Hello everyone! Josh here, designer of the Homeland Expansion. Today we’re releasing the third print-and-play, including some stuff that you haven’t seen yet: the three new Hirelings and all of the Captains for the Knaves of the Deepwood. You’ll find all of that here.
All in all, the project is right on schedule. On the design side, I expect a couple more months of serious development. I’ll release one more Print-and-Play when we’re all done, which will include the maps, landmarks, and three new Vagabonds. On the production side, we’ve received and approved samples for almost all of our hard components. Here’s a (literal) handful of them, including the three new Captains. If you’d like to see more of ’em, check out our studio stream tomorrow at 2 PM CST.
This design diary will be pretty short and sweet, but if you would like a lot more discussion about how the project has progressed, as well as a full walkthrough of the factions as they stand, please check out this video on Design in Progress, a Youtube channel by Jacob Knipper (better known as Endgamer), who is a Root fan, playtester, and co-creator of the Dawn and Dusk fan deck.
In a couple days, Jacob will also post an interview with me about my history in the games industry, how I got involved with Leder Games, rules writing, how Leder Games has grown and morphed over time, and much more, so keep an eye out for that too.
Lilypad Diaspora
The Diaspora has continued apace and is basically done. Since winter break, only a few frog cards and a number here or there have changed. I expect to make a couple more design tweaks on the same scale, and of course they need a bunch of art, especially for the frog cards. I’m very proud of them. That’s really all there is to say! Please enjoy.
Knaves of the Deepwood
With the Knaves, you will notice a pretty big difference immediately—they only have one Captain now. By and large, I made this change because one piece of feedback kept coming in again and again: the Knaves were fun to play as, but not fun to play against. A big reason behind this was their three-Captain structure—they had the ability to project force across too much of the map, they were too flexible in their action structure, and they didn’t care much when their Captains got hit. Going down to one Captain solves this problem and opens up the faction to more interesting dynamics with their building, the den. You’ll see that their dens can take actions, representing their network of lackeys doing their bidding.
This also plays into the second major change: the faction is more streamlined. From the beginning, I set out to make this faction straightforward to play. However, every faction tends to go through a period of increasing complexity as I experiment with various systems, seeing what works and doesn’t, then I transition to making big cuts, reconceptualizing what works in ways that fit together much more smoothly. In the second print-and-play, the Knaves hit peak complexity and have been getting simpler ever since. More streamlining is to come!
Finally, you’ll find that the print-and-play has a ton of Captains with new abilities! As the Knaves continued to develop, it became clear that most of the Vagabonds’ original abilities, even if reworked, wouldn’t highlight the interesting parts of the Knaves, so I’ve rewritten them to be unique. A couple Captain abilities are still similar to their Vagabond versions, but I expect them to develop into new, unique ones over the next couple months.
Twilight Council
As I alluded to in my previous design diary, the Council needed to go back to the drawing board. And I’m happy to say, they’ve become much better for it.
Their conceit remains the same: they are a group of Woodland elders and notables who run assemblies in order to resist the war and create some semblance of popular governance in the midst of civil war. However, the faction now drives toward this goal in a totally new way. Instead of the assembly happening through a card game, which many testers have lovingly referred to as “bat poker,” the assembly now uses an auction system. Broadly, based on your map position, you can send your warriors out from your supply as Influence on the assemblies, and you can spend cards to resolve their Orders against your enemies, turning the tide of the war.
This transition does make me a bit sad—after all, the old system promised to enrich some dusty corners of the design, like the crafting costs on cards. However, balancing this system across the goals and abilities of every Root faction proved to be extremely difficult without creating a huge edifice of rules. Even worse, most of the strategizing leading up to an assembly happened secretly as the players curated their hands for bat poker. It didn’t provide the hooks for a shared story, which is the worst thing you can say about a Root faction.
The fundamentals of this auction system have stayed stable for about three weeks now, and I’m confident this is the way to reach the finish line. That said, many specifics are evolving day over day, and much work remains to be done. But no longer is this faction floundering; it’s flying. If you want to hear more—and I mean a lot more—about this process, please check out the Design in Progress video I mentioned earlier.
Finishing Up
That’s it for the factions. Otherwise, development is basically done for the Squires and Disciples deck, Hirelings, and Landmarks. Now that the factions have solidified, we’ve begun serious playtesting on the new maps. Look out for the maps and Landmarks in the final print-and-play!
If you want even more Root stuff, Cole Wehrle and I recently participated in a video discussion on Homo Ludens about the historical inspirations behind Root’s factions. Though I’m biased, I thought it was a fascinating conversation. Please check it out!
To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!