Root - How To Play - Learn Your Factions

if you want to finally understand the specifics of how to play each of the four factions that comes in the base game of root you've come to the right place if you're just interested in learning one of the four factions you can jump to the faction of your choice by selecting the chapter in the timeline by the way the first video in the series covered all the things the factions do the same and if you missed that or need a refresher of that the link can be found in the description so let's get on with the factions [Music] [Music] [Music] so i could pronounce this faction name marquis d cat but so you don't get too annoyed by my horrible french accent i'm just going to call them marcus decat so if you play this faction you'll create a supply chain of sawmills which create wood which will help you create more buildings that let you craft items on the cards and help you add more warriors which you can then use to defend your buildings or use them to go to battle in other clearings and earn victory points to set up marcus the cat place the keep token in any corner clearing and we'll use this corner clearing right here then place a warrior token in each clearing on the map but leave this one open diagonally opposite of the keep token so you should now have 11 warriors on the map place a sawmill a workshop and a recruiter token in either the clearing with the keep token or in an adjacent clearing you decide which clearings from the ones listed these get placed in then place your remaining sawmills workshops and recruiters on the matching building track leaving the leftmost spaces open and then place your wood tokens and warriors close by the marcus decat faction has a couple of abilities the capability as shown at the top of your player board adds some protection to the space with your keep since no other players may place their pieces in this clearing they can however move pieces into the clearing the field hospital's ability lets you save warriors removed in battle by spending a card that matches the clearing where they were removed you can then take those warriors and place them in a clearing with the keep token so during birdsong for marcus to cat you can place one wood token next to each sawmill for the daylight phase you can craft cards from your hand by using workshops in matching clearings to pay the crafting cost you can craft as many cards as you can pay the crafting cost from if you want to the second part of the daylight phase lets you take three actions from this list in any order and quantity up to three so for example on marcus decat's turn you could take two battle actions and then a build action or you could just simply take three battle actions also for each bird type card you can take one additional action from this list so if we look at this list of actions we've already covered the battle action and then the march action right here just simply lets you take two move actions which we've already covered the move action now for new actions the recruit action lets you take a warrior from your supply and place one at each recruiter building the build action lets you add the leftmost building from any of the building tracks and to do this you would pay the cost in wood as shown above each column and then after you purchase the building you add this to any empty slot in a clearing you rule so the wood you use to pay for the building has to either come from a clearing where you're building like right here i have an empty slot and i could use this wood to pay for that building or from a path to the clearing where you're building that is under your rule so think of this as a supply chain of wood where you can ship through the clearings you rule but not through the clearings you don't rule so if i wanted to build in this clearing there's a path from either this clearing or this clearing so i could use wood from either one of these clearings to build here this is all under my rule so if we look at this clearing i can't build in this empty slot because i don't have a clear path that i rule to get the wood over there now when you add a building you score the victory points as revealed under the building token the last action on this list is overwork and this lets you spend a card to place one wood at a sawmill matching a clearing and it can be a good way to produce a little bit more wood for a turn [Applause] so after you're done taking your three actions from this list move on to the evening phase this is where you just simply draw a card and then you can draw an additional card for any card icon that shows for instance if i built this recruiter i would have another card icon here so i could draw two cards and then you just discard down to five cards at the end of your turn dynasties adds cards to this area at the top of the player board called the decree this is an engine that will quickly let erie take actions matching the type of cards in each slot to do things like recruit more warriors move them around the map battle with them and then build roosts which gains victory points for them beware however that erie will fall into turmoil if they can't complete the actions in the decree we'll look at all of this more in depth in a moment place one roost and six warriors in a corner clearing diagonally opposite of the clearing with the marcus the cat's keep so if the marcus de cat faction is not playing you can place those pieces in any corner clearing find your four leader cards and we're going to place one of these leaders in the leader card slot now you can choose any leader that you would like however the despot is recommended for your first game so that's the one we're going to use here then take the rest of your leaders and place them next to your player board next find your two loyal vizier cards and we're going to place these loyal viziers in the slots at the top this is called the decree up here which match the slots as listed on your leader move and build in this case on the desk bit so i place one in the move slot here so it's visible and all we need to see is the top of that card and then i place one in the build slot so it's visible as well lastly place the remaining roosts on your roost track leaving the leftmost space open eerie dynasties has a couple interesting abilities the lords of the forest ability lets erie rule a clearing where they're tied for the most combined warriors and buildings there also this ability does not apply for eerie dynasties when there's an empty clearing the disdain for trade ability is a bit of a negative ability for eerie dynasties whenever eerie dynasties crafts an item they ignore the listed victory points on the card and only score one victory point now let's move on to their phases birdsong has three steps which take place in order the first is emergency orders so if you have no cards in your hand draw one card the next is really the main part of the birdsong phase for the erie dynasties faction and this is where you must add either one or two cards from your hand to the decree at the top of your player board and only one of those cards can be a bird type card you can add cards to any column and there's no limit to how many cards a slot can hold this is where you have to be careful though because in the daylight phase you will be resolving the decree that means for each card in the decree you have to perform the action as marked on the slot in a clearing matching the card type as soon as you can't take an action from a card you fall into turmoil and this is where bad things happen we'll cover turmoil and resolving the decree in a moment but let's finish bird song so on my turn i could add a bird type card to the battle column and then i could add a rabbit type card from my hand to the recruit column again place your cards carefully because you have to be able to carry these out next in your daylight phase the third step of birdsong is if you have no roosts on the map you place a roost and three warriors in the clearing with the fewest warriors so moving on to daylight the first part of this phase is crafting and the eerie crafting pieces are their roosts the next part of this phase is resolving the decree you resolve each column at the top of your player board from left to right you have to perform the action in a clearing matching the type of card that's in each column and you have to perform the action for every card in the column now i only have one card in each column because we're simulating the first turn of the game however if i had multiple cards here i would have to take the recruit action for each card in this column however i could resolve the cards in any order i wish so in this case i'm going to take the recruit action in a rabbit clearing so i had one warrior in a matching clearing with a roost moving left to right my next column is the move action so i'll take one move action and since this is a bird type card i can take that in any clearing the only clearing i have out here is the one in this corner so i'm going to move warriors into this adjacent clearing we'll take three and put them there and i think three should do the trick again moving from left to right my next column is the battle action and again this is a bird type card so i can take that in any clearing so i battle in this clearing and marcus decade who i knocked over gets zero i have a one and three warriors so i can remove one warrior and marcus decat doesn't remove any of mine and then my last action in the decree is build and this lets me build in a matching clearing you rule without a roost so i take a roost from my player board place a roost on one of these empty slots in this clearing that i now rule now what would happen if i couldn't completely take an action from one of the cards in the decree so what if on that same turn marcus decat had a little bit more power there and i only still moved three warriors into the spot and it was a complete miss so now i don't rule this clearing if this was the case i couldn't take the build action and i would fall into turmoil and i would follow all the steps of turmoil as listed on my player board like i said earlier turmoil is not the greatest for you so step one of turmoil is where you lose one victory point for each bird type card in your decree so i have three here so i would lose three victory points and yes this does include your loyal vizier cards as well step two is where you discard all cards in your decree and just keep your viziers for step three of turmoil you're going to flip your leader card face down and then select a new one from your remaining leader cards and in this case we'll choose the commander and then you'll place your loyal viziers in the move column and the battle column now if i had no more leaders to choose from here i would flip all of my leaders face up again and choose a new one similar to how we did during setup after you resolve the decree then you move on to your evening phase and for this you score one victory point for the rightmost empty space on your roost track so in this case one victory point after you score your victory points then you draw one card plus one card for any card icon that shows on your player board so i draw one card and later on in the game when i place more roosts on the map then i uncover sometimes a card icon which would let me draw an additional card and finally if i had over five cards i would discard down to five cards and my turn is over when you play the woodland alliance you use a special deck of supporter cards which lets you place sympathy tokens in clearings on the map and they in turn let you gain victory points for each token placed sympathy tokens help you gain more supporters and they can essentially blow up and wipe out all enemy pieces in a clearing making way for you to place one of your bases and once you have a base then you can build one of the strongest military machines on the map to set up woodland alliance the first thing we're going to do is find the three bases that look like these and place them in the matching spaces on your player board place your 10 sympathy tokens on the sympathy track draw three cards and place these face down on your supporter stack these cards are different than the cards you'd hold in your hand for abilities the woodland alliance has a good one called outrage when a player removes sympathy or moves any warriors into a sympathetic clearing that player must add a matching card from their hand to your supporters if they cannot they show you their hand and you draw a card and add it to your supporters the other ability makes the woodland alliance tough in battle and that's called guerrilla war this ability lets woodland alliance take the higher die as a defender in battle so if you're not playing the woodland alliance remember this before going into battle so you don't go in and say oops i forgot that you get the advantage in battle so let's move on to phases for woodland alliance so we look at the bird song phase and the first action for bird song is the revolt action the revolt action is pretty powerful as it's a bit like turning one of your sympathy tokens into a bomb and then moving in with your military after you wipe out a clearing you can take this step as many times as you can on your turn to take this action first you need a sympathetic clearing and that means a clearing with the sympathy token in it and then you need the base which matches this clearing so in this case the fox base has to be on your player board which it is if this is true then you pay two cards matching the clearing from your supporter stack and then you remove all of the enemy pieces in the clearing next you place the matching base in the clearing and then in comes the military you place one warrior for each sympathetic clearing you have matching this clearing including this one so for each sympathetic fox clearing i have i get to place one warrior so in this case two the last thing you do is place an officer which is one of your warriors from the supply in the officer box the second step of birdsong is to spread sympathy you can spread sympathy as many times as you can afford to on your turn and this action lets you place a sympathy token on a clearing adjacent to another sympathetic clearing now if there's no other sympathetic clearings on the map you can just place this in any clearing so you spend supporters matching the clearing and you'll need to spend as many as are listed above the sympathy token that you're placing so in this case these first three take one supporter the next three take two supporters and the following four take three supporters so for this example i can place a sympathy token in any adjacent clearing to this one as long as i can pay with the required amount of supporters in this case one so in this case i'm going to place a supporter here so i'll need to pay one mouse type supporter [Music] and when you take your sympathy token i'll collect the victory points as revealed under the token so one last thing to be aware of when you spread sympathy is if you look down here at the marshall law rule it says you must spend another matching supporter if the target clearing has at least three warriors of another player so if i wanted to spread sympathy into this clearing i would need to add another supporter of the fox clearing because this has three warriors from the same player you can craft mobilize or train as much as you want and in any order the only thing different about crafting for the alliance is that you activate sympathy tokens as you're crafting pieces so we know what crafting is so let's move on to mobilize you add a card from your hand to your supporter stack so when you add a card you can look at your cards and say hmm i think i'm going to add this one to my supporters stack and again you could do that as many times as you want to on your turn so you could essentially take your hand and put your whole hand into your supporter stack the next action is the train action and to train you spend a card with a suit matching one of your built bases and then you can turn one of your warriors from the supply into an officer by placing it in the officer box so for example on my turn i take the train action and i spend a card from my hand not my supporter stack which matches the clearing and so this is a bird type card so it matches the clearing and the clearing has to have one of my bases in it in this case the fox base so i spend that card and then i get to add one of my warriors from the supply into my officer box and we'll see what those officers do in just a minute in the evening phase so moving on to the evening phase we're going to look at military operations and now is where you're going to want to see why you want officers because without officers you can't do any of this so you can take one military operation up to the number of officers in your box so in this case i can take one the more officers i have there the more of these actions i can take on my turn your actions consist of move and battle which we've already covered then you have recruit and this is where you can place a warrior in a clearing where you already have a base and then you have the organize action this action lets you remove one warrior from an unsympathetic clearing again a clearing where you don't have a sympathy token and then lets you place a sympathy token in that clearing and of course you get to take the victory points as revealed under that sympathy token and then the second part of the evening phase is the draw and discard and this works the same as it did for the other factions we've already seen so there's a couple more things to be aware of when you play the woodland alliance before you have any bases built like we see all three of our bases are still in the player board here i can't have any more than five cards in my supporter stack if i have any more than five cards like right now they're six i must discard one after you build a base you can have as many supporters as you want also if one of your bases is removed like we see in this battle eerie dynasties removes my base and one warrior then all of your supporters matching the base are discarded as well as any bird type supporters so then i'm going to remove any fox type or bird type from my supporters and so if i look at my supporters i have a fox type and bird type these get discarded and these go back in my supporter stack then you also remove half of your officers rounded up so half of one rounded up is one blah although the vega bond is considered a faction he's a bit different as he's considered a lone wanderer and has no warriors buildings or tokens to place on the map this means that you won't be able to rule a clearing but never fear with your nimble ability you can take the move action and move regardless of who rules the clearing you are moving to or from also as a quick side note since you have no pieces that can be removed in battle if there is an effect that says it removes all pieces from the clearing like the woodland alliance's revolt action then you just damage three of your items instead i'll talk more on items next so the vegabond is an item master in this game and he uses items to take actions so to take an action you exhaust the item or items as shown next to the action by flipping them from their white side to their great outside most of these items will be in your satchel but items on your tracks can also be exhausted since you have no warriors to lose in battle when you take hits you will damage items by moving them from either the tracks they're on or from the satchel and place them in this damaged items area these items won't be able to be used again until they're repaired to set up the vega bond the first thing you're going to do is select one of these character cards to place in your character card slot now each of these character cards has a special action that you'll be able to take with your torch icon and we'll get to that in just a minute in this case i'm going to take the tanker and then put the other two back in the box so place a vagabond pawn in any forest clearing so a couple things unique about the vagabond is this is called a pawn not a warrior and a pawn can't be removed in battle like a warrior can and then the vagabond can go in any forest clearing unlike the other characters so i'm going to place this pawn right here in this forest clearing between erie dynasties and marcus decat shuffle the quest deck and then draw three of these and place these face up next to the map so i'll place these right here since my map is right over here find the four items marked with the letter r and the letter r stands for ruins so then you take one of the ruins markers and put it on top of each one of these and this is where you're going to look away and have another player randomize these or mix them up a little bit and then you look back have the other players turn their head and you place each one of these on the r slots in each clearing and there's four of these place your starting items as shown on the bottom of your character card in the correct space is on your player board all of these starting items will be marked with the letter s and get placed white side up in your satchel unless you start with the tea kettle gold coins or the satchel item in those cases all of those items get placed on the appropriate track so in this case i have a boot a torch a satchel and the hammer and then the satchel item gets placed on the appropriate track then put the rest of the items with the letter s on them back in the box place the three faction icons in the indifferent space on your player board and you're all set so let's talk about aiding players with cards and how that works with relationships so when you start the game you'll have an indifferent relationship with each other player as you take the aid action and aid other players with cards you move their status marker to the next space to the right of the relationship track the way this works is you have to add a player the number as printed in the black box here to move their marker one space to the right so if a player's marker is in the indifference space i can take the eight action one time that turn and move their marker to the right and collect one victory point if on the next turn i take two eight actions in the same turn with the same player i can move their aid marker to another space to the right and collect the two victory points if i'm able to aid them three times in one turn then i become allied with that player and collect two victory points when you're allied with another player you score two victory points each time you take an 8 action with that player but being allied also has some other benefits for the vagabond by being allied with another player you can move some or all of their warriors with you from one clearing to another and when you initiate battle you can use a player's allied warriors in the same clearing with you in battle and we'll look at that a little bit closer in a moment so that's how you become allied with another player and some of the advantages you get by being allied now conversely you become hostile to another player when you remove another player's warriors in battle now the advantage when you're hostile to another player and you can see it on the board here is that you score one victory point when you remove one of their warriors in battle so let's look at the phases if we go to bird song the first step in bird song is i get to refresh three items and when you refresh items you simply flip them from the gray side to the white side now if i had more items i couldn't refresh those unless i had tea items up here and for each one of these tea items i could refresh an additional two items that i have so for the second part of birdsong you can slip this is where you can move to an adjacent forest or clearing at no additional cost and by taking this little slip action it overrides any effect that it would keep you trapped in a clearing for those of you playing the expansions and yes like i said before the vagabond can go into forests and this could be useful later in your turn as you'll see so to take an action in the daylight phase you must first exhaust an item by flipping it from its light side to its great outside so in this case i just exhausted the boot item which would let me take a move action now you can take as many actions as you want and in any order and number as long as you have items remaining that haven't already been exhausted now if you exhaust a tea kettle gold coins or the satchel like i'm going to just do right here that item gets added to your satchel once you refresh this item then you can move it back into the appropriate track so if i wanted to take the move action i would exhaust the boot like i did earlier and then i'd take the move action like we've already seen now another disadvantage if i was hostile to another player is that if i use the move action and i move into a clearing that is ruled by a hostile player i have to exhaust two boots which i wouldn't have here not yet anyway and just as a quick reminder if i take the move action with a nimble ability i can move from a clearing i don't rule into another clearing i don't rule and the move action will not allow me to move in a forest i couldn't do that only slip lets you move into a forest so to take the battle action first exhaust one of your swords then battling as a vagabond is similar to how any other faction would battle except you substitute your undamaged swords for warriors so for this example i roll the dice and marcus de cat gets a one i get a two but because i only have one undamaged sword i can only remove one piece and that would be a warrior now if marcus decat is already hostile to me i score one victory point by removing his warrior however this is the first time i removed one of marcus to cat's warriors then i would change the relationship marker over to hostile on future turns if i remove a marcus to cat warrior i would score one victory point in this example since marcus the cat would also get one hit on the vagabond instead of removing my pawn from the board i would get to decide which item i would damage and let's say in this case i would damage the boot when you move an item from the satchel to the damaged area it stays on the same side same with when you repair the item it'll stay on the same side when it moves back to the satchel now if my sword is also damaged then when a player attacks me i would be considered defenseless and the attacking player could take an extra hit so in this case there's two threes rolled and marcus decat would take normally the lesser of the two so two hits here for the two warriors but gets to add an additional hit since i'm defenseless so i would have to damage three items two here and then one over here for another example of the battle action let's say i have one undamaged sword however in this battle i'm allied with woodland alliance when i'm allied with another player i get to add their warriors to my sword so if i roll a two in this case i would get to inflict two hits if i had rolled a three i would get to inflict three hits one for my sword and one for each of these warriors now be careful when you battle with an allied player's warriors if you remove more of their warriors then you damage your own items you become hostile with that allied player so you take the explore action when you're in the same clearing as a ruin to explore the ruin you exhaust a torch as shown here and then you take the item in this case it's a satchel and either add that to your satchel or the corresponding track and in this case the satchel goes on this track down here so if that was the last item under the ruin marker then the rune marker gets removed from the game and the slot becomes available for building anytime the vagabond explores an item he also gets one victory point so next we move on to the aid action and if you remember the aid action can help improve the relationship status between you and another player and the aid action can also help you acquire more items for your satchel to take the aid action you just exhaust any item so i could exhaust one of my satchels here and then you can aid another player who is in the same clearing as you what you do is give them a card matching the clearing in this case the rabbit type and then i can take one of that player's crafted items and in this case i'm going to take another boot and add that to my satchel for the quest action you first choose one of your quests which matches the clearing you're in and then exhausts the two items shown at the bottom of the card so in this case i'm in a rabbit clearing i select the rabbit type quest and then this quest requires me to exhaust a torch and a sword so after i exhaust my two items then i claim my reward either draw two cards or get a victory point per rabbit quest card that i've completed and this is the only rabbit quest card i've completed so i'd only get one victory point here but that's what i'm going to take so i place the claim quest on the other side of my player board and then i draw a new quest from the top of my quest deck for the strike action exhaust a crossbow and strike allows you to remove another player's piece in your clearing this would be a warrior unless that player has no warriors then you get to remove a building or token from that player now this is similar to the battle action except the other player can't defend also after the strike check your relationship status with that player if hostile you score one victory point per warrior removed if non-hostile then change the other player's status to hostile on your player board if you removed a warrior in this case i did to take the repair action exhaust a hammer to move an item from your damaged area back to the main area of your satchel keeping the item on its current side so i exhaust a hammer and i can move an item from damaged back to my satchel if the item repaired is a tea kettle gold coins or satchel move these back to the matching track on your player board if they're flipped up on the white side when you take the craft action you would exhaust a hammer and the craft action would work pretty much the same for the vagabond except for the crafting pieces for the vagabond we would use hammers and the hammer type would match your current clearing so in this case it would be the mouse type so i would have one mouse type crafting piece with a single hammer and then i'd be able to craft something like this card which requires one mouse type crafting piece for your evening phase as the vagabond if you start this phase in a forest you get to take an evening's rest this lets you repair all of your items so unless you have a special way to enter a forest you would have to slip into a forest during birdsong and then skip your daylight phase to use this as a reminder when repairing items you move them from the damaged item box back to the satchel or tracks and you keep the same side up the second step to evening phase is where you draw one card and an additional card for each gold coin item you have on the track in this case i don't have any yet so i would just draw one card next and just like we've seen with the other factions you would discard down to five cards if you have over five cards in your hand so the last step of the evening phase is i would remove items in my satchel down to six plus i get to keep two additional ones per bag i have over here so in this case i just have four items in my satchel so i don't have to discard any yet so one more note for the vagabond in games with four or more players you can activate a dominance card and this will let you form a coalition with another player with the fewest victory points other than you and then you place your score marker on the player's board so if this was the case i could form a coalition with eerie dynasties since they have the fewest points out of all the remaining players i take my score marker and place it on erie dynasty's player board now if two players were in a tie for the lowest points other than you you would get to choose which of these players you wanted to form a coalition with and again put your victory point marker on their player board when you do this you can no longer earn victory points and you can't form a coalition with another player who's already taken a dominance card so if the player you're in a coalition with wins the game you also win the game alright for final scoring players continue to take turns until either one of the players reaches 30 victory points or a player fulfills the requirements on a dominance card if they took one if you like root you might enjoy another game designed by cole worley called pax premier check the link available here to check out this game also please consider supporting this channel over on patreon if you find this content helpful your contributions will go to new gear new games and justification to my wife to let me continue to do this talk to you in the next video

Channel: Modern Cardboard

Views: 28,874

Rating: 4.9571209 out of 5

Keywords: Root, How-to-play, Watch-it-played, instructional, tutorial, Learn to play, Learn-to-play, Cole Wehrle

Id: A4lf0QLDijc

Length: 37min 48sec (2268 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020