet, so no review, but I did want to share this excellent owl card (one of the alternate leaders for the Eyrie faction if their initial despot gets deposed), for @argumate ‘s benefit:

(There are no images of this particular card online; I grabbed a screenshot when I saw it in a video review.)

ETA: If you like this artist’s style, he sells some of his stuff (but not, sadly, the owl) on clothing: https://kyleferrin.threadless.com/designs/