Teaching Priya Root and Immediately Regretting It

I wrote in my Root review that the learning curve on that game is steep enough to need a resident expert at the table, and I want to be honest about something that review left out, which is that I was the resident expert the one time it really mattered and I was bad at it.

Priya’s my usual two-player partner most weeknights, and she’s good, genuinely good, better than me at plenty of the lighter stuff on our shelf. Root asks something different though. Four factions playing four structurally different games on one board, and I decided the smart move was to teach her all four factions in one sitting instead of just picking two and letting her learn the rest by watching. In hindsight that’s the kind of decision you make when you’ve been staring at a system so long you forget what it looks like from the outside.

She picked the Vagabond because the little raccoon token looked friendly. I should have seen that coming. The Vagabond doesn’t play like the other factions at all, it’s closer to a solo quest character wandering around exploiting everyone else’s mistakes, and within maybe forty minutes she’d figured out the item economy faster than I explained it and was quietly running errands for both the Marquise and the Eyrie players in exchange for favors that, it turned out, were bankrupting both of them without either one noticing until it was too late.

I was playing the Eyrie, whose whole mechanic punishes you for not following through on decrees you make earlier in the game, and I spent half the session so focused on not breaking my own decree chain that I didn’t clock what the raccoon was doing to my economy until my board had basically collapsed. Priya won. I don’t think she fully understood why she won, which might be the most honest way to win a game this asymmetric on a first try.

We’ve played twice more since, and each time I’ve been smarter about only introducing one new faction at a time instead of trying to hand her the whole board on day one. The thing is, she still gravitates toward the Vagabond every single time, and I’ve stopped fighting it. Some people are just going to be an agent of chaos regardless of which faction you hand them, and honestly the games have been better for it.