Bots in the forest

We recently played Root for the first time, which made us immediately want to order the Clockwork expansion for it - which we did! This means we can play the Woodland Alliance and the Vagabond too in 2p games, by using bots! 🥰 We plan to cover Clockworks too, but first I’d like to highlight these 2 factions because they are so much fun! 🤩

🐭 Woodland Alliance
They are the common folk of the forest, who have had enough and want to change things for the better, collecting supporters for their cause and causing revolts to raise militia. ✊ This theme is very nicely translated into their gameplay elements. It feels somewhat strange as you start out without any pieces on the board, even though everyone else is out there. 😮

You can use cards in your Supporters stack to place sympathy tokens on clearings with matching icons and spread out from there. The more of these you have in play, the better it is for you, but they get more expensive to place. This is also your primary source for points in the race to 30 vps. 🧐 Later you can start Revolts in clearings where you already have tokens - this is really powerful, as you remove all enemy pieces there. ‼️ You then get a foothold on the map by placing out a base and start recruiting officers to be able to do military operations. It can be devastating to lose a base, but the Alliance has an advantage in battles when defending, so others are less incentivized to fight them.

🦝 Vagabond
This is something else entirely! Playing the Vagabond you have a single meeple to control during the game, and you are playing all sides of the conflict. You have to manage an inventory of items and exhaust them to do different actions, discard matching cards in certain clearings to finish Quests and trade with other players. Many of the game’s cards offer people to craft items for additional points, and this is an essential mechanic for the Vagabond to grow his item pool.

The asymmetry in Root is just so great and all of the factions are such a blast to play. They all require distinctly different ways of thinking. I couldn’t even pick a favorite, I just want to play all of them! 🤩