![]() ![]() There’s a whole world here, and the fable part of it makes it not so grim and dark!’ Because we’re not big fans of just endless grim, dark, grim-darkness.” “I was going around doing quests and stuff,” Truman said, “and I had one of those moments that was just like, ‘This would be a really freaking cool RPG. But he resonated in particular with the Vagabond, the solitary figure moving in the background and something altogether new in the COIN genre. As a fan of existing COIN games like A Distant Plain, he was intimately familiar with the mechanics. When Magpie Games co-founder Mark Diaz Truman first encountered Root, he was blown away. The game itself contains almost no “fluff,” or elaborate narrative content to set up its conflict. It should feel like the worst kind of thing to deal with.”Īs a result of this very conscious effort to avoid any parallels to our real world, Root is almost entirely devoid of backstory. When you’re playing as a Woodland Alliance you can feel like Robin Hood, but for everyone else playing against them, they should feel like al-Qaida. The example I always use when we talk is the Woodland Alliance. “So it’s not like, ‘Oh, the birds are England.’ Nothing like that. “We were always very careful at the very beginning not to make any sort of cultural or racial equivalents,” Ferrin told Polygon. But Root has won widespread acclaim by very purposefully filing off the serial numbers found on historical international conflicts.Īccording to Ferrin, that was a very intentional choice. Written out like that, it’s easy to see the parallels to the real-world wars in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Cuba - all settings for other, more niche COIN games. Meanwhile, the Vagabond is literally just this one powerful racoon running around in the background having adventures, fully able to cast in his lot with any or none of the other factions on the board. The Eyrie Dynasty, on the other hand, is a monarchic regime trying to return to past glories. The Woodland Alliance is essentially a nationalist group of revolutionaries fighting against an occupying force, the Marquise de Cat, which has come from outside the woods to impose its own rules on its native inhabitants. There are four main factions in Root - the Eyrie Dynasties, the Woodland Alliance, the Marquise de Cat, and the Vagabond - and they all work very differently from one another. In fact, its mechanics are loosely based on the counter-insurgency (COIN) games pioneered by former Central Intelligence Agency instructor Volko Ruhnke. But while artist Kyle Ferrin’s work makes the complex wargame appear like something from Target’s toy aisle, the game itself has more in common with much headier wargames. It’s an asymmetrical wargame where cuddly creatures fight for control of a fantastical woodland. The original Root board game, released in 2018, is a weird one. ![]()
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