While my current stance on big publishers kickstarting games is— don’t back, I’ve been a sucker for some small or new publishers having their first go, as it should be. Making an exception with Ion Games (publishers of Pax, Greenland, Bios series games) is due to Matt Ecklund’s (and Phil Ecklund and Jim Gutt) Pax Porfiriana being astounding and becoming a new bell weather for what makes a good games. His last published game, Pax Transhumanity, is also an amazing design, and really grows on you the more you play. After listening to Phasing Player’s interviews with Matt on his games, I became stoked for his new game that just hit kickstarter: STATIONFALL.
This is a 1-9 player game that takes place on a collapsing space station where players have their own goals (not just the characters in the game). What this looks like to me is the Paranoia RPG in a board game– where people are trying to get characters back to base alive to tell the story about how X or Y other character wrecked the station/mission. All lies of course! Here is the BGG page.
There are so many… so damn many design-by-the-numbers worker placement engine building point salad games, anything that is in opposition to that gets my attention and should yours!
Ahhhhhhh the Pax series of games: complex, interactive, with inscrutable victory conditions and a cliff of a learning curve all inside tiny boxes with minimal components. With Pax Viking, now we have one that is not complex, and has (fairly) understandable victory conditions in a huge box! The question is: is this good? I think it is, as long as you set aside all thoughts of it being a Pax game or a Viking game.
I did not take any shots of the game so this one will have to do for now.
Our first go was with a whopping 5 players, and I think this is a bit too many for a first time out, not due to complexity, but due to the fact that no one knows what they are supposed to be doing and there’s quite a bit to unpack with the interactions.
You play as a Jarl who has a fleet of trading ships which are used to collect followers and open up areas on the map to trade with. This is not a viking/pillaging game regardless of what it says on the box: it’s a trading game.
Scoring (not necessarily the win conditions) is done via four tracks which indicate your Jarl’s influence over each of the four factions in the game: The Rus, the Swedes, the Jarls (warriors) and Religion. When you have majority control of one of these factions, you get a special action you can take that the other players can’t use.
Like all Pax games, Pax Viking has a market with 4 different types of cards: Gods (a type of follower), Patron (followers), Events (fuck you cards) and “Posts” which are places on the map that you can go and exploit/trade. As far as I can tell, posts represent opportunities on the map that only turn into actionable areas after you go there with your ships and open the opportunity up.
Turns consist of buying from the market, playing events, and moving your ships around the map or sitting them on a post to take the actions available there. The game reminded me a little bit of a rondel game (Great Western Trail) where you take actions at various spaces to build up resources for some other thing you are trying to do later. Unlike those games, you can move your ships around anywhere you want on the map. This makes planning a bit more difficult because there is no ‘on rails’ rondel you are following to force your choices.
Battles are super simple with no dice. If you have more ships, you remove one of the enemy ships and then push the rest out. No battle takes place with an even number of ships on both sides and you can never suffer losses as an attacker. It made me laugh as the act of killing is called “Parlay” in the game. ha!
Winning consists of fulfilling certain conditions before other players. There are 4 win conditions and these do not change–they stay static for the entire game an all four of them are open to be fulfilled from the outset. In contrast to the other Pax games, you do not beat the other players in some sort of contest after a comet/topple nor do you trigger the availability of a win condition that is now open to all players via an event. Instead, you race them to complete one of the conditions to win.
In thinking about this game and what it is mostly like– I would say certainly this is not like the other Pax games. The closest cousin to Pax Viking in my humble opinion is Merchant of Venus and Wasteland Express. If you like those two, you should definitely check out Pax Viking. It’s really not a traditional Viking game, it’s an ‘open up markets and trading game’ at it’s core. I’m interested to play this again with that in mind. When I squint my eyes a bit at this design I see a deep space trading game where you have two empires, a religion and some other faction that you are trying to succeed as a space trader in context of. That theme seems to fit this system a lot more than Vikings.
Rulebook is good. Graphic design is fair, components are good, Map looks good, though it’s tough to see all the rivers/access points sometimes. Character artwork is really boring and mundane, from the cover of the box to the pictures of the gods and the Jarl’s themselves. When you own TWO Viking games with art from the LEGENDARY Adrian Smith, it’s tough to stand against that favorably. When you are doing art representing a Norse god, it should not look just like any of the other normal characters in your game.
Next up for me from Ion Games is Bios Mesofauna– probably game of the year unless something comes out of the blue.
I wanted to start the year as I mean to go on, and PAINT SOME SHIT. I’ve actually done quite a bit of painting recently trying to get my copy of The Others to a state where I can play a game with all painted minis, but this week, with (almost) no more Goliaths to paint, I started a test model for my Van Saar gang.
I started with a spare Eldar Guardian to test out the scheme and it turned out almost good enough to continue on to one of the Van Saar models from the excellent but very difficult to build GW kit. I have a bit of patience for painting, but NONE for putting shit together. Please help me.
I’m a very sloppy painter, so fantasy miniatures and grungy stuff (like Goliaths and Orlocks) are much easier for me. The Van Saar will take a lot of precise edge highlighting, which is not my strong suit.
Any way here’s the guardian:
And here is the progress on the Van Saar.
Base ColorsJust after doing the metal, lots left to do but hard parts are done.Getting close to done.
The female heads in this kit have no hair, and it can look OK with just a pure bald head, but as I looked at it more, I just thought it looked lame with this color scheme as the skin color is not totally far from the high armor color, so I did a light grey wash over her tonsured scalp and there you go–looks a lot better. I’m going to get the Forgeworld Van Saar heads for the other females and other dudes. Those gals have hair!
She ended up looking a bit like Thug Rose (not that a Van Saar would ever smile).
Anyway, a start to the year of painting at least. If I can get these guys done by summer, it will be a miracle.
What came out this year that was great? Not much. 2018-to-now the majority of board game design has pretty thoroughly descended into extremely formulaic games with three specific traits in all: very little player interaction, a focus on engine building, with a point salad at the end (again, because if you knew who was winning, you would target them, and that’s a no no these days).
Root was a breath of fresh air last year in this rather fetid tide of same-gameness. Root showed to many people that you CAN and should have constant player conflict and this won’t hurt people’s feelings and most importantly, can be extremely fun. The body of my board game collection is held up by the spine of Cosmic Encounter, Dune, Shadowfist, Eclipse, Study in Emerald, Root and now the Pax games with everything else sort of filling in niche interests for me like euros (Brass) or co-ops / dungeon crawls (Massive Darkness). Almost all the games I like the most have direct player conflict and the potential for massive hamstringing, which is in direct opposition to the current trends in design. I’m hoping the success of Root will engender more designers to build COIN style games and gamers to take an interest in Cole Wherle, Phil Ecklund and the COIN series (and offshoots).
For many people this was a tough year to get gaming in face to face, but we managed it quite a bit later in the summer and especially Fall. Due to this, not quite as many games hit the table, especially anything new. Frankly having to learn new stuff this year felt tiresome with the infrequency we got to play– we went for the meat and potatoes this year: mostly shit we already knew how to play. I only played three new games this year, and one was a new version: Eclipse: Second Dawn, Godzilla: Tokyo Clash and Fort. Fort was not my type of game at all, and we only got one play in before I traded it, so game of 2020 that was released in 2020 is definitely Eclipse: Second Dawn... which is really just an update of a 2011 game after all.
Second Dawn is good, but it’s MUCH harsher than the first edition with serious players. You get one shot for the win now that it’s down to only 8 turns, and if you have a bad run of tiles, a really bad dice run in battles, there is no chance to come back into the game– you just can’t pivot to another strategy like in the old game. Some players will like this, others will not. I will definitely need to play Eclipse more before deciding on which of the versions is better. I hate to say it because I absolutely despised Twilight Imperium 3rd edition, but I have to give TI4 a try before calling Eclipse the reigning king of 4X space games. You know, ones that can actually hit the table instead of just sitting on a shelf because they are too complicated or system-heavy to actually play.
The game of 2019 was Root, and I really played the shit out of that last year and quite a few times this year as well, we shall see if lightning can strike twice with Leder games upcoming Oath game– which looks very…. strange.
This year the game I liked most to play was Pax Renaissance, and this isn’t even my favorite Pax game (which is Pax Porfiriana of course), it’s just the one that shows off what this type of tableau and conveyor market type of game can really do. Instead of just drawing cards or chits from a cup (a la Gangland, the Great Khan Game, King of the Tabletop), you can see what’s coming and control events to some extent. This is one of the best aspects of the Ecklund (pretty much everything) and Wallace games (Princes of the Renaissance, Study in Emerald) I love the most. Pax Pamir is a solid game, but because it uses points for victory, which is very strange compared to the other Pax games, it’s out of the running for the best Pax games– still really good though.
In light of 2020, I don’t think there will be much in 2021 that can compete with existing games, hopefully there will be some surprises. Kickstarter-wise I’m waiting on Oath, Bios Mesofauna, the new edition of Pax Renaissance, Pax Viking and what will probably be another mountain of boxes mistake: Bloodborne from CMON.
You read that right, 13th Age in Minaria— the campaign setting from TSR that never was, and could have been.
For the non old-person, Minaria is the fantasy world created for the Divine Right board game, which many of us had as kids in the 80’s. While the game was a bit labyrinthian for a 9-12 year-old as a hex and counter, the map board was on the wall of my bedroom for at least 15 years. The map and counter art is by Dave Trampier, and is amazing. The Tower of Zards, Invisible School of Thaumaturgy and all the awesome mercenary units (like Hamhara the dragon) were incredibly fertile ground for the imagination as a young and now older mainge.
The mystery is why this was not turned into a Greyhawk style campaign setting by TSR as all the assets were right there– just needed someone to start writing modules for it! There were multiple articles in Dragon Magazine on Minaria and it’s environs. Anyway, time to redress this issue!
13th Age and Minaria are a great combo as the 13th Age world itself is godless and pretty generic fantasy, especially since it has no gods which I’ve always found very strange. While Runequest has a bit too much to do with the gods for me, the 13th Age world just doesn’t seem grounded. The Icons in 13th Age are really just basic concepts and with Minaria, there are oodles of Icons that are far more interesting and engaging than the stock 13th Age ones. Yet on the plus side, you have the amazing 13th Age system, which is probably my most run RPG in the last 5 years or so. While Minaria is not explicitly high fantasy, it has enough of those elements to fit well with the more gonzo fantasy of 13th Age. Minaria and Divine Right are still products of the Gonzo TSR age.
I’m not GMing this one, which is a great break from almost always GMing and I get to play a rogue, so far my favorite class for the game (among many awesome class selections). The fun part about the rogue is that you can bounce around the combat area almost at will, you rarely get stuck, and you can hammer enemies.
I’ve only been in two sessions with the group so far and we are in some rather familiar house by the sea near Port Lork at the moment… and we’ll see where this goes.
I have no idea how this plays, but am very curious. I don’t play a ton of 2-player games, preferring the 3+ for most of my board gaming, but of course, it has to be purchase because it’s Cosmic Encounter.
I LOVE the titles on the ‘attack’ cards (a few listed above). They should put that into every new version of Cosmic from now on.
Gencon just announced it’s cancellation, while at the same time scout camps are firing up and kids will be at camp in a couple weeks across the country- outdoor events in contrast to a major indoor one mostly in closed rooms with recycled air. What Gencon likely doesn’t want is to have a super-spreader event, however unlikely that is during the middle of summer, and have everyone go home and spread it around– a lot like what happens with Con Crud. Again, very unlikely, but I can see why they cancelled it. Indoors, people pressed together, people talking and yelling and getting real close. Sucks, but here we are. Gives me an excuse to finally not go after going since 1994 every…. single… time and instead stay home and game with almost the same friends that I game with at Gencon anyway. I will REALLY miss the auction though… fuck.
That said, a lot has changed in the last couple months and a lot will change in June and July. You have extremes of people who say they will never go to a bar again in 2020 and stay at home until 2021, i.e.:, the bed wetters, and others that are already out at the bars partying and going to underground speakeasy’s and secret restaurants, i.e.: the ‘get it in my body herd immunity folks’. We’ll have to see which extreme ages the best. Most will choose the middle ground, stick to small gatherings, look at the local situation and wait a bit.
What they thought would happen.What actually happened.
My question is, will the cancellation of Gencon open the way for local cons at the same time to step up and fill the gape? They would have to be set up very quickly and frankly for the group of people most effected by the panic even more than your typical facebook Karen– nerds that are on the computers all day long with the horror of bringing every named death, every celebrity infection, every horrifying hospital and morgue story, every panic porn story about kids dying at age 9 (which was debunked, the woman was actually 94) right at their finger tips at any moment.
I’m hesitant to say yes. I think there will be small cons, maybe a beer stand, some tables at a game store an some stuff in the parking lot. There likely won’t be anything on campuses as they will sadly be closed most of the summer (and many won’t ever reopen anyway as they’ll be out of business), but it’s possible that in some places people set up conventions, especially down south where they are drinking a whole bottle of ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ If they do happen, and people divert this year to these cons, they may just continue to do so?
Would it be the year to bring Gencon back to Lake Geneva? Maybe as an all outdoor event in the summer heat? Maybe have age and health screenings in order to be able to go to any group events? You have to be under 40 and fit– and this isn’t really the demographic unfortunately– but FAR more so than when I went to gencon in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. You can’t age or health stratify any event, from sports to cons or even going to the grocery store. For liability: if you have the event and keep certain people out:litigation!, or if you have the event and someone gets sick: litigation!, all events will likely be cancelled regardless of the progress of the virus itself.
Having followed and played Root for almost a year now, I highly suspect from a thematic perspective that the much balance-maligned Vagabond is absolutely meant to be the strongest ‘faction’ in Root. I realize some of the vagabonds are stronger than the others, but for simplicity, I’m going to treat him as a singular faction.
First off, what is the vagabond mechanically?
He’s a timer. The way his points escalate and the fact that he can only be mitigated, never ‘beaten’ times the game. Whether it’s killing all meeples or doing quests the vagabond WILL win the game unless someone else does first. While this applies to all of the factions, many of them require certain board conditions to score that are opposed directly by other player’s faction goals, the Vagabond does not.
He has no board presence. When you look at a ROOT board, you see Cats, Cats, Cats and one area with a lot of birds. This remains this way until mid game where there are TONS of cats in one corner and quite a few birds (or moles or lizards) in other areas. The vagabond isn’t easily noticed on the board and doesn’t raise alarms because he can co-exist with other factions either in the forest or in clearings.
He’s a force multiplier. The vagabond can give other factions much needed cards and help in other ways if allied (move armies around for example). If you are friends with him, he can help you a lot– but at the cost of helping him win the game.
He has ridiculous action economy potential. While the vagabond cannot be stopped from winning eventually, the core issue is that mid to late game, he can take a shocking amount of actions, especially if factions have built items and the Vagabond has created spaces for the other players by exploring ruins (many experienced vagabond players don’t do this). Once he gets an item, unless he’s extremely unlucky with an attack on his turn, he can basically never lose that item.
He punishes the heavy crafters. While the other factions may be scoring points by building stuff (looking at you Alliance), they are also making the Vagabond that much stronger. If players don’t pay attention and suddenly two of them built swords in the same turn– watch out world.
In fighting games like Virtua Fighter or Samurai Shodown, or miniature games like Warhammer 40K or Necromunda there is always imbalance and the designers have to decide what characters or factions are better than the others, because it’s nearly impossible to balance all the sides– so they must pick some to be stronger. They usually do this due to theme.
A great example is Ken and Ryu from Street Fighter. Ken is by far the strongest against the entire roster than Ryu is. However, Ryu is basically built to beat Ken.
In some cases, sometimes designers choose the factions with the most learning curve to be the strongest– IF the player is willing to put the time in to learn them. Izayoi from Blazblue Central Fiction is a good example– very difficult to play as a new player but in the hands of someone who has put the time in, probably the best character in the game. Akira from Virtua Fighter is a very difficult character to learn and use, and while VF has no tier list (it’s just that well designed), Akira is a good example of this.
The Vagabond is the most difficult faction to learn in Root with the most word-count in rules and very ticky-tacky. However, I would argue that rules mistakes with the Vagabond usually HELP the player of that faction rather than hurt them, which is different from the Alliance which needs all of the minutiae of their mechanics to work together for the win.
While there have been some tweaks to the Vagabond since the first printing, it’s nothing major DESPITE all the weeping and crying of players when they lose time and time again to the vagabond (especially Alliance players!). Why is this? THEME.
a real jerk
I think the designers very much want to have an extremely strong (strongest in fact) Vagabond faction thematically. The Vagabond is Yojimbo. Siegen Irako. Ryunosuke Tsukue. The man with No Name. Kibagami Jubei. Patrick Bateman. This is the essential protagonist (or antagonist in some cases) in the stories they inhabit. Bateman is literally trying to destroy people’s lives to draw attention to the absurdity of modern existence. Ryunosuke is so troubled by his past crimes and compartmentalized by society (literally and figuratively at the end of the film) that he just goes ahead and tries to kill EVERYONE. Yojimbo, Jubei and the man with no name waltz into control-machine factional conflicts and tip the balance so that the entire local system collapses onto itself. This is what the vagabond’s role is in Root– upset everyone else’s systems. If you ignore him, he wins. If you attack him, it’s usually to no advantage to your own faction and may even weaken you so you are at the mercy of the other factions. This is how it’s supposed to be.
I actually posted about Irako Siegen and ROOT on board game geek a while back after finding this quote while reading the Manga:
ALL of the other factions represent hierarchical societies and fixed class systems (yes, even the Covids and the Woodland Alliance). The vagabond, like Irako Siegen, is there to repudiated them ALL.
So, the next time you get your ass handed to you by the Tinker prancing around fulfilling quests and tinkering away or one of the psycho killer vagabonds wrecking the Lizard rabble for massive points and bitch about it to everyone: remember, it’s supposed to be that way.
2019 marks the end of the amazing career of Alan Moore with his final comic in the Tempest series of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s easy to make fun of the comic industry and the thousands of comics that are well produced but absolute dreck each year and in addition to that, what I think Moore was saying with Tempest is that the characters that people create are more real than reality itself and will continue on long after the society that created them has been destroyed. While everyone knows Watchmen, do check out his run in SWAMP THING, which was my first exposure to his work as a kid. Him quitting makes me feel pretty old.
Anyway, League was a very interesting series. I wish he had one more block of comics that were more the straight story (like the first two volumes) rather than getting super crazy (Tempest, Century and Black Dossier) or speeding through stories (Rose of Berlin, etc.). What I love most throughout League are the thousands of literary and comic references in each series. It’s almost too much to try to follow on your own, which is why the comics are fully annotated here. With Moore done, is there a reason to head to the comic store at this point? Not too much at the moment.
Films.
Lighthouse, Godzilla. Pretty much runs the gamut of my tastes right there. Godzilla was campy and awesome and Lighthouse was freak out like A Field in England, Mandy, and Valhalla Rising.
Star Wars 9 was interesting to see how they worked around all the problems handed to them from Episode 8 which, like Song of The South and for the same reasons, Disney should put in the vault. Yet it was not a great film and definitely had the ‘just fucking end it’ feeling. I enjoyed some parts, but it’s not worth watching again. Kylo Ren, the most interesting character played by the best actor in the series, had the weakest arc and stupidest outcome. It’s ok for Jedi, like the samurai and warrior monks that influenced them, to sacrifice themselves in battle! Fucksakes. As mixed as the series was, Adam Driver carried the team all on his own. Anyway, I’m getting pumped for sitting down with the Mandalorian though.
My favorite non-2019 movie this year was the LAST VALLEY. Never heard of it? of course you haven’t, but it’s got Omar Sharif and Michael Caine and set during the 30 years war. Among many excellent scenes, in one they play dice for a woman! 1971 had some awesome films.
I probably should have seen a lot more films this year, but just about everything seemed so boring, it’s more fun watching reviews than the actual films!
Board Games.
Root is my number 1 game for 2019. Played the shit out of it, forced everyone to play (many didn’t need it), ran a tournament at Gamehole con and I’m eagerly awaiting the expansion (though I did the print and play with the moles) which will spark up another frenzy of playing. This has killed so many games in my collection. I know this may sound strange, but it scratches the 40K and WFB itch as well.
Otherwise, my current favorites are the PAX series from Sierra Madre Games. I cannot tell you how much I love Pax Porfiriana– so much so that I haven’t even got around to Pax Pamir. Pax Transhumanity is good, but not compared to the other Pax games that I have (Ren, Pamir, Porf). Right now unfortunately for my gaming group (or fortunately if you also love these games), Pax is what I’m bringing every time.
Boardgames are in a really odd state at this point. There are amazing designs coming out, but there are so many design-by-the-numbers worker placement/engine/point salads games that are really all the same and, in general, super tedious. I don’t want to pick on Stonemier games, but they seem to be the Nickelback of boardgame publishers– just putting out the same thing: “multiplayer” solitaire, puzzle, tableau point salad games with a slapped on theme. I guess this is what people want these days. ZZzzzz…
While I’ve stopped doing boardgame kickstarters for the most part, we’ve had had some good times with Zombicide Invader but not enough to warrant the space it all takes up, so I’m on the fence with that one. My kids seem to prefer Massive Darkness anyway despite the fact that it’s much more complex. I like Invader with the kids because it’s NOT complex and I don’t have to explain tiny details all the time, or we get our ass kicked because they forget everything they have leveled up on their sheets.
I did NOT get in a bunch of games of Hate in 2019, which came out early in the year. I don’t know what to say about that one except that it is an absolute work of art from the rulebooks to the boards and especially the miniatures, which are the best that CMON has come out with by far. Seems like it may be a fun day to do a short campaign with 4-5 people, but hasn’t happened yet.
Video Games.
My game of 2019 goes to Samurai Shodown. I just got it, it came out this Summer and I should have picked it up on day one. My mistake.
The game I spent the most time on this year, which is incredible, was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Simply an amazing open world game trying to be as historically accurate as possible. I really never expected anything like this to ever be a large, huge budget video game. Play it as soon as you can.
Lastly which is an honorable mention is RAGE 2. While the whole thing didn’t really come together, the shooting parts, as I noted in my review, are SUPERB and it’s a damn fun game with an uninspired story with the most unfortunate part being that the vehicle combat was uninteresting. I had a lot of fun with the game and will probably reinstall when there’s more DLC action.
Music.
Well there wasn’t an Aphex Twin record this year, and that’s OK because last year’s Collapse was all we needed for awhile, plus the live shows he has been doing the whole year have been incredible.
In 2019, I’ve been listening to a lot of Hadyn and some other random stuff, but I don’t think I listened to any new albums this year enough to comment. Nothing from Wisp (Dwallicht), Lord Huron, Squarpusher (he did a modern organ music thing that was pretty interesting but not on his own).
That said, I’m going to say my album of the year is Hadyn’s 64th.
This is from ’78, but also very interesting.
RPGs
Last and probably least are Role Playing Games. This year I pretty much put everything RPG on hold due to other real life stuff. Next year will be better as I’m a community leader in a certain youth paramilitary organization that’s taking up quite a bit of free time but won’t be next Fall. I did get to run DCC and Feng Shui 2 this year and played in a good Call of Cthulhu one shot, but that’s about it. Most of my RPG stuff is gathering dust so I’m probably going to shed a ton of it in 2020. My three favorite RPG’s as of now are Mythras, 13th Age and of course, Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition looks like it will have some awesome adventures coming out, including a redux of the Enemy Within, but after talking to some friends that played it extensively in the last year, the system has a lot of fundamental problems, which is really unfortunate in this day and age and especially after the mess that was 3rd edition by Fantasy Flight.
The first annual Wisconsin Root championship is in the can and I had a ton of fun running it. We had a full group with 16 players and four tables, which was a great turnout. About 3-4 of the players were new to the game so it was also fun for everyone to introduce the game.
I’m going to go through the rounds, then the winners and then some stats at the end. There were some beautiful and vicious games throughout the tournament but I couldn’t watch them all.
I just want to say that I did pull out a crushing win with the Otters while the final was going on and I hope to see more Otter players next year– they really are easier to win with than the Lizards!
Faction Selection
Players rolled dice and the highest down got to select their factions. This allowed players to play to their strengths but also forced players to play factions they weren’t great at sometimes as well.
Scoring
I did a two round swiss (~2 hours each) with a final with the five players with the most points. All other rounds were 4 players. 1 point for a win, 0.5 for a second place. We had a very large group of people tied for slots in the final, basically because we had so few rounds (only 2), so I would not do it like this again.
Dan is contemplating his future dominance move…
Round one
The Cats pulled off a win at Table 1 (Joe S) with the Vagabond in 2nd place (Graham).
Table 2 was won by the Eyrie (Courtney) with the Alliance in second place (Adelheid).
Table 3 was won by the Lizards (Chris K) with the Alliance in second (Chris S). Dan G went for a Cat dominance victory in the game and was crushed outright!
Table 4 was the Alliance for the win (John R) and Lizards in second (Matt T). IIRC Matt had 29 points as lizards again in this game.
Silas makes a move with the Lizards
Round Two
I put the winners and second place all mixed up together and the rest of the group on the other two tables. We didn’t have any drops between rounds which was great.
Table 1 the first Vagabond victory by Wyatt dominating the game with Beth taking second with the Eyrie.
Table 2 Brad Z pulled out another win with the Cats with Dan G in second place with the Eyrie.
Table 3 was won by Joe S who played as the Alliance with a couple of the other players tied for 2nd place (Courtney and Adelheid).
John R won table 4 with the Alliance and Chris S took 2nd with the Eyrie.
Tables 1 and 2 in round 2 (and Wyatt has some kibitzers)
Finals
This is where my point system didn’t work out well, as we had three people that had either multiple wins or took one win and a second place who were for sure in the finals, but four people that had a single point. Matt T and Wyatt decided not to continue in the final round so we had our five. Again, I would be more granular next time with this few of rounds so this didn’t happen.
The final Table was:
Brad Z – Eyrie Chris K – Vagabond – Tinker John R – Woodland Alliance Joe S – Vagabond – Scoundrel Courtney – Marquise de Cat
I was playing in another game during the final (these guys all knew how to play and didn’t need me much at all to arbitrate) so I don’t know how it went play by play, but it looked like everyone was at parity early and the Tinker jumped ahead and then got it done.
Kris K pulled out the win as the Tinker Vagabond with everyone else in second place except the Eyrie.
Joe giving the LOOK.
And below are our winners. I had a first and second place prize (the BGG Root bags for each faction) so I told Kris I would owe him some bags since he doesn’t own the game yet and gave the prizes to John, Joe and Courtney.
Courtney, Joe, Chris K, John.
STATS!
While the winning faction was no surprise to anyone (and probably got a few groans from experienced players), there were some surprises for me in terms of what factions were picked, and which ones won games.
Woodland Alliance
Another heavily favored faction to win, the Alliance was selected in 7 games and won 3. Selection to win ratio was 0.43.
Marquise de Cat
Assumed to be one of the weakest factions in the game, nevertheless, the Cats were a force to be reckoned with yesterday. Games without the Cats get very strange for other factions and really turn the faction ‘tiers’ on their head as well. The Cats were selected in 7 of the games and won twice. Selection to win ration was 0.29.
Vagabond
While the winner of the tournament and heavily favored in any given game, the Vagabond was only selected in 8 of the games (twice in the final) and won twice. IIRC we saw a Tinker, Scoundrel, Thief, Ranger and the Possum played. Selection to win ration 0.25.
Lizards
Considered the most difficult faction to win with, the Lizards were selected in 5 games and won once for a ratio of 0.20. I noticed a few players were playing them wrong so watch the rules carefully.
Eyrie
The birds were selected in EVERY game of the tournament and there were some very good bird players. However, they only won once with a selection to win ratio of 0.11. The Eyrie took second in almost every game they were in so watch out!
The Otters
The Otters were only selected once (by a player new to the game) and they didn’t pull out a win. I did score a victory with them in the game I played while the final was going on. Trust me, they are MUCH easier to win with than the Lizards!
Rules and Arbitration
Root is not an easy game to learn and many players (including myself) get small rules wrong, especially with the Vagabond, Otters and Lizards. The main thing I was looking out for was that the Lizards must discard a random card when they lose a garden, and it’s critical that they know what actions they take require a DISCARD and which ones are just REVEAL. The Vagabond is very ticky-tacky with a lot of rules. I reminded players that if you exhaust and item that’s not in the satchel– it goes immediately into the satchel (like tea).
We had one set of boards that didn’t have the 3rd printing update on them, so we had to layover printed sheets. Hopefully for next year we will have that all squared away.
I only had to look up stuff a couple of times. One question was whether or not you could play multiple Ambush cards in a single battle. You cannot.
So thanks to all the players and Gamehole Con for hosting and of course Leder Games for making Root in the first place. Thanks Matt, Dan and Brad for letting us use your sets of Root!
