New players treat the shared deck as a pile of powers to craft. Stronger players treat each card as a choice between three jobs. It can be crafted for its effect. It can be spent for its suit, to pay for a faction action. Or it can be held, because an ambush in hand, or the threat of one, changes how the table attacks you.
This lesson is about choosing the right job for each card.
What is in the deck?
The base game’s shared deck has 54 cards in four suits: fox, rabbit, mouse, and bird, with birds wild. The Law names two kinds that cannot be crafted:
- Five ambush cards: one fox, one rabbit, one mouse, and two birds.
- Four dominance cards, one per suit, which change how you win. The dominance lesson at Level 3 covers them.
The rest can be crafted, and they come in two kinds. Immediate effects resolve and go to the discard pile, and most of them make an item. Persistent effects stay in your play area for the rest of the game, and you cannot craft a second copy of one you already have.
Crafting costs and pieces
To craft, you activate crafting pieces in clearings matching the suits in the card’s bottom-left corner, each piece once per turn. The Marquise uses workshops, the Eyrie use roosts, the Alliance uses sympathy tokens, and the Vagabond exhausts hammers in a clearing matching every icon.
That makes crafting a map question. A faction with crafting pieces in all three suits can make almost anything. A faction with one suit is stuck with what that suit allows. When you choose where to build or spread, ask which cards you will be able to craft from there.
Persistent effects that keep paying
Persistent effects are where crafting compounds. A few of the base deck’s are worth knowing by name. These are summaries; the card’s own text rules.
- Command Warren: start a battle at the start of Daylight.
- Cobbler: take a move at the start of Evening.
- Tax Collector: once in Daylight, remove one of your own warriors from the map to draw a card.
- Better Burrow Bank: at the start of Birdsong, you and another player each draw a card.
- Codebreakers: once in Daylight, look at another player’s hand.
- Scouting Party: as attacker, ambush cards do not affect you.
- Stand and Deliver!: once in Birdsong, take a random card from an enemy, who scores a point.
A persistent card crafted early pays every turn for the rest of the game. That is why the Walking Through Root booklet points the Marquise toward Command Warren and Cobbler: for a faction starved for actions, a free battle or move each turn is worth more than most items.
Some cards are one-shot battle tools: Armorers (discard to ignore all rolled hits you take in one battle), Sappers (discard as defender for an extra hit), and Brutal Tactics (an extra hit as attacker, but the defender scores a point). Royal Claim can be discarded in Birdsong to score a point for each clearing you rule. And the three Favor cards each remove every enemy piece in clearings of one suit, a huge swing that is hard to afford.
The item race
Items score the points printed on the card when crafted (the Eyrie score only 1). They go in your Crafted Items box, where the Vagabond can take them by aiding you.
The supply holds 12 items: two each of boots, bags, swords, tea, and coins, and one crossbow and one hammer. When the matching item is gone, any card that would make it cannot be crafted. So items are a race. The Vagabond wants them most, because items are his actions, and every item another faction crafts is one he must earn by aiding them.
That gives every crafter a choice. Craft an item the Vagabond needs and it becomes a trade good: he will pay a card and a relationship step for it. Craft it when he is Hostile to you and you deny him for good.
Spend or craft?
Many turns, the best use of a card is its suit. The Marquise spends birds for extra actions. The Eyrie must add one or two cards to the Decree every turn. The Alliance turns cards into supporters and officers. The Marquise’s Field Hospitals and Overwork both cost cards.
A simple rule of thumb: craft a persistent effect if it will fire at least three or four times before the game ends. Otherwise, ask whether spending the card for its suit moves you closer to 30 this turn.
Hold your ambushes
An ambush is worth most in your hand. It deals two hits before the roll, which wrecks an attack of two warriors and cripples one of three, as the battle odds lesson shows. Because hand sizes are public but the cards are not, any player holding cards might hold one. Spending an ambush for its suit when you need the card is fine. Spending it casually throws away the best defense in the game.
Next lesson
Root Table Talk: Reading Threat, Making Deals, and Kingmaking
Next, table talk and kingmaking: what the Law allows in deals, how to read who is winning, and how to keep the table fair.
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