turns

Attention over time

7-day rolling share of analyzed posts/comments mentioning this entity · 90 daily points ending 2026-08-02

Final complete day: 2026-08-02. Attention was 0.2% — this entity appeared in 20 of 9,589 analyzed posts/comments in the seven days ending that day (25 mentions).

Each point is a seven-day rolling window of complete UTC days; a point is comparable only when at least 100 analyzed posts or comments fall inside it. A day with no analyzed records counts as zero; missing coverage is marked and never shown as zero. The series ends at the latest complete analyzed day — it never extends into the current incomplete day. How attention is measured.

Recent mentions

1. 2026-08-02 16:48 UTCComment

   You need to go into it knowing what you're getting into. It's a lot of randomness and weirdness and you're gonna have stuff happen to you that is out of your control and you have to be okay with it. It's not designed or balanced very well, but it throws just enough cool random shit at you that it's still fun to play. Well, first, you *have* to use the "injury/madness" mechanism from Dunwich. It elevates the game so much I can't image playing without it. It fixes a lot of the randomness without breaking how fun it is. I only have two gripes with it. One is relatively minor; there are a few cards that basically say "You're swallowed whole and die. No roll, no save, you're dead." We ignore those, or at least convert it to "reduce to zero health". Thankfully there's not many events like that, and it's an easy fix. (For the record, you get to play a new character if you die, so you're never really "out" of a game.) The other gripe is that the monsters aren't scaled. The most powerful monster in the bag can come out turn 1. That in and of itself isn't terrible, since you can always coordinate to attack it, but the *other* problem is that there's a non-trivial number of powerful monsters that *don't move*. Which means an entire section of Arkham might be impossible to get to because you're on Turn 2 and haven't had a chance to build your character up enough to fight them. Sadly, I don't know a way to fix that without, say, removing a bunch of stronger monsters like that and add them in slowly as the turns go on. A lot of people in this thread--including myself--keep banging on about "randomness" but it's actually not *that* bad. There *is* a method to the madness (HA!) and the chaos goes both ways--there's usually a few different ways to approach a problem with different solutions. To me, that's the fun part--no two games are the same because there's literally a thousand combinations of problems with a thousand combinations of solutions, with enough overlap/familiarity that it's not overwhelming. At the end of the day, it's cooperative. If there's a rule or card you don't like, chuck it. There is no pretense about how the designers wrote and balanced it because they very clearly just chucked every single mechanism they could think of and threw it in with no regard to how it meshed with everything else. Their philosophy was largely "who cares if it's unbalanced or doesn't quite work as intended, there's a bunch of safety valves in the game that players can figure something out." Somehow, it all still works.

2. 2026-08-02 11:42 UTCComment

   It’s generally good to let random damage fly around the room for a few a turns. But werewolf and vampires want to reveal. Our table strategy is to have at least one shadow reveal a few turns in - take advantage of the powers. Bluffing works up to a point but it’s not the whole game really.

3. 2026-08-01 17:43 UTCComment

   No but i played a lot on something where you had a track with lots of turns on a squared paper like this and you could only increase and decrease speed 1 square at a time. So you'd want to get up to 5 but then when a turn comes you need to slow down in due time!

4. 2026-08-01 11:28 UTCComment

   I’m a Wehrle playtester. I’ve played more Root than most, including every faction multiple times. I think I know how to play Root. You can’t not play this as a wargame. But the very point of the game is that there’s always at least one faction not engaging in direct, army-based warfare. 3P is two high-reach factions and one political/chaos/intrigue faction. Which is Root at it’s very best. But no, I’m not talking base Root. Although I would still prefer base at 3P simply to not include VB. Root at 4P is chaotic in the mathematical sense. With 3 days of turns between your turns, predicting the boardgame for your next turn from initial conditions is an almost fruitless exercise, and even if you can, it might take upwards of 30 minutes between your turns. 4P Root, like 4P Pamir, is a game almost completely made up of reactions, rather than actions or plans. 3P is infinitely sharper, not to mention meaner.

5. 2026-07-31 16:33 UTCComment

   I completely agree. Root is quite punishing, and despite its cutesy appearance, I would consider it a game that only really works for "serious" board gamers. Root is a lot shorter than you first imagine it (in terms of the number of turns you get), and there is usually a window of about 2 turns where the game is decided. If you don't realize what is happening and capitalize on those 2 turns, you lose. As a result of all this, it is a game that someone where someone who knows what they are doing will beat a new player 95% of the time. Root is also very intricate and finely tuned, and as a result it benefits a lot from replay. There are "guys on a map" games that are a bit more foregiving and less "dialled in", where you can make some mistakes and still come out on top because each individual action doesn't really matter in isolation. Root is not that game. Actions in Root are *very* consequential, and each turn has a lot of weight to it. It is a game of surgical precision rather than big picture "I must conquer the world!". Because the systems are so precise, the first 5 times you play it, someone just kind of "wins" and it feels very unsatisfying. You don't really figure out all the interactions, routes to victory, and strategies of the factions until you've had a few goes. This goes double if you are introducing expansions. I would recommend Root if you have a stable core of people who want to learn a game really well and play it 20+ times. In this context, it is a very clever, well-balanced, and interesting game that allows for engaging gameplay and negotiations. I would not recommend Root if you have a shifting core of people who play games, or if your group plays sporadically and rarely sticks with games for long periods. Root as a one-off or occasional game doesn't really work very well, as it is not particularly fun until you "get it".