Me and my play group are pretty obsessed with this game. We just got the riverfolk expansion, the homeland expansion, and the squires and disciples deck. But I wanted to get the other stuff too, is there anywhere to find underworld? Or the vagabond pack of exiles and partisans? Marauders is available still.

What are the hirelings for? And the bots?

I've been wondering about this, because I'm not finding any answer on the internet. I wonder if that's because this can probably only happen with the Favor cards and most people here don't like playing with those.

The question is if the Riverfolk Company funds get halved multiple times if something like a Favor card causes multiple trade posts to be removed simultaneously, triggering trade disruption.

I was comparing it to the cat hospital, which says "Whenever any number of Marquise warriors are removed ...", while the otters just say "Whenever a trade post is removed, ...", so I have to assume that the trade disruption is triggered multiple times. Are there arguments for the opposite?

Hello! Me and my friends are interested in playing a fan faction and we would like to get some recommendations. Preferably ones that have been playtested. Thank you!

So, when I was young and dumb, I threw out the cardboard clearing markers. I won't need those. I bought the resin clearing markers. Why would I use cardboard when I have resin?

Cut to older, wiser me, who has trouble randomizing clearings for a game because I can't draw resin markers from a bag. They all feel different. I can come up with a dice rolling algorithm, but that feels time consuming. What would I give to have those one-sided cardboard clearing markers back to turn face-down, shuffle, and draw... then replace with resin clearing markers.

So, yeah. Anybody got a good way to randomize clearing markers if I don't have those cardboard markers anymore?

Game Plan:

Spend the first 3 turns placing as many enclaves and warriors as possible and scoring when convenient. At the end of turn three, you would ideally have 6 points, 16 frogs, and 10 enclaves on the map. Starting at turn four, reconcile and settle such that you have four enclaves of one suit and 8 peaceful enclaves. This enables you to integrate for 4 pts per turn and draw four per turn to mill through the deck for craftables. Overall, try to get as many enclaves down before the board gets clogged and then aim to outpace your opponents and make it expensive for the table to stop you. A rough breakdown over 7 turns: (1+2+3+4+4+4+4)=22 points from faction scoring, 8 from craftables.

Turn by Turn

Turn 0 / Setup

Pick the river clearing that best matches the suits in your hand; e.g. if you start with 2/3 rabbits in hand, pick the rabbit clearing. This is important because we will discard two cards when provoking turn one, and want to maximize our chances of being able to score 2 instead of one point. If we have a choice in clearing (e.g. hand of 1 bird, 1 rabbit, 1 fox), I prefer to pick one of the top two high-adjacency river clearings. If you have a tea in hand, picking a mouse clearing for your first enclave and crafting tea turn one is also a great start.

Turn 1

Provoke twice in river clearings, spawning two militant enclaves. Provoking requires you to discard a random card. Then settle and place a peaceful enclave in the suit of the remaining card in your hand.

Provoke order matters; the first clearing that is provoked in will have two frogs, while the second clearing will only have one. Provoke first in the river clearing with the highest adjacency; this clearing will have the most flexibility in settling. After discarding two cards, look at the suit of the remaining card. Settle in a clearing matching your remaining card. If you are lucky, you can score two points if the remaining card matches your initial peaceful clearing (your newly settled clearing will be of the same suit, scoring +2 for integrate). If you have a choice in which clearing to settle from, choose your starting clearing with 5 frogs. You will recruit more next turn in the militant clearings.

Why not provoke thrice? This results in no scoring turn 1 and 1 less card draw, making it harder to score turn 2.

End state: 1 (+1) point, 8 frogs on the board, 2 militant and 2 peaceful enclaves, 3 cards spent, 2 cards drawn

Turn 2

Rally, adding a frog in each of the two militant enclaves. Provoke once in the final river clearing, adding a militant enclave. This should result in one militant enclave of 4 warriors, one militant enclave of 3 warriors, and one militant enclave of one warrior. Look at the remaining card in your hand, and aim to settle and place peaceful enclaves in two clearings of the suit of the remaining card. When settling, aim to use your two river militant clearings with 3 & 4 warriors, leaving only one frog to defend the militant clearing and moving 2+ to the new peaceful clearing. It's ok to leave the river militant clearings more sparsely defended; you can always provoke and spawn many more warriors.

End state: 3 (+2) points, 13 frogs, 3 militant and 4 peaceful enclaves, 2 cards spent, 3 cards drawn. the militant clearings should be less defended than the peaceful enclaves.

Turn 3

This is the last setup turn. Rally, adding a frog each in each of the militant enclaves. If no militant enclaves have been removed, settle and place peaceful enclaves three times, prioritizing the suit where integrating will score the most points. You should be able to score at least three points. If your lightly defended militant enclaves have been removed, provoke back up to 3 militant enclaves and add more troops back to the board, and use the remaining daylight actions to settle.

End state: 6 (+3) points, 16+ frogs, 3 militant and 7 peaceful enclaves, draw 3

Turn 4 and onwards:

After turn 3, you should have at least 16 frogs on the board. If not, it will be difficult to settle up to 10 enclaves without enough warriors. For turn 4, reconcile at least one clearing, such that you have at least 8 peaceful enclaves (to enable max 4 card draw) and also four peaceful clearings in the suit of one of your cards. Your priorities are now as follows: 1. Reconcile/Settle so you can integrate for four points at the end of every turn 2. Reconcile so you have 8+ peaceful clearings in order to mill through the deck and find as many craftables as possible. 3. Settle/Reconcile so that you can craft any items you have drawn. Ideally have at least two peaceful enclaves in fox / rabbit and one peaceful enclave in mouse. This distribution of peaceful enclaves allows you to craft anything you draw before you might have to provoke (potentially causing you to discard the craftable) 4. Settle with redundancy; aim to settle so that you have four enclaves in two suits. Should the board team up against you, they need to remove four enclaves instead of two to reduce your scoring from 4 to 2. Drawing four cards (2.) helps with integrate flexibility. It's much easier to recover lost enclaves by resettling(up to 3 per turn) than to try to defend every clearing as frogs. Additionally, allowing enemies to trigger fears come to pass will enable even more card draw for crafting points. 5. Settle in a way that makes you an unappetizing target; For each enemy faction(especially militants), aim to share 2-3 clearings with opponent tokens/buildings. The threat of fears comes to pass (After an enemy removes a Peaceful enclave or battles you at one, flip all Peaceful enclaves with that enemy’s pieces to Militant and place 1 Diaspora warrior at each one you flipped) is the best deterrent against policing. You must keep a few frogs in the supply so that when an opponent triggers fears come to pass, you can recruit in those clearings. This will make enemies think twice about policing as they will be hard pressed to defend multiple clearings from battle. 6. Prioritize defending non-river clearings. You can always place enclaves on rivers with one daylight action, so if there are opportunistic raiders (e.g. Knaves), try to make river clearings the most appealing target.

End state after turn 4: 10 (+4) points, 16 frogs, minimum 8 peaceful enclaves, with the integrate suit having 4 peaceful enclaves.

How To Prioritize Which Clearing To Settle

You want to place as many enclaves as possible per turn in the first 3-4 turns. Never spend more than one daylight action to place an enclave in the early game. This is because once the board gets clogged with warriors, it will be much harder to settle (you need to respect rule when moving into the target clearing, and rule in the target clearing to place a peaceful enclave). Frogs also have a hard time gathering a lot of warriors in once place, as they need to spread ~16-17 warriors amongst 10+ enclaves. Thus, when I have multiple options for what clearing to settle, I think about the following (in no particular order): 1. Will this be one of my two integrate suits with four enclaves per suit? You should think about this at the start of the game; e.g. if the moles have fortified 6 warriors in a corner rabbit clearing, it will be very inefficient to place an enclave there (gathering 7 warriors is expensive, as those warriors could be settling & defending enclaves elsewhere. The other option is move warriors in with settle, provoke to spawn a militant enclave, then flip to peaceful next turn to prevent the enclave from taking a hit from battle, costing warriors and 2 actions). So if a faction like moles or rats have chosen a rabbit clearing to fortify, it is easiest to pick the other fox & mouse suits as your 4 clearing integrate suits. 2. Will I be unable to settle this clearing if I do not do it this turn? This is extremely important; is a lizard eyeing a specific clearing to set up gardens in next turn? Settle there before they play the garden, then coexist peacefully! Will the eyrie move to your starting clearing of 5 frogs, preventing you from leaving? Settle using your homeland, moving most of the frogs out. If you don't do this, you may have trouble getting to four enclaves with the same suit as a card in your hand by the start of turn 4, which will slow your scoring. 3. Can this clearing help me reach more clearings next turn? This is helpful if you need to be flexible in getting suited peaceful clearings. Additionally, if you plan to use the clearing as a staging ground, you should move more frogs in to help obtain rule the next clearing so you can place the enclave. When playing on maps with random clearings, this also applies to your starting clearing and first provoke clearing. You want to be flexible enough to be able to settle at least two of any suit regardless of what cards you get in the first few turns

8 Points from Crafting?

8 points from crafting seems quite high, but it's quite reasonable with the frogs' high card draw and crafting ability.

Suppose we aim to win by end of turn 7. Ignoring our starting hand which we will likely discard and ignoring cards drawn at the end of turn 7, we will have seen 2 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 + 4 = 20 cards. With the frog cards, there are 68 cards in the deck instead of 54. There are 20 craftable cards in the deck, and the average value of a craftable card is 33/20 ≈ 1.5. The expected amount of craftable cards we draw is 20 x 20/68 = 5.88. The expected number of points from crafting by the end of turn 7 is 9.7 points. If we aim to win at the end of turn 8, the expected point value would be 11.6. If we can obtain 1-2 points from cardboard, getting the remaining 6-7 points from crafting is a very reliable strategy.

tip: hold onto a few craftables until the end of the game, so that you can avoid being the table punching bag and burst to victory!

Crafting Priority

Obviously craftables are the most important. I also like extra movement, extra battles and corvid planners, as I find that in the late game it's quite hard to maneuver the thinly spread frogs in order to defend or attack specific clearings.

End

I noticed there aren't very many homeland faction guides, so I thought I'd make one. This is my first time writing a guide, hope it's helpful!

edit: fixed some typos and added a few more words

I got excited and just bought Homeland at my local game store as my first expansion. (Sigh now I just have to wait for my friends to want to play it with me again).

Excitedly, I got home and unpacked everything, reading through all of the new faction info, as I didn't want to spoil any info on new factions until I got them.

I was admittedly a bit confused by the complexity of the Council and the new Vagabond replacement, and found this video: https://youtu.be/avvqQqPX7a4?is=lhecEwfC-N9GxSSz

He talks about the "assembly" function, which I was already confused about, but the way he's describing it and his faction board are totally different. Warrior limits are ignored, and each player can choose to concede, honestly it sounds really cool the way he's described it, but has just confused me even more, as I'm looking through these new booklets and it makes no mention of this action. Instead, assembling just involves the council taking hits if they have warriors in that clearing?

Can someone help me out? I feel like I'm definitely missing something.

Does anyone have a PDF / high quality PNG with the final design for the back and front of the Faithful Retainer cards?

Hello,

I am new to the game, I have the app and the base game. I’ve played 4-5 times online and once over the board. I like the game and would like to scale the collection. Curious on a few things:

1. What are some good strategy resources? The group I’ll play in most drafts factions, so I need to build some notecard’esk resources for each faction while I’m gaining experience to ensure I start well and have a good sense of what the factions wants to do.

2. It appears that the expansions not only add factions, but additional rules and interactions that help balance the game. How quickly should I get into those?

3. As an owner of the game, what after market purchases serve as quality of life upgrades for setup, organization, and general play? Feel free to throw in some nice to haves too!

Thanks, Community!

Blessings,
m^2

Hey guys, me and my household have gotten completely addicted to this game and have played it pretty much every day since learning it 2 weekends ago. (Me and my roomate also went kinda crazy on payday and bought like every expansion lol its just that good). It has been a ton of fun and I have been looking forward to it everyday but I think the one issue I have been having is table talk.

I know that is supposed to be a big part of the game with making informal alliances and what not but I think we are all so competitive (and learning still) that we just get locked into the most optimal moves we can without much discussion or at least if we try it eventually dies down.

How can I help push my table to sort of stop solely focusing on the mechanics and also add this cherry of table talk on top? I think with that it would be my favorite gaming experience ever.

I wanted to give a good review so bad, but I cant login to the account I purchased it on and they wont let you review products on Etsy unless you have purchased it. But I had to because I had such a great experience with the seller.

So I got this delivered while I was out of state, so I didn’t get to actually use it until about 5 days later. I just got back yesterday to try it out. The pieces look great. I just got the white but the seller does offer color options. The material is pretty sturdy. Probably wouldn’t survive extreme damage but a accidental drop probably wont hurt them either. Its a bit daunting figuring out what goes where, but thankfully the faction boxes are labelled and etsy page provides enough context for me to figure it out. I have the main expansions except for Homeland and the Clockworks and all the little packs and the organizers fit in the main and riverfolk box and the hireling box for the hirelings. It fits all that and theres room for Homeland and the deluxe clearing markers. Theres even a little space I put some extra mancala pieces to help me and my friends track actions with. I keep the maps and character boards in another box and my spare box is a bit full of spare baggies and sleeves, but once my Homeland pre-order comes I’ll figure out a way to reorganize.

So I did have a nitpick that I contacted Caxite about. The lizard cult space for their tokens was just a tiny bit too shallow and the top most token would stick out. I mentioned it was a small criticism and Im overall very satisfied, but he responded immediately explaining that it might be the wrong version, asked me to provide some measurements of the pieces and just shipped out a replacement. No idea when it’ll arrive but I guess it’ll be a little over a week like the rest of it.

Overall very happy with this product and the Seller is awesome. A great way to organize your game pieces using the OG boxes.

Will there be anymore plans to making more? I have the first 2 but wanted to see if there were plans on expanding it.

Hey all, I was discussing the concept of buffing cats with a friend recently and we discussed commonly brought up ones such as crafting in evening, 4 actions, free recruit at start of daylight or birdsong, etc.

But I have an idea of my own and I apologize if this has been thought of already but it came to me after playing a few matches as badgers and is inspired by a badgers mechanic. Similar to how badgers get bonus points for recovering treasures along each column, I think cats should get a similar mechanic.

Each column of buildings that gets revealed would give the cats one more action in daylight, and possibly a couple of VP as well. This would also encourage the cats to build more workshops since they usually aren’t built very often in favor of recruiting centers and sawmills. This would still keep the playstyle of scaling in points like cats usually do, but they would scale a little faster and be able to ramp up in actions similar to how every other militant faction can.

I wanted to post this here to see what everyone’s ideas are on this. Good idea? Or horrid? This is something I’d want to try in my next game and a couple of other opinions or adjustments would be appreciated.

For a bit of context i got the base set( cats birds and WA) for Christmas this year and semi regularly play with 2 on occasion 3 friends, and we’ve talked about getting expansion to this game quite a bit on thing is they are pricey

I’ve been leaning toward underground because Corvids seem really funny and great for casual matches, but I’m not entirely sure which set provides the best “value” since I know they each come with more than just the new factions

So I aka you all, what Root expansion would you recommend I get for my friends and I?

Also are there stores where I could find these expansions?

Before i say anything i am super inexperienced so im probably gonna be wrong here. I just thought of this spontaneously five seconds ago

Would it be a good idea to increase their hand size to 6? I think that would maybe help their scoring a good amount. I don’t think it would be that good or bad. Or maybe whenever you reveal a certain number of gardens you get more hand size. Something like that. Thoughts?

Ok, so I have had a few games of Root Homeland now. I am curious what kind of weird Homeland interactions you have discovered and a little bit what kind of policing you do against the new factions and what policing they are able/need to do.

Take Lilypad for example, when would you consider them to be “online” in terms of, they are in a comfortable position to start focusing on points? With 3 settle each turn, it isn’t hard for them have 3+ peaceful enclaves (plus 1-2 spare from the turn before) and that’s when they turn dangerous imo.

A game I were in recently had the Corvid together with Likypad, and all of a sudden Corvid got SUPER dangerous on the backside of Lilypad getting really online. Consider a Lilypad with 6 Enclaves, which I don’t think is terribly hard to achieve, that made the Corvid player able to comfortably recruit 6 warriors with a single Frog suited card, which is a 50% increase from their usual 4, and once their turn was over they could redraw their old frog card from the pond to guarantee the same recruit potential next turn too.

My table usually loves the more underpowered factions in Root, and we usually have an ok time with them because we use the following rule changes. Don’t know if they’re too powerful or not for them though.

General Rule: Ruin rework
- Can remove a ruin as any faction so long as you rule that clearing, and discard a matching card. This can only be done once in birdsong and nets one point. If an item is there, it may be traded for as per usual

Cats:
- Crafting at end of evening, before drawing.
- The ruins rework buffs them anyway

Lizards:
- May pick from the lost souls pile which suit will become outcast next turn. Allows for agency in the lizards.

Crows:
- May only expose in evening, to avoid the failed expose into battle tech for raids.

Vagabond: Shared Infamy
- Vagabond still gets points as per usual, but for every two items damaged by a hostile faction, they get one VP. Might be interesting to adjust it to one VP per item if the Vagabond has targeted a specific player (ie 5/10 pieces removed from one player)

Moles: Incursion
- Other factions can enter the burrow from a tunnel by discarding a card matching the clearing the tunnel is in. May also exit by discarding a card with a matching clearing containing a tunnel. (Was thinking of a brigadier nerf of like compound move and battle, but I think buffs across the board is more fun)

What do you guys think? Are any of these too much?

For those of you who played with all faction expansions, which one do you think is the most fun?

I understand "reach" but what happens to the game if you dont follow it? beginner root player.

I know Despot Infamy is pretty standard for Vagabond at this point but I was curious what the community consensus is on Quest Freshener?

Hey everyone! I wrote a little 10 chapter fan fiction based only within the base game. I hope yall enjoy it as much as I did writing it! There may be some writing mistakes as I did a first pass on editing and not much else. It was for fun after all. On that note, let me know if yall would like a sequel that would include the first expansion!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOD2zPdBLy7q1JNE40vf1nmNkWXzt7_BFmKRN0bmOYM/edit?usp=drivesdk

Hey guys! I moved to the city a year ago and am missing the game. Any new yorkers want to get a weekly root group together? If so, feel free to message me (: