For a lot of people, that’s what it is still in gaming. Even if they’ve progressed away from Monopoly and into games like Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne, the difference between you and me is that I’m blue and you’re red. Otherwise everything we do is the same. And that’s a-okay in a ton of a games. There isn’t a need for your character to be slightly different than mine, but in some games, it makes the game a whole lot better.

Back in 1949, there was an attempt to make “unique” characters when Clue came out. Professor Plum, Mrs. White, Mr. Green, and the rest of the cast allowed you to pick your favorite based off of more than just color of the pawn you were using. Now, they gave you some art, but it really wasn’t a unique character at that point. You were really just picking a color still. But in some ways that was the start of having unique characters. It gave some foundation that could be built off off later.

Now, we see two prominent ways that unique characters are done in board games. There are more ways beyond that, but there are two major ways. The first is the special power route. Your character has something specific they can do that no one else can. The other way is the asymmetric route. Definitely the harder of the two to pull off, because what you do in the game is always different than what I do in the game.

The first type, is the special power or action that only you can take. A great example of this is Pandemic. In this game you have a base set of actions, treat disease, move, trade cards, etc. that everyone in the game can do. But each character has their own special action that they can take or improvement upon one of the other actions. For example, all characters can treat a disease by taking a cube off of the city they are in, but the medic can take all of the disease cubes off of the city they are in. The dispatcher, on the other hand, can move people on their turn, versus just having to move yourself. The rules still apply the same way for how they can move other people’s pawns.

You can start to see from Pandemic how having unique powers can make the game different each time in different ways. In fact, unique powers are a really good way to keep a game replay-able over a long period of time.

There are games that keep the base action for you, but allow either for changing your unique power or setting up your own unique powers. Two examples jump into my head quickly. The first being Smallworld. Since the races and powers are randomly shuffled, you might end up with flying wizards one time, and wealthy wizards another time. In this case, the game, like in Pandemic, dictates what your unique power is.

There are games, however, that allow you to determine how unique you want your character to be. This is the other example, Blood Rage (also Seafall does this), where you can spend action points that upgrade your clan. A pair of warriors can be made to be worth more in battle for you, or you can gain points when your warriors die in battle and go to Valhalla. Maybe your clan leader is now worth more points, or you can move your ship in a certain way. Maybe you have access to monsters now. Based on how you draft cards, you can shape your own player board to be unique. This type of game is interesting because at the start of the game, your clan is the same as everyone else’s clans. But as the game progresses, the clans play more and more differently depending on your cards, and which ones you choose to use. In Seafall, had the game been good, it was similar where you started out with the same base at the start of the first game, but you could buy upgrades that left from game to game, but you could also put in permanent upgrades as well, so the more you played the more unique you were.

Now, that has been the simpler type of player powers to talk about. The more difficult is the asymmetric player powers. The reason that this is tougher is because even if there is the same base to the game, everyone plays with that differently.

A great example of this is Root. In Root everyone has some pretty similar actions, but how they go about doing all of them is completely different. While you all might be moving troops and trying to control areas, the cats, to gain more troops have to build up various buildings, where as the birds are trying to create an order or cards that they play. The woodland creatures are just trying to get onto the board by using cards in yet another way, and the Vagabond is doing something else different with their actions.

This type of game is very interesting, and Cry Havoc is another example. There is one fairly big downside to a completely asymmetrical game. The time spent teaching the game the first time you play it is pretty to extremely high. In Root, for example, you have to explain a fair amount about each character, even though some of the base actions might be the same. In Vast, this problem is made even larger by the base actions being a greater variety. Cry Havoc is probably the easiest of them to teach, because the base actions for everyone are the same, just the buildings, objectives, and special powers mean that how you play the game as each faction is different.

You can see how this has all moved on from Clue where you had a name for your character, but that was about it that made you unique from just being a different colored pawn.

There are a few more ways that games try and add differences. The other most common, though what you can do might not change, is the hidden traitor role in a game like One Night Ultimate Werewolf or Resistance. These games, what everyone does is basically the same, some expansions provide more variability to the game, but in the base, you can hide your actions because you are doing the same thing as everyone else.

This has then been expanded upon with games like Dead of Winter and Shadows Over Camelot. Shadows Over Camelot gives the bad guy more that they can do, if there is even a traitor in the game. In Dead of Winter, each player has a hidden objective. So while you have the exact same set of powers, you are trying for a slightly unique state of the game when it ends, mainly what you have in your hand at the end of the game. For me, these games can be a bit more hit or miss, because depending on if there is a traitor or not, it can greatly hinge the game on various things, and it can at times force you to look like the traitor to actually win the game. If there was some balancing mechanic for it, it would make the game better, but potential hidden traitor and hidden objectives is very hard to pull off well in a game.

That’s a lot variable player powers and the range that can run. Personally, I’d be interested in seeing a reworking of Clue so that Professor Plum can do something different and better than Colonel Mustard, but that’s already been done in some of those investigation games, like Fury of Dracula.

What are some of your favorite variable player power games? Are there some where certain combinations are too broken to play with so you’ve banned them at your table?

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This is a game made by the same people as Vast: The Crystal Caverns, another asymmetrical game where each person is trying to complete their own objectives and score points in their own way. In Root, players take on one of the four different factions, there are also two more in an expansion, and battle for control of the forest. They do that by crafting items, building in locations, and moving about and fighting each other but each does it in their own unique way.

The Marquise de Cats already have most of the forest as they start on the board in every spot except one, and they are looking to use their superior creature count, at the start of the game, to control the forest, build more buildings, and really set-up their dominance in the forest. They do this primarily by adding building that allow them to craft items, build more buildings, and recruit more cats into the forest. However, if they lose too much ground, they might find their production a little bit low. The Marquise de Cats are probably the most straight forward of the different factions to play.

The Eyrie on the other hand are very regimented birds. They also start on the board, but only in a single location. The player picks a leader of the birds and that determines some of what they can do, because the birds are basically building out a decree, and the decree says that things must be done in a certain order in certain places, and if you ever can’t do the decree, the birds go into turmoil and your leader is overthrown and a new one comes onto the board. They are an interesting one to play, and while the game calls them low complexity, because of the fact that you’re locked into doing things in a certain order and at certain locations, you really want plan out what you’re adding to your decree, because you have to keep adding to it every turn, and if you aren’t careful and you go into turmoil, you could end up in a situation where you’re losing a number of points if the decree fails.

The Woodland Alliance is really focused on causing uprisings. They are sowing unrest on the board at the start of the game, and trying to get locations to revolt. If other players have enough creatures in locations, it can stop you from being able to sow unrest there. But once they start getting those on the board and they start causing revolts at locations, other players need to worry because they can spread fast, and they can definitely take advantage of the Eyrie and Marquise fighting against each other to seed unrest.

Finally, the vagabond is just going along through the forest, trying to find gear to improve their actions. They use their gear to be able to do more actions on their turns, and go on quests. The vagabond, like the Woodland Alliance, has a bit of a ramp to the character, because they need to have enough items to be able to complete quests, but once they can start completing the quests, their points will start growing quickly as the more quests that they do of the different colors, the more points they get.

I’ve personally only played the Eyrie, and they are a ton of fun to play. I kind of agree with the makers of the game that the Eyrie are a low complexity faction to play, but I wouldn’t say they are that easy. I had a large decree set-up that allowed me to recruit a lot of troops, move some, attack a little, and then build some of my roosts, so eventually I wouldn’t have been able to continue doing the decrees, but I made it through almost the whole game with a single leader. However, watching the Woodland Alliance and Vagabond being played, both of those seemed like a lot of fun as well. Even with the Marquise de Cats having a more straightforward playing style, you are often having to be the player who keeps everyone in check because of your starting board position and that definitely seems like it could be tricky.

In our game the Vagabond won because the Eyrie was growing so quickly, and the Cats hunkered down that they were playing against each other almost to the point of a stalemate. And the Vagabond was able to get their questing rolling and started getting a lot of points. Then the Eyrie had their decree broken by the cats, and there wasn’t anything that the Woodland Alliance was able to do to stop the vagabond. It made it interesting to see how you had to watch out for the different factions in different ways. The Woodland Alliance got hurt a fair amount by the fact the Cats and Eyrie grew so quickly, it kind of locked the Alliance out of a lot of areas, so they were lagging behind point wise, but the Alliance player still had fun playing them.

Now, clearly I had a lot of fun with the game and playing it, and everyone having different abilities and different ways that they play the game is very cool. That said, the game does have one fairly major drawback. It’s not a game that is fast to teach to new players. If everyone is new, you have to go through what each faction does and how they work as well as the basic actions of the game. So it can take quite a while, and there can be a number of questions about the game and how things work as well. It’s probably a game that is worth checking out reviews or “how to play” videos online ahead of time for all players so that you can get it up and running fast.

That said, the points are score quite quickly. That does mean that the actual game, for how long the game takes to teach, does move by at a good pace. Even the turns that players take are pretty quick. Add in to that some interesting strategy and while you aren’t involved in other peoples turns, you still have to pay attention to what they are doing, there isn’t that much mental downtime in the game. It helps keep the game quite engaging throughout, as long as you can make it through the rules.

Overall, it’s a fun game. I do think that this game will be a miss for some groups because of the complexity of teaching the game, though, if they can make it through that by watching a video to learn how to play or something along those lines if they aren’t good at just sitting and listening to rules, most groups will like this game. The artwork on the game is amazing, and the cards are goofy and cute so the game feels less heavy than it is on some ways.

Overall Grade: A
Gamer Grade: A
Casual Grade: C

The casual grade gets a big knock because of how long it takes to teach the rules, a casual gamer isn’t going to want to sit through rules that are that long. As a gamer, I barely wanted to sit through rules that were that long.

Have you had a chance to play Root? If so what did you think of it, and what is your favorite faction?

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