Root - Playthrough & Review (+ Clockwork Expansion)

hi everyone my name is moani and i'm naveen from before you play and welcome to our mini roots series this is a game designed by cole worley and published by leader games it plays two to four players today we're going to be starting off our mini series with the bass factions and what we mean by a mini series is we're basically going to play this game about three times over the next several weeks changing up the factions and maybe doing a co-op at the very end yes that's right and so like you're mentioning today we're doing the bass factions that includes well actually can you tell which factions we're playing as i'm wearing green and i have a little patch of the trees so i am the woodland alliance and i am the eerie dynasty yes so she's the blue birds and so yes today is going to be base factions but after this we're hoping to showcase the underworld expansion and then probably end with the co-op mode co-op experience yes and each game is going to feature the clockwork expansion because it is an expansion that allows you to substitute bots for any of the missing players around the table so our goal here is to hopefully showcase the different ways that you can play at 2. and now two things before we get started the first thing is if you'd like to learn more information about this game and all the different expansions and kind of what it's about we have included a referral link in the description down below now we do want to mention that this is technically an affiliate link but the series is in no way sponsored by anyone right and so all the opinions expressed at the end of our videos are ours and ours alone and last but not least if you can do us a big favor and turn on your cling on subtitles just in case we make any rules mistakes we can make those corrections there and if you'd like to see more videos like this and want to follow along on the rest of the series please consider subscribing and without further ado we are going to get started so if you please direct your attention to the scent of the table we are all set up here for our two two-player game of root plus a third bot which is the mechanical marquis over here 2.0 that's right especially if you've never played root before just to kind of give you the lay of the land in the middle of the table we have the main board now the base game of root does come with two different sides of the board on the opposite side is the winter looking side it's all white it is and it's slightly different the way that you play but this is the main game right each player also has their own player board that represents the specific type of faction that you're playing as as well as all the different rules that kind of dictates how a turn works for you and so in this game we're each playing as different asymmetric woodland creatures who are pretty much going to war yes this is a war game wrapped up in a cutesy package yeah so each player can do the same basic types of actions we can build we can move go into combat craft cards but at the end of the day the object of the game is to score 30 points so this is just a race to 30 points once somebody reaches that then the game ends immediately and they win and so because the game is very asymmetric we are going to leave these specific nitty-gritty rules of the processes of the different factions to the actual gameplay and so for the rules overview we're just going to kind of go over the general gist of how the game works and so if you look closely at the board the board is separated into different clearings and you can kind of tell what a clearing is because it's bunched with a bunch of colored trees each clearing is of a specific type and you can tell that type based off of color and symbol so the yellow clearings are the rabbit clearings the orange ones are the mouse clearings and the red ones are the fox clearings and the significance of this is going to come into play when we talk about the cards in a second and so each player's turn is very similar in the sense that each turn is divided into three phases there's a birdsong phase a daylight and an evening now what you do in those phases varies depending on the faction that you're playing as but there are some common action types that all players can do one of which is moving so over the course of the game you're going to be moving your warriors from one clearing to another in the attempts to control the different areas of the board and go into battle so the one rule that you must pay attention to when moving is your warriors can only move from either a clearing that you rule or to a clearing that you rule and the definition of ruling a clearing is having the most number of pieces cumulatively in that clearing and so pieces come in two different forms we have these wooden warrior pieces which are basically our character pieces and then we also have these cardboard chits which are going to be the different buildings that you're going to be able to build over the course of the game and so if i were to move on my turn i could move any number of my birds over here over to any of the adjacent clearings because i currently rule this clearing players can also engage in combat and so the way that that works is say if i'm in clearing here with the marquis if there was more than one enemy faction i would choose one to go into battle with and then as the attacker i would get to roll these two dice the attacker gets the higher number and the defender gets the lower number and so the way that that works is you pick each other off one to one and so in this example i rolled a three to the marquises one and so the result of this battle is we would each pick off one warrior i also want to mention that each of these clearings has these spaces here for buildings and so over the course of the game we're going to be building our building types in those areas and so if the example had looked like this and we rolled a 3-2 then my warriors would remove both of their pieces because this still counts as a piece that you can remove during battle exactly so anytime you remove cardboard from the board these are each worth one point one point so i would score one point for removing this building i also do want to mention that there are these ambush cards that people can play prior to going into battle as a defender which would deal two immediate hits to the attacker but we'll kind of showcase these as we play the game and so now on the topic of cards the deck of cards look like this each card has a different suit type and the suits primarily correspond to the different types of clearings on the board and so each of these cards typically will also show a craftable ability meaning you can construct these cards on your turn in order to get either points or an ongoing ability and so the bottom left-hand corner of each of these cards tells you what the requirement is in order to craft that card so in this example the mouse in a stack card requires one mouse in order to build it and this arms trader card requires two foxes in order to build it and so these requirements can be met by placing the building type specific to your faction in clearings of those animal types had i built a roost in a mouse clearing like over here because this is a mouse clearing then on my turn i could craft this card giving me one point as well as this specific item from the item storehouse over here which is this sort of bag like item and the significance of this is in the future if anybody else wants to craft an item that has this specific type there's only one left as soon as those run out then those items can no longer be crafted exactly there's also another further significance to these items but that is only when playing the vagabond which is a faction that's not going to be in play during this game the next type of universal action that players are going to be able to take are building their specific building types onto the board and so this is going to be done in different ways depending on who you are but the basic gist of this is we're going to be able to build our buildings onto these spots and they're going to score us points either immediately or at the end of each turn now in addition to that we're also going to be able to recruit more of our warriors onto the board but those are the three main types of actions that actually score you points right now we briefly just want to go over the basic asymmetry of each of the factions we're playing as and also kind of discuss the way that the bot works before we get into the play through and so i'm playing as the eerie dynasties the erie is a programming faction over the course of the game i'm going to be playing cards to the top of my player board here that is going to dictate what i must do on my turn and so at the start of the game i'm going to have to choose between one of these four eerie leaders and depending on the leader that i choose it dictates where my two starting viziers go in my decree say for example i chose the commander as my eerie leader as long as he is my leader as an attacker in battle i deal an extra hit so all of these leaders are asymmetric in that way and i must place my starting viziers under the move and the battle area at the start of each of my turns i must play at least one card from my hand to my decree up here so say for example i play this card in the recruit area now on my turn i must do all of these things in this order i must recruit warriors to a mouse clearing i then must move from any clearing because bird cards are considered wild and then i'm required to battle at least once in a wild clearing as well i will not be able to build because no card has been played here and so as you can probably already tell over the course of the game i'm going to have to play more and more cards to this decree and so if at any time i am unable to complete my entire decree then my faction goes into turmoil all of these cards get discarded with the exception of the viziers and i lose one point per bird card that i had played to my decree so a minimum it's going to be two because you must always play these two loyal viziers and then at that point i then must switch up my eerie leader gets booted i craft cards using my roosts and i earn points at the end of every turn depending on how many of these roosts i have played out onto the board and that is my faction in a nutshell i'm going to be focusing on making sure my program works because every time it doesn't work i'm going to lose points get knocked down it's going to be a setback okay so my faction it's completely different than how monique's faction interacts with the game and i'm the woodland alliance and thematically what's going on here is i am the native creatures to this land and we kind of had enough with this battle between the cats and the birds enough is enough enough is enough and so we're trying to gain support and sympathy with all the different creatures that are native to the lands and the way i basically do this and score points is i want to get my sympathy tokens out onto the board as i uncover they get sweeter and sweeter and i get more and more points the way i do that is by having a deck of supporter cards now these are going to be the same type of cards that we have that we've been talking about it's just they interact a little bit differently so for my faction i'm gonna have two different decks of cards i'm gonna have cards that are considered in my hands and also a supporter deck and i'm gonna use the cards in the supporter deck to allow me to put out these tokens out onto the board and i'll go over the details of that as we play the game naveen's faction is also sneaky in the way that these sympathy tokens work anytime he has a sympathy token in a clearing and and any other faction either moves into the clearing or battles that token then we must give him a card that matches the clearing that we're in yes it's called outrage so it's outrageous that you have done this to the native people yes and so that card that we give him goes into his supporter deck that supported that can only be viewed by naveen and the significance of that is he's going to have to discard matching pairs or triplets depending on the clearing that we're in and lastly we have the mechanical marques now this is a player board that is a part of the the clockwork expansion the way that the clockwork expansion works is it turns any of the four base factions into a robot so that you can automate its turn in the base game the marquis is the most straightforward of all the factions they're going to be doing things like just standard moving around building their buildings every time they build a building out onto the board they earn points but we're not going to be using the marquis in the same manner yes it's similar but not the same and so the way that the robot works is at the beginning of their turn we're going to draw the top card from the deck and this is going to be considered their order card now if the card has a craftable item on it then they always craft it if the item is still available and then they would play out their entire turn only affecting clearings of the order type and so in this example the order card is a mouse card they are going to battle recruit build and move focusing on those clearing types if the order card is a bird card then we do a lot of other things which we'll discuss during gameplay it'll probably happen yeah we'll talk about it yeah but we do want to emphasize that the mechanical marquis is still going to be scoring points as the game progresses so they can very well win if they get to 30 before either of us do then unfortunately we lose and that is the overall gist of how root works i know we didn't explain all the nitty gritty details you probably don't know exactly how to play after that but we're going to walk you through all of our turns during the playthrough we'll walk it through yes so we're gonna do a little bit of cleanup and then we're gonna get started okay so we have reset the board we are ready to play um i have dealt three cards to both of us and then me i start with three cards in my supporter deck over here and so if you didn't join us for the teach we are playing with the mechanical marquis as our clockwork expansion bot the bots also come with cards that change the difficulty level as well as add on different traits up to four different traits we're not playing with any of these cards for this first game we just want to play the bot how it is so you can kind of see how the bot functions so in order to see who goes first we are going to roll one of these dice i guess i'll be number one he'll be two and the bot will be three three okay so let's see one okay all right so it's me okay so for our setup naveen is pretty much all ready to go right i'm ready so i just have to choose my leader and place my starting viziers okay um i have my my starting cards and that's really important because it helps uh guide my decision here but i think i'm going to be the charismatic leader and so as a charismatic leader i must place my viziers in recruit and battle and the special power here is every time i recruit i get to place two warriors instead of one okay so that's everything sure are we ready yeah let's do it all right so we are going to begin the first phase is the birdsong phase so i'm going to go ahead and get started as the eerie the very first thing i can do in my birdsong phase is if my hand is empty i get to draw a card my hand is not empty so i skip that and then i must add one or two cards to my decree to start off the game i am going to add just one because i don't want to be in trouble here so i'm going to add this this rabbit card over here on move so this is going to require me to move from a clearing that is of the rabbit type which is great because that's where i start sure yeah lastly if ever i have no roosts during the birdsong phase then i get to place one roost and three warriors into one of the clearings but this is not the case because i have my starting roost down here and for anybody who hasn't played this game before my starting roost is in the exact opposite location of the marquises keep and so that is a very powerful location for them next i go into my daylight phase so during this phase i get to craft the cards in my hand using roosts i have onto the board currently i only have one roost and it's here in the mouse clearing but i don't have any cards that i would like to craft so i'm going to skip that and now i'm going to resolve my decree which is the meat and potatoes of my faction i have to resolve from left to right resolving all cards in each column one at a time and so first i must recruit in a matching clearing with a roost and so the only clearing that has a roost is this one this is a bird card which is wild so this is totally legal i get to place two of my warriors into this clearing because my leader is a charismatic leader then i must move from a matching clearing so i have to move from a rabbit clearing to anywhere else as long as i either rule the clearing i'm leaving from or rule the clearing i'm going into and so what direction do we want to go in these are all equal i'm going to take four of my warriors and we're going to move over here to this uh this clearing or we have one marquis friend okay lastly i must battle in a wild clearing so i'm going to battle in the clearing that i'm in over here and so i'm going to go ahead and roll the die and i have a two and one so because i'm the attacker i get the higher value die and the marquis gets the lower value die the marquis removes one of my warriors and i remove it i don't get any points for that because it's not a cardboard token but i now do completely rule this area and so that's it for my degree because i've completed all cards from left to right now i go into my evening phase which allows me to score victory points of the right most empty space on my roost track right now i've only placed that one roof so i actually get zero points terrible so i don't get any points right now and so then i end my turn by drawing one card at the end of my turn i have a hand limit of five cards so i must discard down to that if ever i have more and that ends my turn so now we go to naveen okay so for me uh we're gonna go through birdsong daylight and evening as well okay so my birdsong phase there's two different things that i'm supposed to do in a certain order the first thing is revolt now i cannot legally do a revolt so we'll talk about it later because i'm definitely going to want to do that in the future so we're going to go to the second thing here which is spread sympathy and what spreading sympathy means is i get to take one of these tokens and put them out onto the board and the way i do that is i would take a matching type of card that matches one of these clearings and i would play as many cards as the threshold that you see here so the first sympathy token i would play would only cost me one card because it's within this band right over here if it was later in the game it could cost me potentially two matching cards or three matching cards so the best way to show you is by me doing it i'm gonna put out a sympathy token in this fox clearing over here so i will spend this card so it's gonna go out okay and because it's in this little band right here it only cost me one and i'm gonna place the sympathy token right here now typically when i put out sympathy tokens it's going to score me the number of points depicted uh from what's below it the very first one gives me no points so fortunate but i can continue spreading sympathy because i can do it as many times as i want as long as it's legal now that i have one sympathy token on the board i must place adjacent to that sympathy token following these lines and still following the rules as to which creature is in each clearing and i will put out a second sympathy i'm going to put it out into this region right here so this is the bunny rabbit over there so that's going to go out okay and that puts this sympathy token into this region and now that does score me one victory point so i am on the board ah already on the map i'm there okay and then i'm going to continue to spread sympathy i will not do such things um but i will go into my daylight phase here so the three things i can do here is i can craft cards like monique explained earlier i can mobilize which is basically taking cards from my hand and putting them into my supporter or i can train which i'll explain later on right now i'm not going to be doing any training because that requires me to have one of these bases out there and that's again something that is related to revolting which we'll talk about later and so naveen can do any of those actions any number of times that you'd like to or he's able to yep uh so i am going to definitely mobilize this card into my supporters and when naveen chooses to craft he's going to be crafting using the clearing types where his sympathy tokens are correct so let me do that right now for example i'm going to craft this travel gear because i'm in this bunny rabbit clearing which is what's required here i'm going to be able to gain one point as well as take this token into my possession yeah so i get one point this goes out of the game and so now i have two points nice all right and then the last card here i am going to actually do that mobilize action again i'm going to put this down into my sympathy or my supporter deck very good yep at the end of that turn i'm going to go into evening phase evening phase would be military operations and drawing a card i have no military officers right now again we'll talk about all that later so i'm just going to draw up one card yes so for navy's evening phase he gets to do a lot of different types of actions like moving battling all that stuff that's kind of normal for the other factions he has to build to to kind of earn the right to do that i'm not there yet right now i'm just putting out little little tokens there's your guy that's my one card okay all right so now we're going to go to the turn of the mechanical marquis you may have noticed that the marquis does not have a hand of cards so any time they have to give us a card we just draw from the draw deck anytime we have to give them a card they score a point yes so the first thing that happens is we draw the top card from the deck and that is the order card for the turn and so this card is a fox card so all the actions are going to take place in the fox clearings so now we look at the order card and see if it is a craftable card which it is because this card is root tea yes the bots craft regardless of where their buildings are on the board as long as the item is still in the supply which is so the bot is going to take this tea kettle and uh and also regardless of the amount of points listed on the card crafted cards will only ever score the bot one point each so that one says two but because the bot they're only going to get one point exactly and so that is it for the bots birdsong phase now we go into daylight where we're going to do a host of different things with that clearing type yes so the first thing that happens in the daylight phase is the marquis is going to go into battle in all of the clearings of the ordered card which is all the fox clearings from what we can see here it looks like the only clearing with an enemy token is this one who is naveen typically when you go into battle we roll the dice but because this is an undefended clearing with only one enemy token in it we don't need to roll the die because the attacker will always get to deal one additional damage in an undefended clearing yep so the marquis is just going to go ahead and eliminate naveen's see you later but i do benefit from that that's right that is outrageous that the marquee did that uh i normally would uh gain a card from an active player but because it's the bot i just take the top card from the deck right there into your supporters to my supporters you will go there that's something we like to do times i forget yeah yes okay perfect and because that was a cardboard that the marquise removed they score another point they do protect me monique not looking good for me ah gosh next the marquis is going to recruit four warriors in each of the fox locations and so right now they're in one two three four control all four yeah one one in each one two three and four if they controlled less than four then you would put the extra warriors in the clearing of highest priority and so that is the significance of these numbered tokens that we have out onto the board the one is the highest priority clearing next they're going to build a building in the fox clearing with the most number of warriors that's going to be this one over here that they control yes but the only thing is this only has room for one building so it's already been taken so we're going to go to the next clearing of highest priority which is this one and so because the order card was a fox card they built a sawmill yep which is designated by this one right here yes the significance of the buildings is not is not the same as in the original base game these sawmills are not going to produce any wood for the purposes of crafting for the spot next they're going to move all of their warriors in excess of three in each of the ordered clearings so right now the way we see it all of the fox clearings has three or fewer warriors so nobody moves and lastly if the marquis did not place a building out on this turn and they have five or fewer buildings on the entire map then they do an action that's called expand which would essentially allow them to draw another order card and do their whole daylight phase over again yeah yeah that's not good but because they did build a sawmill then we're gonna skip this entirely and go into the evening phase unlike in the base game this is the point where the marquis gets the score points for the building type that they place onto the board and because they placed a sawmill they're going to get one point for these sawmills they're out in front and then you end their turn by discarding their ordered card which we have already done so now it is back to me and so i'm going to start my birdsong phase by adding to my decree again which is kind of scary so i'm going to play this mouse card to my build section so now i can do one of each type of action on my turn so now i'm going into daylight where i get to craft one of these cards which i will not do and so then i'm going to resolve resolve my decree so starting with the recruit action i must recruit in this clearing because it's the only one that has a roost in it so i'm gonna put uh two birds just like that and then i'm going to move so i have to move from this clearing to another one so i might as well go ahead and take three of these warriors and move them into here because it's another mouse clearing and then we're going to battle so i'm going to battle the marquis over here roll the die all right so it's it's 3-2 which means i eliminate the marquis token but they also chip off one of my warriors unfortunately and uh now finally i get to build so i have to build in a mouse clearing and i have two options here it doesn't really matter where i go i'm gonna go ahead and just place this uh building right in here so now i have a roost in that clearing as well so we've successfully resolved the decree we're going to go into the evening phase and i'm now going to score that one point one point and i'm going to end my turn by drawing a card that's all for me now on to you okay so once again my bird song is i can start with revolt i am not going to do that right now so we're just going to move on to spreading sympathy so that was really unfortunate what they did to me over here uh because i didn't like that so i am going to spread sympathy and we're going right back to that fox clearing so i'm going to spend this okay to put out my sympathy token back in here getting me one point very good and then i have the option of do i want to continue spreading sympathy uh yeah let's do that so i will spend this one okay it's a mouse this one still only cost me one because it's in this threshold so this is going to go into this region here that gets me another victory point for exposing that and i'm gonna hold off on spreading sympathy at that point and now we're gonna go into my daylight so i can craft this card or i can mobilize it i'm not gonna be doing any of the training because i don't have any officers going on right now and i don't have a base so i will be mobilizing this card into my supporter deck over here and then that is going to end the daylight because i have no more cards and we're going to go into evening we have no military operations because i don't have officers and i'm going to go ahead and just draw one card as of right now can i have one card please perfect there you go thank you that's it that's it and now back to the mechanical marquis let's go ahead and draw the ordered cards oh we've got another fox order god so this is a craftable card so they go ahead and craft it taking away one of these items and this is going to score them one point one point for crafting okay and then now we're going to go into their daylight they're going to battle in all of the fox clearances literally what we just said so we can just do it again okay so just this i go away we don't have the role to die because it's one undefended uh-huh but because score a point for that they do score a point for that and you get a card in your supporters okay and now they're going to recruit another four warriors yes into the same place this is just deja vu here this is very bad for me two i realize because uh three and where's that fourth one here it is four because i am adjacent to those fox clearings and that's a lot of uh warriors yeah they're okay now they build another sawmill in the clearing with the num the highest number of warriors and so i think this time it's going to be this clearing because now this clearing has run out of space yes we're going to put a sawmill over here it's this one oh this is bad not good and now they move for each piece that's in excess of three they're going to move to an adjacent clearing with the hut with the most number of enemy pieces so this could be this one no enemies one warrior is going to move yeah this one oh yeah into this spot because naveen is present so moving into this clearing gets naveen a supporter outrageous that you've moved in the outrage outrage okay but that goes into my supporters that's good and then now they if they skip the expand action because they were able to build this term yes now they're going to score points they get two points yes for the sawmills wow they are moving they are moving we discard this order card i don't know we might lose to the bots we got to work together here this is not good all right so back to me i'm going to start by playing two cards now to my decree i'm going to play another bird card to the recruit action so that i can now recruit to two any two roosts on the board and i'm going to play one of my fox cards to the battle action because i am adjacent to a lot of fox clearings so hopefully we can uh get some kind of leverage on the marquis here they're taking over yeah they are so then we go into daylight phase and uh i'm not going to craft any cards from my hand because maybe i can't so now we're going to resolve the decree so starting with the recruit action i can recruit twice in a wild clearing so i can recruit in both of these or i can recruit in the same clearing twice which i think i'm going to do i'm going to recruit um twice because your move is out of the rabbit so i only move out of the rabbits and i'm going to have to battle in a fox clearing so let's uh increase our chances here sure and i'm going to move from this rabbit clearing to the fox clearing how many of these people do one take let's take five okay let's go five i usually like to go either three or four but we're gonna go five because i think we're gonna battle twice so we're going into there okay so it's removed that's my move and i must battle twice i can battle in a fox clearing as well as a wild clearing so i think we're gonna use this clearing twice roll it up first battle here we go you're looking for a 3-0 i'm looking for a 3-0 that's true okay here here's a one zero zero you must take a warrior yes okay or yours get uh chipped away first can't be the sandal and then so that was my first battle card now for my bird card i'm gonna battle in the same same location here we go 1-0 oh my gosh that's bad at least you didn't get hurt that's true that is true i'm still alive and now i end my decree by building in this mouse area i'm going to be in trouble if i don't actually move to a mouse location to build next next turn yeah so i'm going to build my roost we have two mouse locations you have this one and this one but i've already built a roost there oh yeah that's right only one roof for clearing yes but i'm going to build my roost right there so that still is fine finished with my decree now i'm going to go into evening by scoring my two points two points thank you and i get to draw one card plus an additional one because i have revealed this symbol so two cards into my hand very good interesting and that's me so now it goes to naveen okay so now i'm in birdsong so now i have the potential to a revolt oh are you going to i am going to revolts and so revolting is i spend two supporters matching the the sympathetic clearing so i can spend two uh bunnies or two mice oh my god here do not and i can do this as many times as i'd like but you can't let the no you can only do it once per base per base so the whole purpose of revolting is that naveen can put out one of these three bases and they are they each represent the three different types of clearings on the board so once he's put out a base in the mouse clearing he cannot revolt in another mouse clear yes it's a one time only there as long as the base is excited so i'm gonna revolt in this rabbit section here thank you so these two go out i get none of the ben is at the bottom i'm just looking at the top left corner so revolting what that does is i remove all enemy pieces there now there is no um uh cardboard so that doesn't get me any points for doing that and now i get to put out my base and it is a square chit so it's going to go into that nice little section there so no buildings can be built here as of now the next thing that's going to happen is i get to place a warrior in my officer's box here so that's going to allow me to do more evening things and i also get a warrior into this section over here so i'll lay it face down yeah so now naveen is on the map yes so i place the base the warrior and my sympathy token stays here so now i have some level of control of one area right now that's right and so the the other benefit the woodland alliance has is uh whenever we go into combat with these guys they get higher value as defenders as defenders so we kind of want to stay clear away from the woodland alliance stay away from me okay i'm gonna revolt a second time and the only other place i can do it is here i have my sympathy token and so i'm going to spend these two these wilds to represent two mice to clear out that so all of monique's pieces go out one two and your ruse goes out yes if you get the point that gets me a point for knocking out a cardboard uh and then i get to put out the matching base type so it's gonna be this one the mouse one's gonna go there and i also get a warrior to go there and another officer ah yes terrible all right that was good okay are you feeling good about that yeah i feel good yes i needed that okay i am not gonna spread sympathy uh but now i'm gonna go into daylight so i can craft i can mobilize or i can train i'm going to train so what training does is i get to spend a card that matches a built base so i'm going to spend this mouse card that matches this built base and it basically turns one of my warriors here into an officer okay now that i have officers i can take actions in the evening phase and the amount of actions i can take is dependent on the number of officers i have so i have three so i can take three actions uh i'm gonna recruit so i'm gonna recruit one i'm gonna recruit two and then i'm going to recruit a third time here yes and davine only recruits to areas that have a base a base exactly so that is my evening action so now i get to draw cards and now i get to draw one card plus one for each base that i have out so i get to draw three cards one two and three there you go thank you ah this is bad that was needed all right so now the mechanical marquees let's draw an order card we have a mouse all right so this is a craftable card they're going to craft the final one of these items over here okay for one point there you go and then we're going to go into their daylight phase i don't think they're in any battles in my territory yeah let's see the only mouse clearings that they're in this one this one not even that not that one yeah so those two so no battle good so we move on to the next one which is recruiting we're going to recruit four warriors and i guess you just split them up between those two yeah exactly so two and then two thank you now we build because it is a mouse order card they're going to build a recruiter yes recruiter building okay and so it's going to be the the one with the highest number of warriors it's gonna be that one because these are tied these are tied and this is higher in priority so one recruiter building goes into this clearing they're not actually going to move because neither of them are in excess of three three three yep and then we skip the expand phase because they've built a building they did build the building so now they're going to finish their turn by scoring one point one point because that's what's showing here gosh that's enough i'm really hoping that they are going to try to battle naveen over here because i don't like you i gotta do my thing okay i'm gonna start my birdsong phase by playing two cards to my decree i can kind of smell my program breaking soon but uh let's see how this goes so i'm gonna play this rabbit card to my move action so i'm gonna be able to move twice from this rabbit clearing essentially okay and then i'm going to play this fox clearing card to my build action let's see if we can make this work okay so first thing in my daylight phase i am actually going to craft a card i'm going to craft this root t card it requires me to have a roost in a mouse clearing which i do right here yes and so because i am the erie i only get one point regardless of how many points it says on the card i'm only doing this i can remove that so i can't do it or the well so the marquee can't do it yeah uh so let's get to get to the point though gets me a point and then this is going to go out of the game yeah so i have no cards in my hand and now i will resolve my decree so i'm going to recruit twice again in this clear same spot so two and another two because my leader is charismatic and then now i must move twice from this uh rabbit clearing i don't have to give naveen two cards yeah so that's not a good thing so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna move one two three four five all five into this clearing okay and i don't have a card in my hand so naveen gets to draw the top card from your deck i'll take it and then i'm going to move my final bird into this clearing somewhere else yes so i literally did that to protect my program oh my gosh and now i don't want to deal with this i'm trying to figure out my clear my my program here and now we're going to go into battle so you have to do a fox battle i have to do a fox battle so let's go over here ready yes come on hello three two oh gosh that's not good well you knock them out i knock them out but they do one damage to me uh and then i remove both of these yep so that's gonna get you a point that's gonna get me a point so this goes back that's good because we don't want them scoring more of these sawmills yeah one point for that cardboard and i'm required to battle again which is bad so this might break this might actually break my uh my program yeah so i'm required to battle you oh there you go so i get the higher die because it's uh guerrilla war the defender as the woodland alliance gets the higher die ah gosh three zero so i take three of you out and i i don't uh don't do any damage and technically i'm supposed to be asking naveen if you'd like to ambush but did you want to do that okay yeah based off the results definitely not so this is going to break my program which is very unfortunate but uh maybe that's a good thing in disguise i guess so now i'm going to build i'm going to build here and bruce goes out yep bruce goes out there and the reason why i break my program is because i cannot build in a mouse clearing yes because this mouse clearing already has a ruse and that's the other mouse clearing that you are trying to go for yeah and technically i could have built here had i not had to go into battle with naveen but because i do not rule in this clearing i don't get to build a roost unfortunately i now go into turmoil i first get humiliated i lose 150 point per bird card so three degrees that's minus three i'm not gonna score any points my goal here is can we just get to 10 let's get to 10. now i discard my entire decree everything that i've worked towards you keep the loyal viziers they don't go into the discard they are loyal after all but all of these get discarded my loyal viziers are going to get replaced into my degree depending on my new leader so my leader gets deposed i'm going to flip it face down and i don't actually get access to this leader until i go through the rest of my leaders again which is not the goal pretty rare yeah and then i get to choose a new one from these three you know what i am going to choose the commander so as a commander myviz years start in the move and the battle actions here okay and my my benefit is as an attacker in battle i get to deal an extra hit so you saw all that girls will be won i know you are go away go north and now i go straight to evening i get to score two victory points one tip i draw one card plus one more because you're out of cards right i'm out of cards and i know i end my time by drawing that's right that's right yeah stay away i i i don't want to do anything with it i just needed to get that base out there you have a lot of orange on the board you go elsewhere i i will try to go to orange okay all right so the first thing i can do is revolt i can't because i only have sympathy in these two locations and they already have bases any area that i can get out of legally has three people in it except for this one so i could technically spread sympathy there okay i'm gonna spread sympathy into this clearing here and i'm gonna spend my wild to represent that bunny rabbit there and i'm gonna be able to take this one token and put that sympathy here and the reason why naveen was mentioning that is because if any of the adjacent clearings has three or more of an enemy three or more enemy warriors in it then he must spend an additional marshall card this had three that had three three and three everywhere so yeah that one doesn't i get one point because that's what it is there and with daylight i'm just gonna mobilize all three of my cards into my supporters here so i'm just gonna do it one two three and now i get to go into the evening phase so this one is gonna be a little bit different here so i'm gonna i'm gonna move i'm gonna move from here to here okay okay and then i am going to organize and what organizing is is i remove the warrior and then i can freely place a sympathy token into this spot right here without having to discard any supporters exactly it's gonna get me one point for doing that this warrior comes back here so that was action one action two so move organize and then i'm gonna do a recruit action which is gonna put this right back there that's my three actions oh my gosh okay and then now i'm going to draw a card so i get to draw three cards please all right come on marquise where are you you need to control the woodland alliance leave me alone you gotta control naveen all right so marquise order card here we go oh it's another mouse so same thing this is not a craftable card so we're gonna go straight into daylight um there's no battle zones for the the two mouse clearings yep right nope all right so then they're going to recruit two and two two and two okay so we got two here and two there that's a lot of people that is a lot of people so now let's build and they're going to build another uh recruit yep recruiter yep and is there a spot over there there is a spot yeah and it's okay that they're the same building type um yeah for the for the marquis actually the marquis can can build the same building type in the same clearing now they are going to move because these two clearings do have more than three in them so let's start with this clearing so it's going to be two oh so they're either going to move into this clearing so i have one two three four five six pieces two navin's four okay so they're gonna go here all right and then this clearing is going to have two warriors move to this one this one because naveen is technically present here with this little sympathetic token yes don't you wish you didn't put that there well i get a card oh yeah they moved in so maybe you're happy though man support wow so we skipped the expand and now they're going to score points based off of however many um recruiters they have out so it's two points two points one two go you gotta control them i'm gonna try i'm over here losing my my program turmoil ah going to turmoil okay so now back to me and now i have to choose to add gosh i need i should just add both of these cards to my degree because right now it's empty i can only move and battle that's it okay i'm going to start by playing both of my cards okay into recruit because i desperately need um to get more traction and so i don't have any cards in my hand so i can't craft anything but i will uh resolve my decree so i'm now i'm going to recruit twice once in this clearing and so now that i'm not a charismatic leader i can only recruit using one that's right one warrior and then i'm going to recruit into this this clearing over here because it's a fox class and now i must move anywhere anywhere any type yeah let's move north i want to move four of these warriors let's kind of stay away from naveen for a second here i don't want to get him any more supporters yes so we're going to this clearing i was ruler of this i was able to do that and now i'm going to battle them nice good luck and you get one more battle i do you can max four here i'm counting on it of course okay well that's 2-1 technically one they pick off one of my warriors i pick off two of theirs not bad eh not good either okay just set up for the next one we're not looking good here if you can clear off those two cardboard though that's two points that'll be two points pretty good so i do not have a card in my build action so i don't get to build a roost and now i will score two points two points and draw two cards not bad okay so the scores are six seven and eleven yeah so naveen you need to get the marquis right now the marquis you say yes well then maybe i should revolt here oh good thing i didn't go there yes i was thinking about going there yeah i know i was like please go i'm revolting there so it's gonna cost me two uh foxes so i have one fox one wild all right that is gonna clear all five of these baddies out now i get no points for that but but you get all those baddies out they all go out and i get to put out a base here oh my gosh as well as a warrior there and then uh this one is gonna come here and these all actually turn up this is how i keep track of how many turns i get so now i have four evening actions okay so now i can spread sympathy and i think i might just do that so i'm going to spread sympathy into this rabbit section here and now it's going to cost me two now because i'm in this little band so it's going to cost me two yellow all right and this sympathy is going to come into this section here that's gonna get me two points one two and i cannot do any further because i only have one card in my supporters so no matter what i can't do any more all right so now let's go into daylight okay i'm gonna do a couple crafts let's craft a little bit okay so i'm gonna craft this one which is i need to be in a rabbit territory which i am uh and i get the boot the last boot and i get one victory point so the boot will come here so i have two boots and a point all right and then the last two cards i am just gonna mobilize and put them down into my supporters uh i have no cards left so now we're gonna move into military operations in the evening so you have four actions what are you gonna do okay i'm gonna move so i'm gonna move from here into this section okay and then i'm gonna do that organize which allows me to put out one of my sympathy tokens here and then this kind of gets destroyed into my collection so that gets me two points okay so that was two actions two actions so that's action one and action two and now i'm gonna recruit so i'm gonna replace and put this back there and i think i'm in a battle i think i'm gonna clear this this i'm gonna try to clear that clearing out yeah so i get to roll so i get the high die here and now do you get a plus one on defense nope okay only one attacking so it's uh three one so both of yours go out and then one of mine goes out yeah so you go ahead and take yours okay that's gonna go there and that is it for me okay so i get to draw now four cards one plus one two three so four cards one two three four all right so we gotta get naveen's base out of here if we can eliminate one of the bases then that's actually very a very good thing so maybe we'll work on that go away deal with this points for you okay speaking of the marquis let's go ahead and see what they draw oh this is our first bird order card so first things first this is not a craftable card so they do not craft but the thing about the bird order cards is they go into escalated daylight yeah this is kind of like a terrible version of their daylight phase gosh the first thing that happens is they battle in every clearing that they're in that has an enemy piece let's just start let's go in numerical order yeah let's go and target sorry let's go into uh priority order so no enemies uh yes there's an enemy here but this might be a freebie takeout for you maybe this could be they can only deal one damage to you there's only one warrior like sound of that [Laughter] so they're going to remove one of my warriors i don't remove any of theirs i don't know if we mentioned this but you cannot ambush the bot by the way if you have an ambush card you cannot use it you cannot ambush the bot that's true uh and the reason why they only deal one damage because they only have uh one warrior there so one to one it's one swipe yep next next one is this clearing they are not present here so i am gonna lose this one no matter what because i i'm defenseless with only one token here you don't even need to roll don't need to roll i lose this but i get a card for them doing that there you go into your supporters and they get a point they do get a point so you got to stop spreading your sympathetic tokens but that's how i get points get in the points we're tied i can deal with it okay so clearing number five there's no enemies number six where are we here you have it oh gosh here we go good luck come on dice come on come on okay okay so so you guys take each other out yeah we take well they took a roost no no they don't they don't because they can only do a damage of two oh i think they have two warriors total ah thank goodness okay so two two all the warriors go bye-bye that's great that's great news all right so that's six we're going to go to seven nope they're not there eight by themselves for themselves nine here with me so they go ahead and remove that sympathetic uh they do their sympathy get a card and they get a point so they get a point oh my gosh this is so bad they're not here they're not here and they're not there either so now they're going to recruit two warriors each in the two clearings that they roll of lowest priority so i believe those two clearings are nine and eight yes so it's gonna be two two warriors here and two warriors here and two warriors here uh oh this is not good next they're going to build the building type that they have the most of out onto the board which is the recruiters yeah so it's going to score them about the maximum number of points essentially right and so they're going to build that building in the clearing that has the most number of their warriors i think it's going to be here is that five total here and five there yeah here or there so it's looking like this because it's the highest higher priority yep so they will score three at the end of this they they will and then last but especially not least they're going to move into adjacent clearings from clearings that they have more than three warriors of so similar to the standard daylight but the difference is now the clearing that they move into they're going to start a battle yes so this is done simultaneously i believe the only two clearings that that actually affects are these two this one and then that one right there yeah so this so two of these words are going to go into this clearing and we're going to battle and two of these warriors are going to go into this clearing and um they are going to battle so because they moved into a clearing with my token i get a card that's right and so let's go ahead and start uh with this battle over here which is me unfortunately i have like no more presents on the board of course this is i'm i'm not doing well at all this is uh that's bad luck right there it's kind of some bad luck okay here they're gonna roll i get the higher die though so that's good one okay so we both go out one one uh oh and that finally ends their daylight phase that was really nasty too much it's too much so now they're gonna go into the evening phase they score the number of points equal to the highest uh the highest row essentially so it's three points they're moving and now they're more than halfway to victory naveen are we gonna let this cat win no i can't i'm not trying that so that's this car this card and now it's going into my turn good luck oh my gosh what am i doing clear that out you need to clear that out yeah because they can't put those out anymore because they're going to get a lot more points if they put that type out that's true okay so um i'm going to start by playing both of my cards to my decree okay i'm going to place another fox card here you got to get people on the board we're going to get some more people on the board all my people are over here and then um with this mouse card i'm going to try to build in mouse clearings this might be the end of me as well but we're going to try and see um how often we can do this i don't have any cards in my hand so i'm not going to craft but i'm going to resolve my decree now so two recruit actions in the fox clearing the only one that i have a roosted there you go too so here we go two warriors and then one in my bunny clearing over here and then now i'm going to move and i'm only going to move one warrior into that clear i'm going to leave one behind sure just in case uh some people try to do something and then we're going to battle in this clearance good luck i literally have to get a 0-0 for it to break my profile yes um considering the luck that i've had so far you've rolled a lot of zeros that might not be far off good luck thank you okay okay so we've got three one which is technically four one yeah which is technically four ones but uh this is fantastic so the the cat is going to remove one of my warriors and i'm going to remove all three of their pieces the cat goes away i'm gonna remove both of these recruiters that is great which is great because it's scoring them so many points whenever they they activate it well you good it's gonna get me two points one two because they were both cardboard pieces and wow and now you've opened up a double build there so you can buy yourself some time i can't build my roofs twice i can't build your rooster in the same clearing so that's what's kind of tough about it but i will take advantage of the one time i do get to build sure i'm gonna place this roost out get yourself some points onto uh that clearing oh that's solid that'll give you three points and you're right back in it i don't yeah i guess yeah you're right back in it okay so now i'm going into evening i'm gonna score my three points so one two three i'm right behind you there naveen yeah you are and i get to draw no two cards okay so i can no longer revolt anymore because all three of my bases are out so this whole thing is just completely nothing until the base is returned which is a possibility because it cannot revolt it could happen uh okay i will i will spread sympathy so i'm gonna spread sympathy down into this section here it's gonna cost me two um bunnies so i'm gonna spend wild and bunny so it's gonna go there okay that's gonna put this out and that gets me two points right away one two nice uh do i wanna spread more sympathy that is a good question i will i'm gonna spread more sympathy so i'm gonna spend these two to uh spread into this section here okay okay so that's my last of the two section that goes there that gets me another two points so back with you cat i have two cards left the next uh whole section requires three cards to do this so expensive not going to happen anytime soon all right with daylight i am going to mobilize all four of these cards into my supporter deck that's very boring but i'm gonna do it there it's a setup all right now my officers for evening okay the first action i'm gonna do is i'm gonna recruit so this is gonna be one action i'm gonna recruit and i'm gonna recruit this mouse here uh the second action i'm gonna do is i'm gonna move that mouse so this mouse is going to come here the third action i'm going to do is organize so this mouse is going to come off the board so that second action was moved organized is the third and that allows me to freely put out this sympathy token into this clearing and that gets me three points okay so now you are past the marquis here yeah and then i should probably recruit and i will recruit so i'm gonna spend this one to recruit back here so i can just kind of keep that a little bit safe that's me that's you that's all four yes so now i get to draw four cards okay we gotta play every shuffle two three four yeah we are going to reshuffle very soon all right so back to the mechanical marquis let's hope this is not another bird card because that was that was terrible brutal ready yes no no oh my gosh all right that's that's stinks so we are going to do the escalated daylight same thing we just did once again all right this is bad so we're battling in all all clearings where they have enemy pieces so this time let's just kind of go where we want to write it yeah orange well here's me okay they're gonna battle me they win okay so you get this card into your supporters they do they get a point they do so let's shuffle this do you mind shuffling this well sure yeah the next one okay so the next clearing that i see is this one yep and so they're going to actually roll die so come on let's roll a one zero one zero one zero two zero yes so they go out because i am the defender i'm i'm happy about that actually this one okay this is a auto auto loss here's a card for your supporter deck and they get a point they do get a point oh my gosh my spread is looking bad bad they're gonna battle you here oh good luck come on kick kick her when she's down 0-0 let's go three three one so i remove one they're gonna remove my roost and my word that's kind of a good thing so that my my uh you have to deal with it my program doesn't break here oh really yeah because then you can go in there and build yes that works now they're going to recruit in these two areas again so two and two okay because they are the clearings of lowest priority that they control i don't think they're in ten right yeah they're not in here yes okay so now they're going to build and so we actually have a tie for the buildings that uh of the of the most number on the board so in the case of a tie the sawmill wins okay yep if it is a part of the tie and it's going to get placed in to either this region or this one because they're the two uh areas that have the most number of so this is full so it's gonna go here yes that's gonna go right there yep perfect and now they move so same thing only these these two um clearings and so these two are going to move to it's supposed to be an adjacent clearing that has the most number of enemies enemies so and neither of these areas have anything i believe they go to the place with higher priority i'm just gonna go here and then this is now gonna come and bother me so two and a half in here hey you get a card i do get a card and i believe this initiates a battle yes they must move and then battle so all right come on good luck two zero three three no okay so they're gonna take out so i take out one of theirs they take out one of mine and then i get the choose of these two they're gonna take out my sympathy token and leave my base alone so you get a card get a card they get a point they get a point and that's it yes so they stay here they stay there oh that's not looking good for you no so now they get their two points right because it's the end of their evening yes so now they they get two points for to end the evening phase and the cats have 21 points here that's out of the bag all right these cats sad too many have too many of these bird cards yeah too many bird cards guys okay so back to me we need to do something because um i don't want the cat to win i would rather naveen wins that's that's my current style so i'm gonna play both of my cards to my decree okay and so let's go ahead and play this mouse card to the move action okay and my bird card to the build action okay and i don't have any more cards in my hand so i cannot craft so we're gonna go ahead and resolve the decree so two warriors get recruited to my roost here that's in the fox clearing one goes over here to the rabbit clearing that has my roost in it and i have to move twice uh once from here and once from any other clearing and so i'm gonna go ahead and move uh two of my warriors from this clearing into this one okay so that is my wild movement right there and then i'm going to move from this mouse clearing into this one so i'm going to move both of them everybody everybody's going we're all going okay and we're going to battle in this clearing okay i'm going to try to attempt to take that out so you with your leader you get one extra battle point i do please please i've had bad luck come on oh there you go okay three in one so yeah it's overkill so they are going to unfortunately eliminate one of my warriors but in turn i'm going to remove both of theirs and so that's removing the sawmill the much needed uh sawmill off the board so you get a point and i'm going to get a point yes um like that and then lastly i'm going to build twice once in a while clearing which is going to be this rabbit clearing and then the second one mandatory is this mouse clearing no that's not except that's a rabbit clearing because your recruit you can now recruit into there yes that's great it's it's not bad so i built two roofs this turn i'm going to end my turn by uh scoring four points so we're gonna go up to 16. there you go slightly closer yeah and then i get to draw two cards two cards okay one two okay done yep i'm done all right so now it's my bird song so revolt again i can't do any more so let's start doing some stuff uh the first thing i will do is spread sympathy into this mouse clearing by making two of these okay so that's gonna go oops into there and that gives me two points hello cat you know what i'll spend two more okay to go from there now into this section so it's gonna get me another two points okay one perfect all right can i do any more yeah can you can you earn seven points right now do you have well i can't i can do this these three so i'm gonna move sympathy from here into here so this is gonna be because now it's in the three category okay so i get a sympathy out there that's gonna get me another three points yeah one two three wow i'm trying you can you can do it i'll try oh my gosh are you gonna win right now and then i can take these three the mouse clearing going into here because there's only two warriors if there was a third warrior there then it would cost me an extra card so one two three mice okay that's gonna put this one here and that's one two three four that's four points that's the four point that's it that's it you knew this is coming you're like sure go ahead monique do your decree but i'm gonna win on my turn and i had an anvil to build the next one wow oh my gosh good job good job i'm glad that you won oh you're nervous for a second i'm like no we we cannot let the bot the bot is gonna win we cannot let the cat win yes wow wow that escalated quickly that was a lot of points at the very end there yeah i'm i'm very disappointed in um my performance today i just wanna say you know you had a couple zero rolls that were just like that happens yeah it does happen that is the nature of any kind of dice rolling in a game right essentially but i had fun trying to make my program work and that is what matters that's what matters yeah okay so let's talk about it but before we talk about it actually nadine this is your year 2020 that's right this is what it usually looks like when we play games at home ravine does win a a fair amount i see those comments out there okay that naveen doesn't win i mean never wins money wins yeah it took a year and a half for naveen to get used to the lights that's that's what it is it was light the lights were dazing yeah i was like a rookie you know in the nba or something like that right all right yes so that's that was root uh that was root with the all base game only base game map uh base game factions no bells and whistles and uh with one bot from the clockwork expansion which is the mechanical marquis so we're going to discuss uh how we feel about the game in terms of two different things in terms of the actual gameplay itself because we've never covered it before on the channel and then in terms of the clockwork expansion playing the game at two right and we decided to go with this series because you know we didn't really have a very good experience to tell you the truth that first time that we played and this game is so popular people really really love this game it's like it has like a cult following it does yeah and so we were like you know what we didn't really truly understand the game the first time we played it let's actually learn it and then form a proper opinion after we played each faction yeah the very first time we ever played this was at a local convention and it was like hey you want to play root i've never played it before moonie have you ever played it no we never played it before and it was like here read this little pamphlet about your faction i'm like okay so i can okay this is what i do but we had no idea what anybody else could do and so we were just kind of just going around and playing into other people's strategies the people that we played with they taught it well but they're still definitely a certain degree to this game where you have to play the game you have to experience each faction at least these first three that we played with the vagabond is its own character but you have to experience all three of these factions in order to truly understand the strategy that is behind and the overall picture of the game because the first time we ever played the game i felt like it was way too it was like a tug of war like you're doing all this to go two points to go one point you know it's like it was too it was very frustrating for me and it didn't really fully grasp you know what my opponents could do and the first time we played i was the marquise yeah i was here he was eerie i didn't fully understand the strategy of the erie so so the whole time we played i could just hear naveen over and over again going ah my program bro god i don't know how to use this faction yeah so it was like three points four or two points back every single time it was a frustrating experience to say the least and so now that we've played this game let's start with theme yeah okay to me this game has the cutest theme one of the cutest themes ever in like uh you know a cult classic kind of game yeah it's uh it's surprisingly vicious for its theme this is a war game you know you could retheme it and make it like really feel a lot more aggressive a lot more i guess i shouldn't call it aggressive because it's actually not that punishing it's just very strategic yeah it's incredibly strategic so i love this theme i think in terms of theme and components this has got to be one of my favorite games in terms of production you know leader games over and over again you know we've seen it with a card game as simple as fort they're very consistently high quality in terms of their production and so the components in this game are just fantastic adorable that's really right yeah fantastic what do you think about the theme yeah i like the theme uh i like i like the theme that it is asymmetric yeah that the theme and the mechanics kind of interweave very very well in this game i'm excited to play all the other factions yes yeah in terms of player count and replayability so yeah well we just played with the bot and i think it's it is interesting with the bot um because i've heard base game two player only even though box says you can play two to four players i've heard at two players it's not very good yeah and so we've actually played this game three player with the bot and over facetime with a friend and of course four player in that very first time we ever played and also we have the app so in preparing for this game there is an app on the i on ios devices and it is really good yeah um and so we've you know we've been able to kind of experience multiplayer that way but i would say that in terms of the clockwork expansion it is a very good expansion yeah you know it's not going to perfectly simulate a player there are things they're little nuanced things that you kind of lose out on like the specific effects of the building types that the marquis puts out you know you're no longer taking consideration wood tokens which also means you don't get to score points for removing those wood tokens that's true yeah yeah i would say though some the way the the bot works kind of allowed me to get point points faster because the bot was forced to take my tokens off it was forced to go into areas for me to get me more cards meaning so at the very end i was like well i got all these cards i can just lay out a bunch of sympathy yeah that's true so in a game where it's a it's a human playing the cat they probably have been like okay i'm gonna avoid naveen there because i don't want him to get anything extra let him grind and try to figure it out yes so i will say the bot kind of helped me out there but that also can play into naveen's strategy as a woodland alliance i know that if the mechanical marquis pulls this order card they're going to be forced to take my sympathy token so maybe i'm going to put my sympathy token there right exactly um so i think it is a little bit harder for the erie or maybe it doesn't play it well i don't know you're telling me let us know um but it it it does definitely it's a lot more punishing because they they get to battle in like if they if they pull a bird card they're gonna battle at all the clearings that they're in yeah so the bot is quite aggressive and you can scale the difficulty of the bot uh with those um level of difficulty cards that we did not play with cards you could make it easier you could make it more difficult if you want a challenge you can also add traits to that bot which we're probably going to showcase in the next play through but in general i think that the clockwork expansion is fantastic for filling in you don't even have to fill in just one player we could do a four player game with two bots which i don't know we may do in the future i want to see all four bots playing against each other automate them automate everything yeah zero players but it's also good news for those of you who play solo yeah you can do so you can do a four player game with you and three bucks yes you can but in general the last thing that i want to say about player count is i think that the four player game is probably still the best it's the richest of this game put the vagabond in there so the vagabond can checks and balances you know all the factions that not one gets you know really dominating i guess and what about in terms of replayability yeah so i mean we've played this now a lot quite quite a bit and every single time i play it i'm very excited i think there's so much replayability because now you can play as all these different factions also so it's not like i okay i'm just gonna always be the woodland alliance yeah so that that adds so much replayability because now it's like oh i want to explore what the vagabond has to do and i want to explore that six times you know before i want to move on to the next one so yes you can purchase all of the expansions you can get all the different factions and mix and match and kind of see how everything feels when you mix and match the different factions together in a game and i believe there's a bunch of different maps also yes yeah yeah i was gonna also mention that there's also the winter side of this board but also it's a game where it makes me feel like every time i come back to the table i want to try something new even if i play the same faction i'm going to try i'm going to try a different strategy i'm going to play as eerie again and i'm going to start with a different leader right just one of those games that you can just play over and over again and still enjoy it every single time in terms of weight that's another thing that i really like about this game it is not heavy the the heaviest part of the game is the rules overhead yes once you figure out how the game plays then just follow through yeah and now in terms of mechanics what are your thoughts it goes back to the asymmetry thing for me so like everyone has the same mechanics but they all work a little bit differently yes uh i think the most interesting mechanics though are the erie with the programming i love this faction yeah that is the most interesting thing do too well in this place but i do but i really do think that this is an interesting faction yes i i find the area to be very strategic and before we continue i also do want to mention that for anybody who's looking for strategy guides for root lord of the board on youtube and we're going to link his channel in the description below but he does fantastic root uh strategy guides player guides and i believe he's going to cover the next expansion that they just announced which is the marauders expansion specifically for two players by the way oh is that right well i i believe it benefits the two-player game even more even more yeah okay cool so but what i was going to say about the erie that i really really like about them is they're building this program right and the scary thing about building that program is what if it breaks it's gonna break it's going to break and you know the very first time in the very first or second time you play as the era you're like dreading the moment when your program breaks you go into turmoil you're gonna lose that many points but the thing that's interesting about it you can strategically plan when your program is going to break you don't want your program to last forever because that means you're only going to be using that same leader the entire time i started the game with the charismatic leader which allowed me to put out two warriors on the board when i recruit instead of one i don't want to do that the entire game right at some point i do want to transition into my commander leader which gets me an extra hit in battle so if you can figure out a proper timing to say okay i'm okay with this this program breaking so i can move on to my next one and build it up it's all about timing i suppose and um yeah you had you kind of ran into a little bit of bad luck with that you had your leader that put out a bunch of people on the map and then you rolled a bunch of zeros in defense are in defense and so you got wiped off a lot yeah i did and so then when your thing broke they weren't there for then that big military attack and the charismatic leader was gone so now i'm only putting one warrior out yeah so wasn't a very good moment for me yeah but i think the thing that kind of saves this faction is the fact that once the program breaks your roofs don't come off the board yeah so yes it's scary to lose points for each of the bird cards that are so tempting to play into your decree but you also still gain the points at the end of each at the end of each turn before having roos onto the board yeah so you can let nothing break and then just start right over again right yeah so it's not the end of the world and i think that if you just plan for when your program breaks you'll be in good shape aside from the erie that the my favorite faction of the play uh is the woodland alliance the one that i played here they're sneaky they are sneaky yes and at first you're like i'm not even on the board i'll get one point you know then you smack me down okay i get one card because you smack me down but once you finally get your first base and especially when you get your second base out there and you can sure up the base and protect them and then now you start just kind of sending out uh these sympathy tokens after that and the way it just ramps up and ramps up it gets very very interesting um yeah they have the least amount of warriors they must divvy them between their officers and the warriors that they actually put out onto the board but they also get the higher number when they defend yes that's big they're like one of those factions that you know just leave them alone let them do their thing because if you try to defend them they they punch hard yeah i really enjoy the part of i'm gonna purposely put out the sympathy token so that you can just trip it when you walk through get me a card and then hey if you want to defeat it then get me another card so that i can just spit it right back out at you and uh and yeah that sounds really funny because of that i think that specifically in the setup that we played or we played as a woodland the erie and the bot was the marquis i think that we have to ignore the woodland alliance a little bit less than usual because they can use the bot to their advantage and uh if if the erie just focuses on defeating the marquis like it typically plays out in in the standard game then it's much harder because the woodland alliance can take over much quicker yeah so i think that that's definitely a thing in the clockwork expansion anyway we can go on and on about this game but um i just want to say that i really really really really now love root yes yes this took some practice and i do recommend for anybody out there who has played maybe one game maybe two games of root and we're like you know i didn't really like it if you want to see what this game is about if you have that kind of interest then i recommend playing as each of the faction types that are in the base game and then make a decision one of the best ways to do that is through the app like you said yeah you can play as any one of the four base factions i i don't know if there's expansion factions or not but um but yeah i was able to play as each one i haven't played as the vagabond on the app the vagabond is awesome yeah i really do like the vagabond and i feel like it doesn't get as much uh attention because it's so different like people usually choose these three factions right but the vagabond is really fun um and so if you're willing to put in that kind of effort to explore this game i i think it's really really worth it so final thoughts yeah it's great i'm looking forward to our next one uh we still haven't decided what exactly combination of things we want to do but we know we are going to be using some of the expansion factions yes so we're going to support that we actually only have this the base game the clockwork expansion and the underworld expansion we don't have the riverfolk expansion unfortunately which now i'm thinking we need one day yeah because i want to collect them all i want the whole thing but uh for the next playthrough we're probably going to play the factions in the underworld expansion and kind of see how that works with the clockwork so if you have any interest in which bot that you'd like to see us uh showcase next game let us know in the comments down below and uh yeah we hope you enjoyed this playthrough and hope it made sense yes yeah sorry we didn't do a full teach but uh we figured you guys have more things to do watch us stumble through the rules so we will be back with another episode of root next week next week yes well thank you all so much for watching the video we hope you enjoyed it if you'd like to see more videos like this and you want to follow along on the series please consider subscribing thank you [Music] bye you

Channel: Before You Play

Views: 27,173

Rating: 4.9729424 out of 5

Keywords: root board game, root board game expansion, how to play root, root board game rules, root how to play, root board game review, root board game overview, root gameplay, root board game playthrough, root playthrough, root review, root expansion review, root expansions, root board game tutorial, root board game runthrough, root board game thoughts, root board game played, best root board game, review, root board game strategy, Root board game, Root expansions, brettspiele, Root

Id: FTQ2LW3GM2A

Length: 76min 22sec (4582 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ninetysixk]

I used to scroll past these videos (wrongly) assuming they were just another of the seemingly endless YouTube channels with couples playing games. Not that there's anything wrong with that but there's not much value there for me personally.

Then I heard Monique on a podcast, I think it was Board Game Barrage maybe? And she was super knowledgeable and had a knack for explaining gaming concepts in ways that helped you connect the dots. Since then I've found their videos rather helpful in learning new games, and am curious to hear their final thoughts as I know it'll be informed.

[u/BoardGamingRamblings]

Thanks for sharing! Monique and Naveen make amazing content, and we really are enjoying it :D

[u/KungFooShus]

I never really see these two linked in this sub. If there's a reason for that and I've missed a rule about it, please lock or delete this thread but assuming it's okay, please check them out as they have great content.

[u/RussellGrey]

What’s folks opinion of this at 2 players? I’m always looking for games that scale well to 2p. When I heard about the mechanics here, we gave Root a pass but the art is so adorable that I’m constantly tempted to purchase.

[u/AYCB-Carlo]

Excellent YouTube channel, and they also seem like wonderful people, which comes across even more if you follow them on social media.

And especially if you like Vital Lacerda games, you should absolutely be subscribed to their channel.

[u/Vexus88]

Love these two.

They did make a few mistakes in the video, or they forgot, like Naveen forgetting to draw a card when someone attacks him. But anyway nice play through, love Root!

[u/Brodogmillionaire1]

Loved their video playing Curious Cargo. Iirc, Monique did an awesome teach, and then the gameplay was pretty smooth and kind of cheeky. Part of what led me to getting the game. Really enjoy their content.

[u/Danny_V]

I’m assuming this is not the new 2 player expansion coming to kickstarter soon?

[u/SPAZZx625]

I really enjoy this couple. Their Fort play through was great!