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In 2018, the board game Root was released by Leder games, to a sort of confused, but very enthusiastic ‘hooray!’ Based on earlier successes by the same developers (and some weird, contentious ‘hey, you copied my notes’ complaints), Root is an asymmetrical war game, where in the base box, you have four factions competing with one another to try and take control of a nonspecific woodland glade. Each faction, the game promised – and delivered – are different; not the same rules with a few different units, but entirely, meaningfully, complicatedly different in how they relate to one another.
Lauded for its emergent complexity and its charming aesthetic, Root is one of those games that quickly became institutional; multiple expansions, fan merchandise, an RPG in the setting, all that stuff that signalled people are into your game, the base board game Root is probably one of those recent classics. It’s kinda funny to talk about in hindsight, to revisit these words from years ago because like, Root isn’t even the biggest Cole Wehrle game, and its weird early start is now just a footnote, certainly compared to his work on Pax Pamir. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just know that each of these things I’m mentioning is worth an article unto itself.
Root, the board game is a lot of game. As kickstarter products go, it’s one of those games that absolutely jam-packs the box with stuff, and it’s not even like that’s a bad thing in this case. While I will regularly dunk on kickstarter board games for making tons of pieces that are unnecessary — looking at you, Kingdom Death Monster. Root is a game whose meeples and cards and board and all the tokens and reminders are there to serve a purpose, and then maximise their charm and value in that space. The copy of Root I’ve handled – which isn’t mine – is very present in its mass. It’s a really, really charming game, and the game you get is very rewarding per-kilogram price. While normally kickstarter games with a lot of good material components are secretly miniature distribution venues with a board game attached, Root is using every gram of its materiel.
I never wanted to buy Root, though.
Look, Root is amazing. Don’t take me saying that as a mark against it. Games aren’t inherently valuable, you don’t just automatically want them for any reason. Any given game’s value should be considered in what it offers, and that’s kind of why we talk about games like this. To complain about Root the board game is to pre-emptively make excuses about why you don’t like it, it seems. Root is a game that doesn’t fit my life, and the reason why is kind of specific.
What it is is what I refer to as mastery depth.
Mastery Depth is a term I used when talking about Century: Golem, then realised I may have never mentioned it anywhere before. I mention it from time to time, and then don’t explain myself, which is a great example of bad academic language. Here’s the concept, then: Mastery. The ‘put it in a single sentence’ version of Mastery looks like this: Mastery is the way the game is affected by having already come to understand the game.
That’s a small sentence, it’s reasonably simple words. Like any simple phrase in games studies, it comes with weight that makes it feel challenging to properly handle. Let’s dig into it, then: For pretty much every game, previous experience playing the game makes the game easier to play. Sometimes that’s just a matter of learning the rules more thoroughly, so you don’t need to look things up. Sometimes it’s about knowing what you should prioritise in the game, after the rules present them to you as a big wave of equal stuff.
Mastery depth is a way to look at a game in terms of how much of what a game does that rewards players with more or less mastery. Is there a game you can think of where there’s a particular dangerous situation that can come up and you need to know how to recognise it? What about the way we see Chess, a game with a variety of ‘openings’ that require learning a new language to understand? Mastery is how you recognise those things. A game that rewards mastery often rewards playing with mastery – games like Dungeons and Dragons are mind-blowingly complex, but as you master them you learn how to stop caring about unimportant details, and learn ways to build the game to get the outcomes you want.
A lot of games get called ‘bad’ because they lack mastery depth, and some are ‘bad’ because their mastery depth has a hard limit. Connect Four and Tic-Tac-Toe are games that once you understand them enough are solved, and the person with sufficient mastery knows the way the game will go and wins it. By comparison, though, there are some games where it’s hard to tell different levels of mastery – you can look to the intricate and complex development of Magic: The Gathering, where asking a computer to calculate ‘best plays’ in any given situation is brain-explodingly difficult.
Bear in mind what players need to know, how much they have to play, and if your game needs mastery or rewards mastery, and if you’re okay with that. Mastery is fun! I love games with a lot of mastery depth… but I’m also learning to love the games that are a bit less likely to reward you for a long-term plan.
I’ve been thinking about this these past few years as the weird uncle watching my family’s relationship to games changing. There was a point where games had to be almost universal, players need to be playing with the same pieces and information had to be open so I could help maintain the game state for the young kids trying to play. But then things developed and evolved and now I’m at the point where they’re playing complex games like – well, Magic: The Gathering. What this means is that I’ve been familiar now with a really interesting experience of watching a playgroup evolve in real time over the past few years.
It’s heartwarming and honestly really cool. It taught me a lot about ways that these ‘simpler’ games could be engaging in different ways. King of Tokyo and Century Golem are two games I would never have sat next to one another but their mastery depth is very similar, and the games you get to play out of both one are both really good. And this idea, Mastery Depth, is at the Root, ha Ha, of my reasons for not wanting my own copy of the great woodland war game.
This is a game with four factions, each of which play explicitly very differently and do their own unique form of play, which means that you need players for that. This isn’t a game I can take to a family gathering and sit down and play once or twice a year with my mum and nephew. This is effectively four separate games in one box and each of those games interacts with one another, and those interactions are complicated. In order to play this game, everyone needs to be aware of how their faction plays and how to play it right, to just make it function, and then they need to understand what’s important to that function to play it well.
Basically, this is not a game for ready sharing, this is a game for playing and replaying with a small group of people who want to play it again and get better at it. This is not to say this game is not a game for people like me: I love the complexity, I love the systems of the game, and I love the ways they give you choices for how you engage with the game. Yet, this is not a game for a person like me.
This is a game for four people like me.
I don’t have four people like me.
Root needs table space, too, of course. This game sprawls out and it needs a gutter to play around so you can put your player card somewhere and your hand and keep track of what’s going on. I do not have a big, clear, open table for playing board games. When I do have access to big tables, it is often at the University, or it is at my parents’ – and my parents have dining tables that have other needs.
Point is, Root is a game that asks of me materially in ways I cannot give it; I cannot give it the players, and I cannot give it the space.
<videogame footage starts>
This is where I get to point to good news, everybody, because Root has a digital version on Steam. and that good news is extremely good news. See, to my absolute shock and delight, Root on Steam is pretty much everything you’d want out of a digitised version of the game. It is visually charming, with lovely models and animations that do not carry the same aesthetic character as the meeples the board game does, but still convey the tone of the different factions.
As a digital game, Root melts away a lot of the things the game does that you need to pay attention to and process and handles them for you. You do not need to shuffle, the deck of cards is not a thing you look at – it’s just that at the end of your turn, cards appear in your hands. You do not need to look over at other player’s boards or ask them to calculate their Victory Points for you, because those are presented on the interface itself. Information is brought forwards as necessary and you are given room to inspect the game in the ways the game recognises you need to.
It’s also quiet: You do not have to communicate with the other players if you don’t want to. For random games of a board game with strangers, this seems like a bad thing, but you have to remember that the videogame community and board game communities are not necessarily dealing with the same problem. Videogame players can use the videogame plateform to quell anxiety, and to not have to talk to people or make sure they’re managing the rules correctly (and avoiding a socially awkward fight at the table) can be a delight. The game handles asymmetrical play – where you can turn up, play a turn, then log off for days at a time if necessary.
Is it a strict upgrade? of course it’s not. To talk about these games as if they’re comparable versions with a better or worse misses the point. Root is a beautiful game that’s very complex, hard to manage in your house, and challenging to find players for, which means for me, it’s strictly superior to have Root on Steam.
But you know what will never happen?
My partner will never wander by the computer while I’m playing Root, look over my shoulder, and say ‘oh, that’s cute, can I join in?’
I will never be able to take a meeple from the box of this and use it in another game for an impromptu bit of house ruling.
When the servers shut down, I will lose access to this copy of Root and have no way – literally no way with my current skillset – of changing that.
If I don’t plan on playing Root this month, I won’t be able to hand it to my friend Pendix and say ‘hey man, give this a shot with your partner for a few weeks, see what you think.’
The ways we structure our relationship to games change based on how we play them. Root has a digital version that solves so many of its problems, and let me play the game with some people I really care about. Opening those pathways limits others, and that means that as with many such things it’s a compromise. In a lot of ways, it’s best not to think of Root the board game and Root the digital game as just the same game, but rather, two asymmetrical factions in the same space, competing for your attention in different ways.
Root as I said up, in the top, a really charming game, a game that I like and that doesn’t serve my needs a lot. But now I have a version of it I can always play with one of my friends. We can even play with the expansions very cheaply. For this reason I give Root a score of Friends/10.