Overview

As the Marquise de Cat, the core of your military-industrial engine is your three building types, each of which scores you victory points when constructed and offers a unique recurring benefit. The first of these is the sawmill, which produces a wood token at the start of your turn; wood is necessary for constructing buildings, and the cost increases as you build more, so sawmills support the growing demand. Next, workshops act as the Marquise de Cat's crafting piece; they contribute a crafting suit of the clearing they're built in, so be intentional about where you construct them. Lastly is the recruiter, which provides an additional warrior whenever you take the Recruit action on your turn; it also has the added benefit of periodically increasing the number of cards drawn at the end of your turn.

To aid you in protecting your ever-growing empire is your seat of power: the keep. Placed in one of your starting clearings, the keep token prevents other players from placing pieces in the clearing with the keep. Be wary, however: other players can still move pieces into the keep clearing from connected clearings, and as a token, your keep can be destroyed.

In addition to your keep, you also have access to Field Hospitals, which, when any number of your warriors would be removed, allows you to spend a card matching their clearing to transport them to the clearing with your keep instead. This ability can even be used on the keep clearing itself, making it difficult for other players to battle through the warriors defending the keep. However, if your keep is destroyed, you also lose your ability to use Field Hospitals.

Strategy

As the Marquise de Cat, your game plan is among the simplest in the entirety of Root: construct a building every single turn. There's some slight variation depending on the circumstances, but the general principle holds. The difficulty, then, is actually pulling it off.

The Opening

The best opening turn for the Marquise de Cat is largely solved, and is pretty memorable with the acronym S.O.R (pronounced "soar"): build a Sawmill, Overwork, and build a Recruiter. This sets you up to start your second turn with two wood tokens, with which you can construct your third recruiter (counting the one you start with) and begin drawing two cards at the end of your turn instead of just one. The one interesting action here is Overwork: since it requires a sawmill to be in a clearing matching the suit of a card in your hand, your starting hand can have a strong impact on the choice of where to place your first sawmill or where to build your second.

Even from the first turn, you're confronted with one of the Marquise de Cat's ongoing questions: where do you build? It's impossible to give an exact answer, as it depends as much on intuition and the other players at the table as it does on any given board state. An easy rule of thumb, however, is to consider all clearings within two moves of your keep as easily-defensible territory. This is because Field Hospitals allows you to save would-be-fallen warriors, and the March action allows you to get them back to the frontline with a single action, as long as it's within two moves of your keep. However, as the available building slots on the map fill up over the course of the game, you'll likely be forced to start building wherever you can, so don't hold on to this rule of thumb for too long.

The one thing that hasn't been mentioned thus far is your third building type, the workshop. Unfortunately, in general, it's not worth it to build workshops. While certain cards can be very worthwhile to craft as the Marquise de Cat, most are not worth the lost wood from not building a sawmill or lost combat power from not building a recruiter. If you have a card that you particularly want to craft, however, then go for it; ultimately, games are meant to be fun.

As a final warning, you are likely to score faster in the first couple turns than every other faction on the board. Combined with your intimidating starting army, this results in the Marquise de Cat often getting framed as public enemy number one early on, especially when playing with people newer to Root. However, these starting "strengths" are offset by slow scoring at the end of the game and an anemic number of actions compared to your opponents, restricting your ability to respond to attacks. Given that, try not to get framed as much as possible; talk down alliances against you, and don't get drawn into policing the other factions.

The Win

If you've made it near the end of the game still in a position to compete for the crown, congratulations! Many Marquise de Cat games are effectively over far sooner, so it's no small feat to make it to this point. Unfortunately, there's little advice to be offered here. As the Marquise de Cat, you possess very little power to burst across the 30 point finish line like most other factions in Root do, so there's little to do in the way of maneuvering anything into position.

One tactic to consider, however, is to temporarily delay your scoring. Spend a turn or two carving out space to build on, maybe obstructing an opponent's scoring, all while quietly stockpiling wood tokens. Then, you can build two or even three times, netting you 8 to 11 victory points. It may look like bursting to an inattentive opponent, but since you simply chose to forgo scoring for a turn or two, it's more like unexpectedly making up for lost time. Just be careful: a pile of wood tokens is a pile of points to an interested opponent, especially if their faction makes those tokens easier or more worthwhile to snatch up, such as the Lord of the Hundreds with their Mob tokens or the Eyrie Dynasties with their Despot leader.

Resources

• [Gittin Gud] - Marquise de Cat Advanced Strategy Guide for Root — The first of Nevakanezah's Gittin Gud series of Root strategy guides, this video is both ridiculously funny and ridiculously informative. They also occasionally upload narrated Root gameplay videos, so their two Marquise de Cat videos (here and here) may also be a great resource for you.
• Root Strategy Guide | Marquise De Cat | — From Lord of the Board, this strategy guide is organized into 10 important tips for playing the Marquise de Cat well. It's also a quick 6 minutes, so it's well worth it if you're interested in something a bit more respectful of your time.
• Episode #04 - Strategy de Marquise de Cat — From the Woodland War Machine podcast, this episode of the podcast is a 90-minute deep-dive into playing the Marquise de Cat. The hosts read the rule descriptions as they discuss, making this podcast very beginner-friendly while not slacking at all in terms of depth.
• Root Winter Tournament: Round 3 - Game 3 — Despite being in a 5-player game with a crowded board, Jermcurry delivers a decisively astounding performance as the Marquise de Cat in this match from the Root Winter Tournament hosted by Guerric Samples Games. Especially highlighting the power of table talk in Root, this game is definitely a worthwhile watch despite the lengthy runtime.