Root

Wonderful game! Played many times and still feel like I am figuring out the layers of strategy available - worth my time and my money!

Innovative and tightly designed. The asymmetry is interesting but may inevitably create some sense of imbalance or whiplash for new players that can be hard to smooth over.

** disclaimer, I was a playtester **

It's odd, this is a game that changed so much from when I first played to when we played the final rule set on a pre-production copy. Cole's written a bunch of stuff that was in progress, and I'm not going to rehash that. I think the things that really resonate with me is:

A) This is about the limits of enjoyable asymmetry in my mind. You sort of need to be able to relate to other people's factions and have a core binding element to really make a game come together. I think Vast was too far, but the common deck, battle, ruling criteria, and a common series of objectives (VP or VC card) really give this game enough gravity.

B) The game works because the factions are tested and really pretty good, but the alt-VC cards are what makes the game shine IMHO. Now you have some alternative to just performing better (which is the problem with most VP race-style games) and that this creates this whole other thing to keep track of in a sub-optimal way if you're the leader is fantastic. Much better than the original cards, which was better in practice (but not in theory) than the board control alt-VCs when we first started testing. At 3p, it's positional with pitting players against each other, but more so than that, your dominance cards can actually be triggered so you're enacting this suboptimal plan for points while trying to stave off someone else scoring a dominance victory. At higher counts, the odds you control 3 out of 4 bunny spots means you're probably going to do well in points anyway or you're playing the winter map with a clumped clearing setup.

C) Related to B, I think it's a fantastic game at 3p, really pretty good at 4p, and I'd rather not play at 2p. That said, 2p beats 5+ because the downtime is brutal in my opinion. The game is setup mechanically so that it bottlenecks the decision making process to the beginning of your turn more often than not. In particular, the Eyrie suffers from this as a programming faction. It's not bad necessarily, but does limit the player count. Some of that is just preference (and my lack of interest in downtime), some of it is just how it is.

The production is fantastic, everyone at Leder should be really proud of this effort. A solid game.

The game seems fun at the beginning, but it feels too asymmetrical in my taste and the game may not be balanced until every player knows how to play.

Location: YVN

I had high hopes for my first play and wasn’t disappointed. It is an excellent design and I can see why board game geeks are so enamored. I would happily play this again.

I chose the Vagabond for my first play which turned out to be a good ‘faction’ for my play style, the Vagabond is more about resource management, which is my regular wheel house, while the other two factions were all about area control and I was surprised to have won this game.

I went along my business while they got caught in tussles, keeping each from taking the ultimate win and that left me enough time to get the points needed FTW. Still it was close at the end and I was in no way playing optimally.

This first play was at game-day on someone else's copy. I've become so enamoured I had to buy a copy!