By Eric Published September 12, 2026

Which Root Faction Should You Play First? All 4 Ranked

Play the Marquise de Cat first. This ranking is not about which faction wins most — it is about which one teaches you Root fastest and forgives you while it does it, which is a completely different question and the one new players are actually asking.

Root hands four players four rulebooks, and the box does not distribute difficulty evenly — which is why BGG’s crowd weight for Root sits near the top of the mid-heavy band. If you are still deciding on the game, our full Root review covers whether it suits your table at all.

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1. Marquise de Cat — Start Here

The Marquise is the only faction in the box whose scoring you can explain in one sentence: place a building, score the number revealed under it on your board.

She begins the game owning the map. A warrior sits in every clearing except the one diagonally opposite her keep, and her Birdsong produces wood at every sawmill she controls. Her whole game is a supply chain — wood travels to where you want to build, and your opponents win by cutting the chain rather than by killing you.

Two rules make her forgiving. The keep means nobody else can place pieces in that clearing, so you always have somewhere safe. And Field Hospitals let you spend a matching card to recall removed warriors to the keep instead of losing them, which converts a disastrous battle into an expensive one.

Her weakness is the flip side of starting everywhere: she is the obvious leader on turn one, and Root tables punish leaders. Learning to feel that pressure is exactly the lesson a first game should teach.

2. Eyrie Dynasties — Second, and Only Once You Accept Turmoil

“Why would anyone play a faction that can lose points for existing?”

Because the Eyrie are the most satisfying machine in the box when they work. Every Birdsong you must add one or two cards to your Decree, and in Daylight you must resolve every card on it, column by column. The Decree only grows. You are writing instructions for a future self who will have fewer options than you do.

When that future self cannot obey, Turmoil fires in three steps, in order (the Law of Root spells them out at 7.7):

1. Humiliate — lose one victory point for every bird card on the Decree, including both Loyal Viziers.
2. Purge — discard everything on the Decree except those two Viziers.
3. Depose — flip your leader face down and choose a new one from the remaining leaders.

They also carry two rules worth knowing before you sit down. Lords of the Forest means the Eyrie rule a clearing even when merely tied, provided they have a piece there — a genuinely powerful exception. And Disdain for Trade means crafting an item scores them exactly one point regardless of what the card says, so the crafting route that works for everyone else is closed to them.

3. Woodland Alliance — Powerful, Unforgiving, Not a First Faction

The Alliance are the hardest faction in the base box to play badly and survive, which is different from being the hardest to play well.

They have ten warriors. The Marquise has twenty-five. What they have instead is Guerrilla War: as the defender, the Alliance deal hits equal to the higher roll and the attacker takes the lower. That single inversion is why a ten-warrior faction is not a pushover, and it is the most misread rule in Root — new players attack sympathetic clearings because the stack looks small, and hand the Alliance free points.

Their engine runs on the Supporters stack, face-down cards spent by suit that do not count against hand size. The catch is capacity: with no bases on the map the stack holds five cards and any excess is discarded outright. Get a base down and it becomes unlimited.

That cliff is why they rank third for a beginner and why experienced players love them. The Alliance are the faction where the punishment for a mistake arrives two turns later and all at once.

4. Vagabond — Fun, Fiddly, and Hardest to Learn From

The Vagabond is last here purely because he teaches you the least about Root.

He has no warriors. He has one pawn, and the glossary is explicit that the pawn is not a warrior and cannot be removed. He cannot be killed, cannot rule a clearing, and cannot be stopped from going anywhere — his limit is his satchel, a set of items that exhaust when used and refresh each turn.

He scores by aiding factions to improve relationships, by removing warriors of factions hostile to him, and by completing quests. All three are about other players rather than about the map, which means a Vagabond player spends the game reading a game they are not really playing.

Leder sell three more of him in the Root line, which tells you how popular the role is. He is a great third or fourth faction and a poor first one. A new Vagabond learns how to manage a backpack; a new Marquise learns how Root works.

The Honest Summary

If you like the idea of ranked asymmetric factions generally, Scythe’s factions are the closest comparison on this site, and Spirit Island does the same trick cooperatively.

Rotate every game. Root’s balance assumes everybody at the table knows what everybody else is trying to do, and the only reliable way to learn what a faction threatens is to have played it. When four factions stop being enough, the Riverfolk Expansion is where the line goes next — we rank all four boxes in our Root expansions guide.