Learn to Play Root in 24 Minutes (with updated rules)

nature an ever-changing tapestry of life all existing together in a delicate ecosystem that should have become unbalanced could endanger each and every species with an expert such an unbalancing has occurred recently the once great Erie a monarchy of proud birds of prey who ruled these forests for countless generations have been deposed the Marquis their cat and their powerful industries have dethroned the Erie and taken hold of these woods seeking to shape it to their purposes but more the birds and the cats fight the smaller denizens of the forest suffer and soon they will decide that the suffering must end while this woodland Alliance cannot hope to match the others in pure strength they are gaining the support of the common folk should the support continue to surge they may be unstoppable and then as this one isn't he cute he mostly rummages through rocks and trades with whoever will deal with him look he's got something in this little backpack it isn't that adorable let's see what is it Oh mine well what are you going to do with that oh god oh god stay away No hey everyone my name is Shay Parker and this is RTFM the show I teach you how to play a game because if playing The Pursuit of Happyness is taught me anything it's the kids getting someone to do the work for you it's actually the best strategy of all and today I'm teaching them how to play root the woodland game of might and right and this is an asymmetrical game of conflict between up to four factions that each have completely different play styles now the gameplay can get a little complex but the goal is nice and simple the first 230 points is the new ruler of the forest what makes this game interesting is how each of these different factions interact with each other you might have to be bold one turn defensive in the next sneak it towards one player and forthright with another you might even have to do all of these things in one turn and every game ends up a little bit different so without any further ado let's learn how to play root okay so you've got your friends you've each chosen a faction now it's time to set things up first deal out three cards to each player then we set up the board we're using the autumn map for our first game the other side of the board is all winter themed but you don't need to worry about it just yet start by setting up the items at the top of the board are grey spaces where you'll place matching item tokens then if you look at the various clearings there are four spaces with an R on them on these spaces you'll place a random ruins item beneath the ruins token lastly after placing your point tracker at 0 each faction has unique setup instructions which we'll go over and detail a bit later once those are done the board will look something like this pick an starting player however you like and take terms in clockwise order now each faction plays differently but there are a few things that are common to everyone each turn you'll play out three phases birdsong daylight and evening birdsong includes most of the faction specific things that happen in the game whereas daylight and evening are usually about taking actions playing cards and then finishing up your turn again I'll go into how each factions turn goes later for now let's talk about the basic actions first up is moving it's simple you just take as many of your warriors as you want from one clearing and move them along a path to an adjacent clearing but there's a catch you need to rule either the clearing you're coming from or the clearing you're moving to rule is a turn by which player has the most collective warriors and buildings in any given clearing and since there's no one else in this base our flock of birds are clearly in control the space we've moved to is now ruled by the birds as well and if the cat wanted to leave on their turn they could do so as long as they're moving into this space that they rule of course you might not want to let them do that and because the woods are a dangerous place sometimes you're gonna be fighting and whenever a battle occurs the attacker rolls the two dice these up numbers ranging from 0 to 3 and will determine how many hits each side will deal whether used to d12 and not a4 or an 8 sided die anyway the attacker takes the higher number so we would deal more than enough here to destroy this one measly cat and they kind of - but since they only have one warrior they're max damage is 1 meaning we each lose a warrior the extra damage we dealt would just be lost but let's say the cats had built up this clearing a bit and since we dealt 3 damage the cats would die and then the defender chooses which pieces to remove anytime he forced another player to remove a token or building score one point so this battle scores the birds too occasionally a card or game effect will allow your units to deal extra hits potentially more than their number of warriors for example if the clearing has no defending Warriors the attacker automatically gains an extra hit regardless of what they roll let's talk about cards next there are a bunch of cards in this game but what they all have in common is that they have one of four suits shown at the top of the card these will be either foxes rabbits mice or birds the first three correspond to the three types of clearings on the board but birds can fly so they're considered wild the suits of these cards are often used to fuel certain factions specific effects but most of them can also be crafted if you see a signpost on the bottom left that means you can craft the card the symbols on that signpost refer to the crafting requirements which will work out differently for each faction the big thing to note is that the crafting requirements and the suit of the card might not match so make sure you actually have what you need before crafting once you've crafted a card you'll get the benefit from it be it a persistent or immediate effect if it's a persistent effect place it near your player board you can grab multiple different persistent cards but you can't have multiples of the same card if it's an immediate ability resolve the effect and discard the card and if that effect is to create an item pull the item from the top of the map and place it on your player board scoring however many points are listed on the card if the supply it doesn't have the matching item you can't craft the card different factions will activate different game pieces for crafting but you can only use each piece once per turn there are two other kinds of cards that don't need to be crafted ambush and dominance the beginning of a battle the defender can reveal an ambush card with a suit matching the battles clearing dealing two hits to the attacker if this destroys all of the attacking Warriors the battle is cancelled however the attacker can also play a matching ambush card in order to cancel the first one so watch out now dominance cards really shake things up if you have at least 10 points you can play a dominance card which removes your score tracker from the board place it on the card itself and now you have a new wind condition which the card will to tail it's impossible to win on the same you play a dominant card though so you'll need to make sure you've got a strong position if you want to try it if you discarded on this card for any reason instead of going into the discard pile move it to the side of the map it's now available for any other player to take should they sort desire to do this during daylight discard a card matching the suit of the dominance card and just draw it into your hand lastly after you've played a few times on the back of the autumn board is the winter board the paths are different and you randomly assign suits to clearance besides that and being all snowy and beautiful it's basically the same and those are pretty much all of these shared gameplay elements of route next we'll go through faction by faction and describe how each of them work if you want to skip to a specific faction there are links in the description as well as any Corrections if I find out later I got something wrong but before we move on I need to mention that the designer has been updating the game a little bit in order to balance the different factions these changes will be implemented in the third reprint and I'll be using those rules going forward which is why you might notice them printed out components here and there also denote the rules change by showing this symbol in the corner and there's a link to the official PG update thread in the description now let's get on to the cat's the Marquis de cat has set her hungry eyes on the forest and seeks to turn it into a great industrial machine she has earned early victories and taken much of the land but in doing so she's also put a target on her forehead let's set up the board and see why because the letter is a you get to make the first choice namely where to place your keep this is the seat of power and he will need to protect it during the game we have to place it in a corner clearing so let's choose this one over here with the 2 Bil'in slots next we place one warrior in every clearing except the opposite corner after that we put down one of each of our buildings choosing the clearance containing and adjacent to our keep lastly we're gonna flip the board and fill our tracks with the remaining buildings let's get into how our turns work the cats are a good choice for beginning players because their actions are pretty recognizable as far as strategy games go drink birdsong each sawmill creates one wood token nice and simple next is daylight and has two steps first we can craft cards from our hand activating workshops in the required clearings let's say we want to make this route tea since we have a workshop and a mouse clearings no problem we play the card grab the token put it on our crafted item section and gain two points good for us next we get to perform three actions or we can do more than that by discarding one bird card per extra action taken there are five options to choose from and you can repeat most actions so let's see what they are battle is simple start a fight in the clearing with your warriors and somebody else March allows you to take to move actions in a row so you can use this to move the same units twice or to different stacks once or even pick up some cats on the way however you want to do it but you have to finish both moves before you do your next action recruit lets you place one warrior at each recruiter so building up recruiters can help you get big armies really quickly you can overwork which requires you to spend a card to place one wood and a matching clearing with a sawmill and lastly you can build building is the main way you get points as the cats remember the wood we got from our sama this is what it's good for let's say we want to breed a lot of new kittens so we decide to build a recruiter using this table on our player board we see that we need to spend one wood to do so whenever you build something gain the points listed beneath the building tile you remove we also need to make sure our wood can get where it needs to go every time you build you need to trace an unbroken line of ruled clearings from the wood to the build site at the beginning of the game this is easy because we control almost everything but later on it'll get a little more difficult in this scenario because all our wood is trapped here we can't spend it to build anywhere else after daylight is done we move on to evening and draw one card plus one for each card symbol showing on our player board then after we've drawn if you have more than five cards discard down to 5 and pass the turn to the next player last thing to talk about are the cat's special rules first is our keep as long as it's on the board other players can't place any game pieces in that clearing by pieces I mean everything Warriors buildings tokens you name it but they can move things into the space of course if it gets destroyed all bets are off because you can't rebuild it second is your field hospitals ability which states that whenever any of your warriors are removed you can spend a card matching the clearing that they were in to move all of them to the clearing with a keep instead of your supply and that's the can score points for buildings recruit a ton of warriors and be as territorial as well as cats next up is the birds the Erie dynasty once ruled the forest but times change and now that marquis has taken control not content to let that stand the king seeks to drive them back but their numbers are great and your people are set in their ways in order to rule again you'll need to build an engine of conquest and protect it at all costs we'll start with our last remaining outpost and go from there because we had to let her be we set up after the cast but before anyone else take the corner opposite from the keep and place one roost and six warriors there then she's one of these four birds to be your leader each will have a special ability and they determine which position sort of oil béziers will take slot them into the indicated spaces on the decree now this decree is everything to the birds each turn it will determine which actions you must take so let's see how it works first let's look at bird song at the beginning of your turn draw a card if you have none in your hand then add one or two cards to the decree in any space the suits determine which clearance these actions can take place in because birds are wild they count as any space but if you're adding two cards to the decree only one can be a bird then if you have no roosters on the board that sucks dude I'm sorry you know what go ahead and place a roost and three warriors on clearing with the fewest warriors of any faction on me next is daylight and this is where the decree takes place but first we get to craft using our roost since you start out with one right now we can only craft one card with a matching symbol next are to creat aches flight each turn we have to perform each action once for each card in that slot of the decree in our case we'll need to recruit somewhere and because our leader is so charismatic we place two warriors instead of one then we need to move from a bunny clearing also easy that's where we started out next we do battle in any clearing and we don't need to win here as long as we fight that satisfies the decree and lastly we need to build unlike the cat's you don't spend any resources to build you just place a roost on a clearing you control that matches card on the decree and doesn't already contain a roost easy right well at the beginning of the game yes but it gets a lot harder when your decree starts looking like this within each column you can use your cards in any order but if you are ever unable to perform an action in the decree you go into turmoil which is bad and has four steps first your king is humiliated and you lose one point for each bird card in the decree that includes those Beziers so it will always be at least two then you purge the decree discarding every card except the va's ears next your leader is deposed flip them over choose another leader and reassign the va's ears to their new posting and lastly you must rest immediately ending your daylight phase and moving to evening now that sounds horrible and it's not good but it's important to note that turmoil doesn't affect your roosts which is good because roost are the main way you score points in the evening take a look at your roosters track whatever number is below the rightmost empty space is how many points you earn so if you can get a lot of roosters on the board you'll be scoring three four maybe even five points per turn after you score draw one card plus one for each card symbol shown under board and then discard down to five lastly let's talk about the birds special rules as Lords of the forest you rule in any clearing where you are tied in presence normally this would lead to there being no ruler but not for the Eyrie however you also have a disdain for trade which means that when you craft items no matter how many points it says you are you'll only get one and that's the Eyrie dynasties for you program your way to victory or go out in a blaze of feathery glory I think they might be my favorite faction but I need a few more plays to make sure and for bonus points here's a picture of the bird I grew up with he was a monster and is still alive because parrots live forever next up is the woodland alliance [Applause] well the birds in the cats fight the smaller creatures of the forest cry out tired of being kept down by their oppressors an alliance has formed and must build support for the cause before it's ready to unleash its fury as the Alliance you'll set up after the birds and the cats but there isn't much to do it first simply draw three cards and place them face down on the supporter space you look at these cards but keep them secret to other players for now these fuel a lot of your actions and at the beginning of the game you can only have up to five once you have a base then there's no limit but I'll get to bases in a bit starting with birdsong there are two different actions you can take you can do either of these actions as many times as you want and they both require spending your supporters first is revolt but I'll come back to that in a minute because I want to talk about spreading sympathy let's say you want to make this clearing sympathetic to the cause in order to do that you'll have to spend supporters matching the suit of the clearing to place a sympathy token how many supporters you need to spend is listed above the token and if there's a number beneath the token you'll earn that many points for placing it the first sympathy token can go anywhere but after that each token you place with this action must be placed adjacent to a sympathetic clearing and two things to keep in mind real quick each clearing can only have one sympathy and if there are three or more warriors of another faction in a clearing you have to spend an extra supporter to place sympathy there okay once you've got sympathy on the board that's where the real game begins now you'll be able to stage a revolt to do this you'll spend two supporters matching me sympathetic clearing and an unbuilt base then remove all enemy pieces there except the vagabond who can't be removed after that you place one of your three bases down again matching the suit of the clearing and placing as many warriors as you have sympathy in matching clearance in this case we have two sympathy and mouse clearings so we would place two warriors and lastly place one warrior in the officers box on your board we'll get to them in a bit just remember that you revolt before you spread sympathy so it's very powerful but it can be difficult to pull off at times and once you place a base you need to protect it because if one ever gets removed then you have to discard all matching supporters including birds and you lose half of your officers if this is the last base you had you'll also have to discard supporters down to a maximum five so be careful next is daylight where we have three actions that we can take as many times as we like in any order we can craft using our sympathy so our two mouse sympathy tokens would let us craft this scouting party then there's mobilized which allows you to add a card from your hand to your supporters and lastly we have trained spend the card from your hand matching the suit of a bass on the board to place a warrior in the officers box daylight is pretty simple but the decisions made here can affect just about everything else you do we're going to evening this is where you perform the actions that most of the other factions do during the daylight which makes sense for an undercover organization when you think about it first our military operations you can move battle recruit placing a warrior at one of your bases or you can organize removing a warrior from a clearing and placing a sympathy token there you can do these in any order but the trick is that you can only take as many actions as you have officers meaning you have to balance how many officers you have against how many warriors you want on the board and since you only have ten of these little green slices of bread you'll be playing with some pretty thin margins after you take your actions draw one card plus one for each card symbol showing then discard down to five and lastly let's look at your special rules first is outrage which states that any time anyone enters a sympathetic leering or remove sympathy they have to give you a card matching that clearing if they don't have any matching cards they have to show you their hand and then you get to draw a card from the deck either way the car to get goes near supporters the other rule is guerrilla war because you always get the drop on your enemies even when you're defending you take the higher role on the battle test so that's the Alliance strike from the shadows build a spy network and be constantly frustrated at how few mice you have and how many cats and birds are always on the board but end up winning most of your fights anyway last up is the vagabond [Music] the hero the wanderer this little weirdo well the rest of the forest wages war the vagabond remains apart from it all making allies and enemies as they see fit free to aid other players or stab them in the back at a whim as you might have guessed the vagabond plays pretty differently from the rest of the bunch so let's get started your setup letter being e you'll begin after each of the other factions start by choosing a character there are three in the base game so let's go with this little cutie each one has a special ability I'll talk about it later then place your pawn in any forest on the board yeah you can move through forests no big deal next you're going to take this quest deck shuffle it and draw three cards placing them face up near the map we've already put out the ruins so lastly we just need to set up our player board place your character card and grab your starting items listed here the word will tell you where each type of item goes and finally grab relationship tokens matching each other players faction and place them on the indifferent section of your board now I want to talk about the Vagabond special rules first because they'll be important to know going in first off your nimble meaning you can always move regardless of who rules the clearings you go in and out of which is good because you're also a lone wanderer not a warrior you can't rule clearings or stop others from ruling but also your piece can't be removed from the map no matter what happens even though your stuff can get damaged you can't be killed so no worries there and those items you got they're gonna be fueling just about everything you do and when you use an item it's gonna get flipped over so in bird song you start by refreshing three of your items plus two more per tea that you have of course if that tea is exhausted or damaged it won't count but anyway refresh your items and then you get to slip which means you get a free move into an adjacent clearing or forest just slip away now the river doesn't separate forests on the autumn board but on the winter board it does so keep that in mind during daylight you'll get to use all of your items to do actions you can move across paths using your boots and that's the only action that doesn't really require any further explanation so alright let's get into it fighting is a little different with a vagabond when you battle your max number of hits is equal to how many undead swords you have in your satchel so if you've got three you can do up to three damage depending on your dice rolls if you take hits you'll have to choose items to take damage these can't be used until they're repaired so choose wisely and if you have no undamaged swords you're considered defenseless meaning enemies will get +1 two attacks against you it's also important to note that if you have multiple of the same item you can take those actions from multiple times so if you gather a lot of swords this cute little beaver can become an unstoppable killing machine something to keep in mind the crossbow will also help your murder quest because when you use it you can remove a piece in your clearing from the board you have to hit warriors first but if they aren't there you can use it to destroy buildings your tokens too next we have explore exhaust the torch to take an item from a ruin in your clearing put it on your board remove the ruin from the map leaving the space open for other factions to build there and score point you can also use the torch for your characters special ability in our case rooting through the garbage and taking a card matching our clearing how charming you can use your hammers to repair broken items giving them on whatever side they were when they were damaged or to craft cards when crafting each hammer used matches the clearing your in and satisfies the one requirement so in order to get this scouting party you'll need to be in a Maus clearing and have to unexhausted hammers of course crafting and exploring aren't the only way to get items when the other players craft them you can buy those items off of them for cards if you're in a space with any of their pieces exhaust any item to give them a card matching your clearing then take any item of theirs you like the first time you do this you'll also get in their good graces so move yourself up one space on the relationship board and earn a point if you want to go higher on this board though it's going to cost a little extra for each advancement you'll need to aid them that many times in one turn so to move up again will cost another two cards also if you're just doing it for the points the player doesn't need to have any items for you to aid them that's just a bonus if you make it to a third level you become allies and then a few things change from now on each time you aid them you'll gain two points you can also lead their forces meaning whenever you move you can take their forces with you of course they aren't nimble like you are so they'll still have to follow regular movement rules and when you initiate a battle you add their forces to your max hits you can make them take any amount of hits that come your way but if they take more hits than you do well then you'll lose your allied status and become hostile which also happens with any faction if you remove any of their pieces you can still eight a hostile faction if you want but your relationship won't improve and this has an upside and a downside the upside is that every time you remove one of their pieces in battle during your turn score a point the downside is that takes an expert boot to move into a clearing that has any hostile warriors and the last action to talk about is questing this is where those quest cards come into play if you're a clearing matching the quest card you can exhaust the magic items to complete the quest then choose to either draw two cards or score a point for each quest of that suit you've completed including the one you just finished there are five quests of each suit so you can earn a lot of points that way once you've completed the quest draw a new one and place it with the others and once you performed as many actions as you want or can to move on to evening if you're in a forest you get an evenings rest and repair all items but remember if you can only go into a forest by slipping so that basically means you've spent your whole turn there licking your wounds after that you draw one card plus one for each stack of coins you have then discard down five and if you've got too many items you'll have to discard down to six but if you have bags then your satchel size increases by two so if you get three bags you can have up to twelve items in there one more thing it's not written on the player board but you interact with dominance cards a little differently because you don't control locations it would be impossible to ever complete them so if you want to claim dominance you'll have to form a coalition with another faction in a game of four or more players you can activate a dominance card then choose the player with the fewest points besides you and put your score tracker on their player board and if that player was hostile they now become indifferent now if that player wins the game the vagabond shares in the victory as well dominance cards it's difficult to pull off but satisfying if you do and that's the vagabond blaze your own Trail look under rocks hoard your way to victory and that's also all of route well the base game anyway if you're a patreon backer you have access right now to the videos I've made factions of the river folk expansion and the exclusive strategy video links to those are on the patreon page and if you want access right now head on over pledge a few bucks and check it out if not I mean I need to e but it's cool those videos will both go public a month from today so make sure to subscribe for that and for the extra videos I'll be releasing in the coming weeks as well got so much to do now if you think I've got anything wrong please let me know in the comments I'll keep an updated Corrections list in the description and the next game I'm teaching is gonna be terraforming Mars this game was voted on by my army of rules lawyers and if you want to suggest games and vote on what I teach next consider back on my patreon and join the legal team I also want to extend a big thanks to the brothers Murph for their help on the intro we also filmed an adventures in board-gaming which you can check out on their Channel you

Channel: RTFM

Views: 221,994

Rating: 4.8739696 out of 5

Keywords: board, game, rules, explanation, learn, to, play, Shea, Parker, RTFM, gaming, rtfm, rftmshow, show, tabletop, gamer, boardgame, games, tutorial, boardgames, how to play, root, leder, ledergames, woodland, forest, animal, critter, cats, cat, bird, birds, mouse, mice, vagabond, raccoon, marquise de cat, marquis de cat, eyrie dynasties, eyrie, eyrie dynasty, woodland alliance, alliance, marquise

Id: tpxV-uNZef4

Length: 27min 8sec (1628 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019