Root Counterplay Guide
Introduction
This document is a guide on how to counter the various factions in the asymmetric strategy board game Root. It details their means of scaling, merson1 deployment, and win conditions, as well as how you can best prevent fulfillment of those those win conditions.
This guide is for those of intermediate familiarity with strategy board games and basic familiarity with the rules of Root. General strategy game terms such as “action economy”, “board presence”, and “engine” will not be explained. Some Root specific rules terminology will also not be explained, but the rules are available online here.
This is a living document, which means it will receive updates as new information is gained and strategies are tested. All updates will be recorded in the change log. Contributions are welcome, and can be made by submitting a pull request here.
Change Log
2024-08-12
- Created Underground Duchy section
- Created Woodland Alliance section
- Created Corvid Conspiracy section
- Created Lord of Hundreds section
- Created Lizard Cult section (unfinished)
Underground Duchy
What do they do?
The Underground Duchy has a heavy board presence. They have the ability to deploy massive numbers of meeple, which is hampered only by their initially slow recruitment. They start with a poor action economy, but scale rapidly by swaying nobles, as well as building citadels and markets. Swaying nobles allows incredibly good action economy, building citadels allows rapid recruitment, and building markets allows greater procurement and cycling of cards.
How to Sabotage
The moles require a few rounds to ramp up. If you know the person playing them will be a threat, they’re relatively easy to kneecap by attacking within the first three rounds, before they get everything going. If they’re smart, they’ll hole up in a few defensible clearings from the start, which makes things more difficult.
Woodland Alliance
What do they do?
The Woodland Alliance2 has the lightest board presence of any faction. They deploy very few meeple, but mainly ramp up by accumulating followers and placing sympathy tokens. These sympathy tokens are key to their development. Even though they’re placed undefended, you’re incentivized not to destroy them. Each token you destroy requires you to select a card from your hand matching the suit of the clearing, and give it to the Alliance. If you have no matching cards, they get to view your hand and select a card of their choice. Either way, it gets added to their supporters.
This makes fighting the Woodland Alliance annoying and expensive. The alternative, however, is worse. If a clearing has a sympathy token, the Woodland Alliance player can pay two matching supporters to revolt, which will:
- Destroy all enemy pieces in the clearing
- Deploy a number of Alliance meeple equal to the number of matching clearings with sympathy tokens
- Place a matching base that allows them to directly deploy warriors
- Add warriors to the office box, increasing their action economy
Additionally, the number of victory points that they score by placing each sympathy will increase with the number of sympathy tokens currently placed.
How to Sabotage
Bases are what allow the Woodland Alliance to directly deploy units. Removing a base does very bad things to them. If you destroy a base, they must discard all matching supporters and remove half of their officers (rounded up). They also lose the base as a deployment point for meeple.
Because of the Corvids’ ability to deploy snare plots, they’re uniquely suited to handicap bases. If the Corvids were to flip a snare in the same clearing as a base, and then remove all Alliance meeple from that clearing, the base would be worse than useless until the snare is removed. The Alliance would be unable to deploy meeple there due to the snare, and also unable to revolt in that suit because of the existing base. While marching in from elsewhere to destroy a snare is easy for heavy factions, the extremely light presence of the Alliance makes this very expensive for them.
Corvid Conspiracy
What do they do?
The Corvid Conspiracy has a light board presence. They have the ability to deploy plots, special tokens that have one of four functions:
- Bomb: When flipped, remove all enemy pieces in its clearing.
- Snare: While face up, enemy pieces cannot be placed in or moved from its clearing.
- Extortion: When flipped, take a random card from each player who has any pieces in its clearing. While face up, you draw an extra card in evening.
- Raid: When removed, place one warrior in each adjacent clearing.
Tokens are always deployed face down. Facedown tokens allow the crows to deal an extra hit per defending battle. Tokens can be flipped face up during the Crows’ birdsong phase if a crow is present in the clearing.
How to Sabotage
Facedown plots are their primary method of exerting pressure, especially because other players don’t know what the plot is. Facedown plots can be exposed: You can reveal a card of a matching suit and make a guess about which plot it is. If you’re right, the facedown plot is removed.
If you have the extra action economy, you can attempt exposure and guess what you think is most likely. However, the most economic way to deal with plots is to guess whether the plot is a Raid. If it is, it will be exposed and disappear, giving you one VP. If it’s not, you can safely destroy move in meeple and destroy it, knowing that it won’t spawn more crows.
A slightly more advanced application of this strategy involves guessing what you think would be most harmful, not most likely. If your guess is right, it’s removed. If your guess is wrong, you are assured that the worst case will not come to pass, and can decide whether it’s even worth engaging with the plot.
Lord of Hundreds
What does it do?
The Lord of the Hundreds holds iron-fisted control over clearings. Completely controlling clearings is the only way for them to score VP, and their toolkit is designed around doing so. The first and foremost of these is mob tokens. During evening, the Lord can spend a card to place a mob token in a matching clearing that has a Hundreds warrior. At the beginning of each of their turns, every enemy token (excluding warriors) in clearings with a mob token are destroyed.
The reason the Hundreds needs such strong board control is that they can only score victory points from clearings that they control which have no other factions’ pieces.
How to Sabotage
Like the Woodland Alliance, the Lord of Hundreds is expensive to fight, but the alternative is letting them win. You can fight the Hundreds primarily by destroying mob tokens and keeping warriors in their clearings.
Preventing Victory Points
Because the Hundreds can’t score from clearings with enemy pieces in them, you can waste a lot of their time and actions by keeping the minimum number of warriors in their clearings necessary to prevent them from scoring. This is best done by heavy factions that can afford the losses.
Preventing Recruiting
The Hundreds rely on the warlord for recruiting. They can only recruit in the clearing where the warlord is, and the Recruit action is before the Anoint (replace warlord) action, so \textbf{killing the warlord prevents them from Recruiting for one turn}. (Note that any Strongholds will also produce warriors, but only one per turn.
Enlisting the assistance of the Crows to prevent the movement of Hundreds warriors is also very helpful, as their Snare Plots, Bomb Plots, and Raid Plots can be a great deterrent. This can be combined with the help of the Woodland Alliance’s Sympathy tokens to require the Hundreds to pay cards when entering clearings.3
Preventing Mobs
Preventing effective deployment of mobs is something that benefits all players at the table except the Hundreds. Consider preemptively coordinating with the other players at the beginning of the game to cordon off the spread of Mobs. This is best done by building a perimeter of warriors around the Hundreds, so that they can destroy any newly-formed Mobs that appear along the border.
The Crows are especially good at this because of their ability to place Snare Plots. When revealed, they prevent any new non-Crow pieces from being placed in the clearing (but doesn’t prevent warriors from moving into it), so the Hundreds aren’t allowed to place any mob tokens in clearings with face-up Snares.
Addendum: Opinions on Game Design
The Lord of Hundreds has the unique effect of changing the objective of the other players. Not within the rules, but informally. If the Lord is present, and the other players don’t cooperate to handicap them, it will prove an easy victory for the Lord.
Their balancing is such that they can win most 1v1 faction matchups easily, unless the other player is experienced in dealing with them. However, they can be quickly dispatched by the cooperation of a heavy faction with any other faction, especially when one of them is able to deploy warriors flexibly and without prior building placement as a prerequisite.4
Lizard Cult
This section is incomplete.
What do they do?
The Lizard Cult is unconventional in its engine and action economy.
How to Sabotage
Destroying gardens is one of the most effective ways to mess up the Lizards’ plans. Unfortunately, destroying gardens is not as straightforward of a countermeasure as something like destroying the Moles’ buildings. Because destroying Lizard meeple in battle effectively feeds them actions, attacks on gardens must be calculated so that they destroy the fewest possible meeple in battle.
Footnotes
Merson is a portmanteau of “mini person”. The plural is meeple, as in “mini people”. ↩
Colloquially called the Toasts, because their meeple resemble bread slices. ↩
I’m a big fan of the “Maginot Line” strategy, where the Crows and the Toasts collaborate to make clearings with sympathy and snare plots to render the area difficult to pass. It requires players passing through to pay a card tax to the Toasts, then destroy the snare. ↩
The moles are included in this description, because they can deploy on the same turn they place a burrow. ↩