Mouse warlords and badger knights

Do you love Root? We sure do! We just tried it with The Marauder expansion! ☺️ It is regarded as maybe the best expansion, especially for 2p with its new factions, and the included Hirelings that introduce new mechanics to fill up the board and give the losing player a helping hand.

For now let’s take a look at the new factions! 😁

🚩 The Lord of the Hundreds is a cruel and moody mouse-warlord 🐭, hell-bent on conquering the forest and oppressing its inhabitants, burning 🔥 everything that stands in his way. This faction is a true area-controlling warmongering one, as you are mostly only doing combat. The mechanics bring this theme to life amazingly!

Each round you have to pick out a new mood card that represents the warlord’s fickle nature. These give you all kinds of bonuses and are tied together with your hoard of items - they play an essential role too, as actions you can do scale with the amount of them. You could also forgo some hits in combat to steal items from enemies. 😈

You move around your armies with basic actions, but you can more easily move your warlord and his soldiers around to attack, so you have this “death-ball” army steamrolling through the map. 

🛡️ The Keepers In Iron are exiled badger-knights 🦡 who are trying to recover lost artifacts from the forests of the Woodland. This is a much more chill faction, especially compared to the Lord of the Hundreds. 😅 Their action selection resembles the Eyrie faction, with columns of cards corresponding to actions, but they also have this indirect way of play like the Woodland Alliance, and the singleplayer-esque treasure seeking of the Vagabond. So it’s an interestingly stitched together faction that still brings something new to the game. 😊

To gather artifacts you first have to Delve in clearings to pull out artifacts from the forests, then you have to bring them to matching Waystations to recover them and score points. This is not easy, as not having enough control around the forests could lose you cards from your tableau and weaken you. Artifacts you carry are also juicy 2 points for any opponent who takes them, so you are always in the crosshairs. 🙀