The Homeland Expansion will be the second time we’re adding new maps to the game. It includes two new maps: the Marsh map and the Gorge map.
Marsh Map
While I was at Gen Con, I was a bit surprised that many people approached me and mentioned that they would love to have a map that fit games of 5+ players more comfortably. Certainly convention audiences skew toward more-invested players, but it was intriguing! The more that we thought through what map concepts would bear fruit, the more we recognized how nice having a larger map would be. Turns out that our very own Patrick Leder was tinkering with this idea already in his Swamp map. And given the new factions’ animals, frogs and bats, adding this map made total thematic sense. Behold some of Kyle’s beautiful willow trees!
The conceit of the Marsh map is simple: it's bigger—it has 15 clearings currently. However, this increase in clearings brings up a major concern: it needs to work with pre-existing products. Most importantly, we can’t leave people with the deluxe clearing markers hanging. To address this, we are experimenting with using landmarks. Basically, we’re imagining a set of three chunky wooden landmark pieces, one of each suit. These clearing suits would never change, such as by the Lilypad Diaspora. And they would likely have a secondary effect such as adding a building slot, to give the map some gathering points so that it doesn’t feel unfocused. Because they’re landmarks, you would be able to use them on other maps to modify them to your tastes as well!
The Marsh map can also shrink down. This is simple if you’re going down to 12 clearings, same as any other map, since you can just let players choose a cluster of clearings to remove from the map during setup and add a rule for how to move through them. We’re hoping to let you shrink the map down even further, to 9 clearings, but this does raise some concerns! Certain factions are limited in their token and building placement by suit, such as the Lizard Cult, others such as the Woodland Alliance have limits of one token and building per suit. The Lilypad Diaspora even has both a limit by suit and one per clearing. Will some or all of these factions break under the pressure of reducing the clearing count? Another route may be making the map simply feel smaller by closing off building slots or adding placement restrictions or warrior caps to certain clearings—flooded clearings, anyone?
Gorge Map
Thankfully, there are many fewer questions swirling around the second map, the Gorge map, originally designed by Sam Smith, the Lord of the Board. For a long time, we’ve been admirers of Sam’s map. It truly felt like something we would design, and it provided new and interesting strategic geographies to play with. Here’s the map as he designed it:
I love this map as a new take on Autumn map conventions that focuses conflict into the natural chokepoints in the gorge itself, giving it a very different feel. It also introduces no new rules, so it’s easy to learn. That said, the map was designed before the Marauder Expansion came out, which means that some of the forest shapes need to change in order to support the Keepers in Iron. This map will go through a full testing and development regime, and will of course be illustrated by Kyle.
As far as experiments go, I would like to take a page from the Marsh map and see whether there are opportunities for a modular setup where the bridges and/or ladders can be moved, but otherwise I wouldn’t expect any sea change here. Sam has clearly done his homework, and it shows. I'd like to preserve its qualities without adding a bunch of special rules that bog it down during play.
As you might tell, we’re still in the early stages of thinking through these questions. In particular, we don’t know yet whether shrinking the Marsh map is feasible without impacting balance too much! This will require much more playtesting to pin down, but it’s a major focus and we have many, many months to do it right.
Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. To find out more, click here.
Find all of Josh's Root: The Homeland Expansion Design Diaries on BoardGameGeek!