Root - How To Play - Start Here!

whether you're just learning how to play root or looking for a bit of a refresher for this game you've come to the right place this how to play series is divided up into two videos video one starts you off with the essential root overview and finishes making sure you can take the actions all the factions have in common the next video focuses on everything faction specific once it's released you'll find a link in the description so with that said let's get started so root is what's considered an asymmetric game this means that the faction each player controls has some unique actions that they'll be able to take and some unique ways that each will earn victory points there are however some things in this game that all players are going to do the same so as we learn how to play root we'll first learn how to do the things in the game that all players do the same or mostly the same and then we'll look in depth at how to play each of the four unique factions that come in the base game the way you win in this game is the same for all players with an exception for the vagabond player that we'll look at in the next video to win you'll need to lead your cute little faction of forest creatures to victory by proving that they are the most dominant faction in the game root dominance is mostly measured by the victory points you earn and in some cases dominance can be measured by the area you control on the map to earn victory points and control regions on the map players will place buildings or tokens they'll craft items and wage war with warriors to win the game you'll either need to be the first player to earn 30 victory points or the first player to play and fulfill the winning condition as stated on a dominance card so we place the board on the table with the autumn side up and you'll see that the other side of the board is the winter side which is a little bit more for advanced play and i'll talk about this side later on in the video and we're going to go through setup as if you were playing with four players so we'll eventually set up every faction if you're setting up for a two or three player game toward the end of the learning to play guide there are recommendations on which factions to check out the torch lets you know which faction combinations would be good for new players so each player chooses a faction and takes all the faction pieces as noted on the back of the faction's player board so if you need to for your group you can choose to randomize the factions each player gets use any method of your choosing to randomize these factions once you figure out which faction you'll play place your score marker which has this little victory point wreath on it on the zero space on the score track shuffle the shared deck of cards which look like this and then deal three to each player find the four spaces on the board marked with this r and place a ruin marker on each build the supply with the 12 items at the top of the board make sure these are not the items with the s or the r on them as those are for the vagabond faction place these plane items on the board white side up each player gets four faction overview cards as reference to help better understand what the other opponents are going to try to do to them players will set up their pieces on the board in this order marcus decat erie dynasties woodland alliance and vagabond so that's it for setup for now as we'll cover fashion specific setup for the factions of the base game in the next video so no matter which faction you choose your turn will be divided into three phases as listed on each faction's player board the first phase is called birdsong so think of this as dawn the second phase is daylight and then the third phase is evening throughout these phases players will have maintenance tasks they will need to perform but most importantly they'll be able to take an assortment of actions that they have available to them some actions are unique to each faction and some actions like moving battling and crafting are actions that all factions have in common players also have unique ways that they can earn victory points but all players can earn the victory points listed on cards when they craft them and then players get one victory point when they remove another player's buildings or tokens from a clearing let's start with the actions all players have in common like moving battling and crafting but to do this we first need to know a little bit more about the map so there are 12 areas on the map called clearings and each of these clearings is connected by paths inside each clearing you have these square outlined areas called slots and if you look at the clearings you'll see that they have anywhere between one two and three slots each slots are where buildings get placed by every faction except for the vagabond faction so the marcus de cat faction will try to build sawmills workshops and recruiters the woodland alliance will try to build bases while the erie dynasties tries to build roosts if all slots in a clearing are full like we see here no more buildings can be built in that clearing in clearings with ruins tokens slots can be made available however after the vagabond explores them there are other round pieces called tokens some factions will place in clearings and these don't require slots such as the sympathy token from the woodland alliance or a wood token that marcus de cat faction might place along with slots for buildings each clearing also has a clearing suit or type as seen here or here you may want to take the move action to move your warriors around to protect your buildings and or tokens or you may want to move them to attack other players to eke out a few victory points and that would be if you can remove their buildings and tokens when you take a move action you move from one adjacent clearing to another and you can move as many or as few of your warriors as you want with a single move action the restriction of moving is that you must rule either the clearing that you're moving from or rule the clearing that you're moving to or both so to rule a clearing players must have the most combined warriors and buildings on the clearing than any other player so over here in this clearing we have woodland alliance and erie dynasties woodland alliance rules the clearing because they have three warriors and one building so that's four ruling pieces to erie dynasties three two warriors in one building don't count the token tokens do not count for ruling piece only buildings do which are in the slots if we look at this clearing over here erie dynasty's rules because they have three ruling pieces two warriors and a building two woodland alliances two one building one warrior again don't count the token now if woodland alliance had an action where they took the move action and they moved one warrior over into this clearing now there would be a tie in this clearing for ruling pieces woodland alliance has three marcus decat has three and when there's a tie for ruling pieces no one rules the clearing now that we know what it takes to rule a clearing let's look at a couple examples of moving so erie dynasties rules this clearing and they take the move action and move two warriors over here into this clearing to possibly battle marcus decat and take down this building for another example of moving marcus decat would like to move this warrior over to this clearing since marcus decat rules the clearing he is moving as warrior 2 he can do this remember you have to rule the clearing you're moving from moving to or both so if marcus decat wanted to move this warrior over to this clearing he wouldn't be able to since he neither rules this clearing that he's moving from or this clearing that he'd be moving too whoa all right now that we know how to move warriors around we have to know how to use them in battle battling works pretty much the same no matter which faction you're playing when you use the battle action you will be the attacker and then you'll choose one faction in the same clearing as the defender you roll the two 12-sided dice which give outcomes between 0 and 3 and you as the attacker automatically take the higher roll the amount of hits you inflict on the other player is equal to whichever is less the result on the die or the number of warriors you have in the clearing so in this example woodland alliance has two warriors and rolled a one they would take whichever is less in this case one is less so they would remove one from eerie dynasties one warrior hiri dynasties has a zero so they would remove no warriors from woodland alliance hey so for another example if marcus decat were attacking erie dynasties marcus would take the highest die three in this case but will only be able to inflict as many hits as their warriors since there are only two warriors marcus decat inflicts two hits on eerie dynasty eerie dynasties gets the lower die two in this case and has two warriors so they hit for two battling happens simultaneously so players remove the pieces at the same time so when you inflict hits warriors have to be removed first before removing buildings or tokens and remember you get one victory point for each building and token you removed from the opponent now the player taking the hits gets to decide which pieces are removed this really doesn't matter so much when just removing warriors but it will when warriors are all removed and you must make the decision of which building or token to remove now that you know the basics of battling let's add a couple more details which you will hopefully be able to take advantage of in your games if you battle in a clearing where there are no defending warriors like in this case meaning there are just buildings and tokens you get to inflict an extra hit so in this case eerie dynasties is the attacker and marcus decat is the defender however marcus decat has no warriors so erie dynasty would roll and rolls a two and a zero the two get applied to eerie dynasties the zero really doesn't matter because marcus decat doesn't have any warriors eerie dynasties would inflict two hits normally and then the extra hit they'll add one more so they can inflict three and so in this case they really only need two to wipe out these two tokens but they take out the building the sawmill and take out the wood token and you know what that means it means eerie dynasties gets to take two victory points the last thing about battling is that at the start of battle the defender can play an ambush card that matches the clearing and instantly inflict two hits on you as the attacker so if woodland alliance was the attacker and marcus decat played this ambush card marcus decat would inflict two wounds instantly removing these two warriors if this removes your warriors the attack stops right there you do have the option however to foil an ambush by playing an ambush card again matching the clearing right after the defender plays theirs and in this case this ambush card is like a wild card the bird type is wild so that works in any clearing and that would cancel this ambush out then the battle would continue in the clearing as normal so since we're talking about cards let's look at them more in depth cards can be used by all players in two different ways first cards can act like currency in this game where you'll have to pay a card matching a clearing to take certain actions or do certain things with your faction now even though there are only three types of clearings on the map your cards come in four types the mouse the rabbit and the fox matching the clearings on the map and then a special bird type which is like a wild suit that can be used to match any of the clearings so if i use the field hospitals ability from marcus decat which says whenever any marcus warriors are removed you may spend a card matching their clearing to place those warriors in the clearing with the keep token to be able to use the field hospital ability and keep my wounded warriors in play i have to discard a card which matches the clearing which is the rabbit clearing to be able to move them to my keep so i'll discard this card with the rabbit on it and it doesn't matter what's on the bottom of this card you're just discarding it for the symbol or the type on the top and then i'll move my warriors over to the keep token here all right so the other way to use your cards is where you craft what is on the card when you take a crafting action you also have to have crafting pieces in clearings which match the crafting cost as listed on the card and you can only activate crafting pieces once per [Music] turn all characters in the game can craft however each player's crafting pieces are different from one player to the next marcus the cat needs to activate workshops in matching clearings to pay the crafting cost whereas erie dynasties needs to activate roosts woodland alliance needs to activate sympathy tokens and the vagabond would activate its hammer item in its satchel all of these would have to match the clearings as listed in the crafting cost to craft the card if you forget what pieces your faction uses to pay crafting costs this is listed under the craft action on your player board once you activate your crafting pieces if the effect is listed in a paper box this is considered an immediate effect where you resolve it right away and then discard the card for instance if i'm woodland alliance and i use the craft action to craft gently use knapsack i would activate my crafting piece in a clearing which matches the icon on the card so i'd gain a satchel from the item supply then take a victory point then discard this card now if the crafting effect is listed in a stone box this is considered a persistent effect and you'd place a card face up next to your player board and use the effect written on the card when it applies by the way you can only have one persistent effect of the same name in your player area at a time if the cost to craft the card shows question marks then you can use crafting pieces from any clearings to fulfill the crafting cost of the card so for example as part of erie dynasty's turn they take the crafting action and want to craft command warren the crafting cost for this card is to activate two crafting pieces into rabbit clearings now since you can only activate a crafting piece one time per turn i like to shift them just a little bit to show that i've used that piece this turn so i activate my roost in this rabbit clearing this roost in this rabbit clearing and then since this is a persistent effect it goes by my player board one last thing on crafting if the supply does not have the matching item to take you cannot craft the card the last thing about cards that all players have in common are dominance cards dominance cards can again be used to pay for things that match a type of a clearing but they cannot be crafted if you use a dominance card for its type instead of discarding it place it aside during any players daylight phase they may spend a card of a matching suit to purchase the dominance card if you either purchase the dominance card this way or if you draw it and it is in your hand then during the daylight phase if you have at least 10 victory points you may play the dominance card to your player area to activate it when you do this you abandon the whole victory point track winning condition and remove your victory point marker from the track the only way you can now win the game is by fulfilling the winning condition as listed on your dominance card by the way this card can't be removed from play nor does it count against your hand limit and if you take a dominance card you can't replace it with another one nor can you decide to go back to victory points so one more general rule that all players must follow is that you are confined by the constraints of the game if pieces run out you use as many as you can and if they're gone you can't place any more out there and you can't perform that action on future turns so before we move on to factions i said we'd look closer at the winter side of the map so during setup you have the option of playing root using the winter side of the board this side adds more variation to your games where rather than having all of the clearing types fixed like on the autumn side during setup the clearing type markers are shuffled face down and placed at random on the map after they're all placed then you flip them all face up also on this side the river should be considered a divider of the forest areas why you ask is that important well you'll see when we look closer at the vagabond so you're now ready to move on to video 2 which is focused on everything faction specific once i have the video posted you'll be able to click the link on the right side of your screen and you'll move on by the way bookmark these videos and you can use the chapter markers to quickly jump to a specific part whenever you need a rules clarification if you like this type of content consider becoming a patron of this channel over on patreon but all support like subscribing and checking out new videos is really appreciated alright enough of that so we'll see in the next video

Channel: Modern Cardboard

Views: 33,012

Rating: 4.9700856 out of 5

Keywords: Root, ModernCardboard, Modern Cardboard, How-to-play, how to play, watch it played, instructional, tutorial, root

Id: WpeCTljzlWI

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020