Overview

As the Eyrie Dynasties, your Decree is the heart of your faction, both as its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The Decree has four columns, ordered from left to right: Recruit, Move, Battle, and Build. At the start of each turn, you're required to place one or two cards into the Decree, putting them into the columns of your choice. Each card placed in the Decree represents an action you must then take on every turn thereafter, in a clearing matching the suit of the card. The columns of the Decree must be resolved in order from left to right, but the cards within each column can be fulfilled in any order.

The Recruit and Build actions of the Decree both relate to the Eyrie Dynasties's single building type, roosts. These roosts serve as bases from which you'll recruit more warriors, but there can only be one roost in each clearing. Roosts are also how the Eyrie Dynasties earn victory points, scoring at the end of every turn based on the number of roosts you have on the map. Just be wary, however: you only have seven roosts total, and if you build them all, you won't be able to build more on future turns unless some are destroyed.

Rallying and unifying the Eyrie Dynasties is the leader card. The leader provides you with a special ability while they're in power to help you reclaim the Woodland, and also comes with two loyal visiers, faction-specific bird cards placed into Decree columns designated by the leader card.

If you find yourself unable to complete any of the actions dictated by the cards in your Decree, you immediately turmoil. When this happens, you'll lose a victory point for every bird-suited card in your decree, including your loyal visiers. Then, you must discard all the cards in your Decree (minus the loyal visier cards) and remove your current leader card. Afterwards, pick a new leader that has not yet turmoiled to replace the previous leader and move the loyal visiers to the Decree columns dictated by the new leader card. Finally, you'll stop resolving your Decree on that turn, losing the opportunity to take any actions beyond the one that caused you to turmoil.

Strategy

The Eyrie Dynasties have a relatively straightforward mechanism for earning victory points, scoring for simply having roosts on the map. Because of that, Eyrie Dynasties strategy is largely focused on how you manage the Decree so that you have enough actions to defend yourself and interfere with your opponents, while not always being on the verge of turmoil.

The Opening

Of the four leaders available to the Eyrie Dynasties, the Charismatic and Despot leaders are considered by far the best, with the other two typically only being used under special circumstances. The Charismatic leader lends itself towards a more aggressive playstyle, with its double-recruiting ability allowing you to quickly get many warriors onto the board, but requiring you to intentionally lose those warriors in battle so that you don't turmoil on a Recruit action during your next turn. The Despot leader, in contrast, leans towards a slower, more methodical approach, carefully spreading to new clearings and constructing roosts, but wary of losing too many warriors in battle due to its slower pace of replacing them. Both playstyles have pros and cons, so pick the one that appeals to you; if at some point in the game you turmoil, it's probably a reasonable time to try the other approach.

When it comes to placing cards in your Decree, there's an important rule of thumb to remember: keep the edges blue. The Recruit and Build columns are the least flexible columns in your Decree, and are the ones most easily targeted by opponents looking to force you into turmoil; putting only bird cards ("blue") into these columns keeps them as flexible as possible. In contrast, the Move column of your Decree is the most flexible column, being able to satisfy multiple Move actions simply by moving a single warrior back and forth between two clearings; dumping your suited (fox, rabbit, and mouse) cards into this column is often the safest way to get rid of them while placing relatively little burden on your Decree. Finally, the Battle column sits somewhere in the middle. While it's usually possible to find opponents in some clearing of a given suit, it's also true that determined opponents may vacate those clearings solely to turmoil you; keep the Battle column blue if you can, but less urgently than the Recruit or Build columns.

The Win

If you've made it towards the end without a turmoil on every second turn, congratulations! The Decree is an unruly beast, and making it this far is a feat unto itself. The endgame strategies of the Eyrie Dynasties are, like the Decree, a double-edged sword. If you've had a particularly good game (and your opponents have not), you may simply have the lead and strength necessary to coast to victory on your end-of-turn roost scoring alone. However, in a more competitive game, more drastic measures may be necessary.

The impending end of the game lifts one important restriction on the Eyrie Dynasties: the need for the Decree to be sustainable long-term. As such, in the final turn or two, you can feasibly place a number of suited cards into columns they otherwise should not be in, simply to end the game soon enough that the consequences of your actions don't catch up to you in a following turn. Multiple suited card in the Recruit or Build columns, or an unreasonable number of cards in the Battle column, are the kinds of things that might appear in the Eyrie Dynasties's Decree near the end of the game.

However, the gamble here should be apparent: fail to reach the requisite 30 points to win the game, and you'll almost certainly turmoil, not only costing you victory points, but also robbing you of the actions necessary to defend yourself, much less prevent anyone else from securing the crown. It is a substantially all-or-nothing play.

Resources

• [Gittin Gud] - Eyrie Dynasties Advanced Strategy Guide for Root — Another in Nevakanezah's unreasonably entertaining Gittin Gud series of Root strategy guides, this video is a must-watch for anyone interested in learning how to kill god play the Eyrie Dynasties. They also occasionally upload narrated Root gameplay videos, so their Eyrie Dynasties videos (here and half of this one) may also be a great resource for you.
• Root Strategy Guide | Eyrie Dynasties | — From Lord of the Board, this strategy guide is organized into 10 important tips for playing the Eyrie Dynasties well. It's also a quick 7 minutes, so it's well worth it if you're interested in something a bit more respectful of your time.
• Episode #06 - Dynasty Dynamics — From the Woodland War Machine podcast, this episode of the podcast is a nearly 2-hour deep-dive into playing the Eyrie Dynasties. The hosts read the rule descriptions as they discuss, making this podcast very beginner-friendly while not slacking at all in terms of depth.