Root Rules New Players Get Wrong

New Root tables rarely get a faction badly wrong, because each faction board spells out its turn. The slips happen in the shared rules, the ones everyone uses and nobody reads twice. This lesson collects the common ones, each checked against the Law of Root dated October 13, 2025.

The Law asks to be read literally. If a rule does not say something happens, it does not happen, and if a card disagrees with the Law, the card wins.

Moving and rule

Mistake: moving out of a clearing you do not rule into another you do not rule. To take a move, you must rule the clearing you leave, the clearing you enter, or both. The Vagabond is the exception: he moves regardless of rule.

Mistake: counting tokens toward rule. Rule counts warriors and buildings only. Wood, sympathy, the keep, and the Vagabond pawn do not count. On a tie, nobody rules, unless the Eyrie are among the tied players: their Lords of the Forest ability lets them rule ties, as long as they have pieces there.

Mistake: one move per warrior. The Law sets no movement limit on a piece. If an action gives you two moves, you can move the same group twice.

Battle

Mistake: rolling more hits than you have warriors. Each side’s rolled hits are capped by its warriors in the clearing. An attacker with one warrior who rolls a 3 deals one hit. Extra hits from cards and abilities ignore that cap, and so does the extra hit for attacking a defenseless defender, one with no warriors there.

Mistake: removing a building to save a warrior. The player taking hits chooses the order, but every warrior there must go before any building or token. And every enemy building or token you remove scores you 1 point, in battle or not.

Mistake: ambushing late. An ambush card is played before the roll, by the defender, and must match the clearing (birds match anything). It deals two hits right away. The attacker can cancel it only with a matching ambush of their own. If the ambush removes every attacking warrior, the battle ends.

Cards and crafting

Mistake: activating one workshop twice. Each crafting piece can be activated once per turn. To craft a card with two fox icons, you need two fox crafting pieces.

Mistake: crafting an item that is not there. Item cards take their item from the supply on the map. If that item is gone, the card cannot be crafted. The supply holds only 12 items, and there is a single crossbow and a single hammer among them.

Mistake: swapping a bird for a bird. Birds are wild when you need a fox, rabbit, or mouse. But if a rule asks you to spend a bird card, only a bird will do.

Mistake: holding six cards overnight. At the end of Evening, every base faction discards down to five. The Alliance’s supporters are a separate stack and do not count toward the hand.

Faction rules that touch everyone

Mistake: forgetting Outrage. When any player moves warriors into a sympathetic clearing or removes a sympathy token, they must give the Alliance a matching card as a supporter. If they cannot, they show their hand and the Alliance draws a card for the stack instead. Placing pieces there does not trigger it.

Mistake: entering the keep. No one but the Marquise can place pieces in the keep’s clearing. Others can still move in and battle there.

Mistake: clearing ruins with anyone. In the base game, only the Vagabond explores ruins. Without a Vagabond, those slots stay blocked all game.

Scoring and the finish

Mistake: waiting for the end of the round. The first player to reach 30 points wins at once, even mid-turn. If two players reach 30 at the same moment, the tied player closest in clockwise order to the current player wins, and that includes the current player.

Mistake: scoring removed warriors. Removing warriors scores nothing in itself. The Vagabond is the exception, with extra points for battling Hostile factions.

Mistake: playing dominance in a two-player game. With two players, the four dominance cards come out of the deck at setup.

A rules habit for the table

Keep the Law nearby, and when a question comes up, look it up rather than vote. Leder Games also runs a card library at cards.ledergames.com for specific card questions. Settling a rule in thirty seconds keeps the game moving and keeps it fair.