The World’s Cutest Power Politics Simulator

There are few tabletop games more relevant to our times than Root (2018). At its most basic, the Leder Games bestseller is an asymmetric wargame pitting rival factions of cute little woodland creatures against one another for control of a forest. Marshaling and deploying your troops, claiming territory, and routing enemy forces in Root proves intrinsically satisfying. Yet the real fun is that each faction (ten with the current expansions; soon to be 13) involves divergent play styles, scoring conditions, and paths to victory.

For example, the Marquise de Cat, an extractive industrialist faction portrayed as a herd of bright-orange felines, benefits from building infrastructure and controlling space. The Riverfolk Company, a gang of mercantile otters, profits from selling cards and personnel at a premium to players in need. And the Woodland Alliance, an assemblage of rodent and vulpine revolutionaries, seldom occupies the board – until exploding onto the scene at key moments to kneecap the opposition and score major windfalls.

The variety among the factions creates many permutations for Root scenarios, forcing players to reformulate plans and adapt their strategies as the state of the board evolves. Yet it’s not all hardcore calculation. Luck-of-the-die combat and diplomatic table-talk add “soft” strategic elements – and prevent the game from ever being solved. It makes for a highly replayable, deeply engrossing package. And, if Root’s lucrative Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, people love the formula: The original game raised over $630,000 USD against a modest $24,000 goal, while its most recent expansion mustered a whopping $2,449,036.

Yet Root’s cute and cuddly aesthetic (part Brian Jacques’s Redwall, part 2010s Cartoon Network) belies a cutthroat power politics simulator with a sophisticated understanding of asymmetric conflict. The game asks what happens when actors within the same political environment neither play by, nor have incentive to play by, the same rules – and provides a means of visualizing the consequences. At this particular historical juncture, Root proves relevant because, in modeling political and structural asymmetry in the abstract, it furnishes a tool for thinking through their attendant problems and possibilities.

These represent pressing questions in today’s United States, where political and structural asymmetry have metastasized into existential hazards. Traditional mechanisms of understanding American politics (i.e., legacy media and its analytical apparatus) conceive of the two major political parties as more or less equivalent. Despite the parties’ contrasting views of what constitutes good governance, it’s supposed that they have similar motives and incentives based upon the rules for garnering power within the constitutional order, and therefore pursue power by similar means within the bounds that order prescribes.

Recent history, however, has decisively discredited this assumption. Institutional advantages favor one and only one party, which accordingly acts in bad faith, fosters authoritarianism (if not outright fascism) and undermines the practice of democracy. The same span has demonstrated prior methods’ insufficiency for diagnosing this asymmetry, much less communicating or addressing its unchecked corrosive effects. By way of example, there’s little consensus in current philosophical literature regarding when or whether to sideline liberal democratic values in defense of liberal democracy itself; PhilPapers logs nearly 1,000 results on the “Paradox of Tolerance,” indicating the unabating headache bad-faith actors pose to democratic societies. Meanwhile, the work of pro-democracy journalists and media scholars have exposed the inadequacies behind modern journalistic habits, such as symmetrical news coverage (“bOtH sIdEs ArE tHe SaMe!”) and horse-race journalism, that result from the collective inability to resolve such paradoxes. The conversational trajectory indicates an ongoing struggle to accept the perils that political and structural asymmetry constitute – and telegraphs that solutions are slow in coming.

Here, Root steps in as an imaginative exercise to clarify the situation and its fundamental causes. Designer Cole Wehrle, whose doctoral dissertation discusses “the narrative dimensions of empire,” is sensitive to how ideology informs action. Accordingly, Root’s central political insights come from the interplay between the factions – specifically, in the tensions between their aims and how they can be realized. For instance, the aforementioned left-coded Woodland Alliance can’t win without establishing a groundswell support network. The Corvid Conspiracy, an anarchic coven of corvine chaos agents, needs machinery to rage against; their strength is proportional to what their schemes will cost their enemies. The oligarchic Great Underground Duchy, whose action economy hinges on recruiting and retaining mole nobility, must project strength at all times; losing infrastructure spurs nobles to withdraw support, permanently hobbling the Duchy’s motor. The factions’ various methods and ideal board arrangements demonstrate how victory looks different for different value systems, and must be achieved – and maintained – by means that accord with their principles.

Furthermore, defeating each faction requires varying tactics, illustrating the necessity of tailoring one’s approach based on what fuels one’s political rivals. Combating the militaristic Eyrie Dynasties head-on is often less effective than sabotaging small but crucial components of their war machine. The ubiquitous but slow Marquise de Cat can’t keep pace with multiple fast-moving threats, making them vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts. Vigilante and insurgent factions founder when more muscular rivals subject them to regular policing. The takeaway is to use one’s own strengths to deny what one’s opponents do best – in other words, not to play your opponent’s game, but to play yours. At the same time, the fluctuating board state means that alliances must often be forged and broken to maintain the balance of power among factions. Judging when or whether to tip the scales often matters more than blazing ahead with one’s own agenda. Thus, Root’s other lesson is how the path to success in politics is never one-size-fits all, and confrontations with rivals are seldom zero-sum when other parties stand to benefit from those interactions.

Playing Root always makes me feel as if I come away a little bit shrewder – like I have a sharper understanding of how people operate the levers of power available to them, and how others might throw wrenches in the machinery (for good or for ill). I hold out hope that Root can provide the wider public some groundwork for thinking through the implications and practicalities of political and structural asymmetry themselves. Root is valuable because it furnishes a baseline for assessing the dynamics of asymmetric political arrangements, but its true worth comes from encouraging players to picture what comes next, giving them a springboard for imagining – and enacting – solutions to the political asymmetries of our own era.

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Alexander B. Joy hails from New Hampshire, where he used to spend the long winters reading the world’s classics and composing haiku. He now resides in North Carolina, but is plotting his escape. Find him on Bluesky and see more of his work here.