Root app.

Root is one of the top 100 games on Boardgamegeek’s rankings, which skew heavily towards more complex games, especially those with very little luck or randomness, and it now has a gorgeous digital port from the heroes over at Dire Wolf, who have never missed on any of their adaptations of tabletop games (in my opinion). If you like Root, or wanted to try it but didn’t have the mates to make a game of it, this is absolutely for you. That said, I’ve cooled on Root since I first reviewed the game a few years ago, as I found the rules for each individual faction too fiddly, taking a lot of the fun out of the play.

Root is an asymmetrical game with four factions in the base game for players to try out. Each faction has unique rules, and a unique setup, so playing one gives you very little insight into how to play the others. The four represent forest creatures who function differently in the woods, and whose goals differ from each other’s. Two of them rely primarily on area control, but the cats start out controlling most of the board and try to hold on to it while building three building types in clearings they control, while the eagles start with just one well-defended clearing and score by gradually taking over more clearings and building further roosts. The foxes – I think they’re foxes – are more like a populist guerrilla army, and probably are best served making friends with one of the first two factions and fighting the other by sowing dissent in specific clearings. The vagabond, a raccoon in the physical game, is a lone wolf – no pun intended – who rarely benefits from battles, faring better by running around the board and trading goods with the other players (who can’t decline, but do gain from it). There are expansions to the physical game with even more factions to try.

The digital adaptation looks incredible. Dire Wolf used the art from the original game but makes the app look like a cartoon, and the animations are clever and fun, especially as the animals run from clearing to clearing (or, in the vagabond’s case, to hide in the forest). The app makes it extremely easy to see what you can do on a turn through sensible highlighting and good color contrast, and in general the app will present you with an option if it’s available to use, such as cards you might play at the start of a battle. I would like to see an option to turn off some of the animations – it takes too long to resolve battles, for example, and the smoke that appears when a clearing changes hands isn’t all that helpful – but they’re at least visually appealing.

The one aspect the app is missing is a stronger undo function. You can reverse some actions, but not others, like undoing a move from one clearing to another, and it’s unclear what the difference is. Experienced players would probably feel this lack less than I did.

The app also comes with an outstanding tutorial that lets you play as each of the four factions, starting you off in each mini-game and then letting you finish them off by yourself. The rules of Root are fairly involved, and the tutorial focuses on the big picture rules, with the more detailed text rules available through the main menu. It also does a solid job of getting you acclimated to the screen and layout, which is like the physical game but with a slightly isometric view. All of the potential moves and the cards you have are displayed on the screen at all times, and you can click on your faction card to see the moves you can make each ‘day’ and how your faction scores. Moves available to you are highlighted in the lower right, and grayed out once they’re used or unavailable.

The problem I have with Root is that the more I play it, the less I enjoy it. There are way too many situations where you’re prevented from doing something because of an arcane rule – you don’t have a card matching that specific type of clearing, for example, although there were situations where I thought I had the right card with the right symbol and still couldn’t use it because I have no idea why not. One of the most frustrating experiences for any game player, regardless of skill level, is to be unable to do something obvious, like defend yourself in an attack, or build something you need to continue to play. Root is full of moments like that. I suppose adherents would say you have to plan accordingly so you don’t end up in those situations, but in the app, it’s even harder to keep track of what’s what. In the Steam version, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to zoom out to see the whole board, although I imagine that’ll be obvious on tablets; either way, it made planning harder because I could never figure out what cards I had to keep – and, unfortunately, you can lose cards to other players in Root. The best laid plans of mice and cats and eagles often go awry in this game. Whether that’s your cup of root tea (a card in the game) is really for you to decide.