Root Woodland Alliance Strategy: Sympathy, Outrage, and Revolt

The Woodland Alliance starts the game with nothing on the map. No warriors, no buildings, just three cards face down. Leder Games describes it as a faction that begins slowly and builds toward a dramatic late game. Played well, the Alliance ends up everywhere at once. Played badly, it spends the whole game waiting.

This lesson covers the Alliance’s four moving parts: sympathy, supporters, revolts, and officers.

How does the Alliance score?

Mostly by placing sympathy tokens. Each one scores the points printed on the space it uncovers on the Sympathy track, and the later tokens score more. A revolt adds points too, because removing enemy buildings and tokens scores 1 point each. Crafted items score as normal.

Supporters and Outrage

Supporters are cards on the Alliance’s Supporters stack, separate from the hand. You spend them for their suit to spread sympathy and revolt. They cannot be crafted or played as ambushes. With no base on the map, the stack holds only five cards, and any extra card is discarded.

You fill the stack two ways. In Daylight, Mobilize moves a card from your hand to the stack. And Outrage makes other players pay you: whenever another player removes a sympathy token or moves warriors into a sympathetic clearing, they must add a matching card from their hand to your supporters. If they cannot, they show you their hand and you draw a card from the deck for the stack instead. Placing pieces there does not cause Outrage; moving in and removing sympathy do.

Spreading sympathy

In Birdsong, after any revolts, you may spread sympathy any number of times. Choose an unsympathetic clearing next to a sympathetic one (if you have none, any clearing works). The Marquise’s keep clearing is always off limits. Spend matching supporters equal to the cost printed above the next token, place it, and score.

Two rules shape where you go:

• Martial Law: a clearing with three or more warriors of another player costs one extra matching supporter.
• No defenders: sympathy does not fight back. A token with no Alliance warriors beside it is defenseless, so an attack there removes it whatever the roll, unless your ambush removes every attacker first.

The walkthrough’s advice is to spread sympathy near the fighting. Clearings where the Marquise and Eyrie keep moving armies are clearings where Outrage pays you.

The revolt

In Birdsong, you may revolt in a sympathetic clearing that has no base, as long as the base of that suit is still on your faction board. Spend two supporters of that suit. Then:

1. Remove every enemy piece in the clearing: warriors, buildings, and tokens.
2. Place your base there, plus warriors equal to the number of sympathetic clearings of that suit.
3. Place one warrior in your Officers box.

A revolt is your biggest swing, so set it up. The walkthrough shows a revolt that removed a single warrior and calls it not the best use. Look for a clearing where an enemy has built, so the revolt scores, and where you already hold several sympathetic clearings of the same suit, so you get more warriors. You have one base per suit, and you cannot revolt in a suit again until its base is back on your board.

Officers and the Evening

Without officers, the Alliance cannot move or fight at all. In Daylight, Train turns a card matching a built base into an officer. In Evening, you take military operations up to your number of officers:

• Move: take one move.
• Battle: start a battle.
• Recruit: place a warrior at a base.
• Organize: remove one of your warriors from an unsympathetic clearing to place sympathy there and score.

Organize matters late in the game. It places sympathy without spending supporters, so warriors left over from a revolt can turn into points.

Guerrilla War and your bases

When the Alliance defends in battle, it deals hits equal to the higher roll and the attacker the lower. That makes a base with a few warriors hard to crack.

It needs to be. When a base is removed, you discard every supporter of that suit, birds included, and lose half your officers, rounded up. With no bases left, the stack drops back to five cards. Losing your only base can undo several turns of work.

How the table should treat you

Because the Alliance grows late, it is easy for other players to ignore until the revolts start. Leder Games puts it plainly: the Alliance’s late surge works only if it can keep the other players in check. Expect pressure as soon as your sympathy track starts to empty. In one of its suggested three-player mixes, the Learning to Play guide notes the Vagabond has a natural friend in the Alliance.

Our piece on area control without the bloodbath looks at how Root’s asymmetry changes who is worth attacking, the Alliance most of all.