Overview

As the Woodland Alliance, your aim isn’t to establish strongholds or raise armies, but to spread sympathy for your revolutionary cause among the denizens of the Woodland. To spread your sympathy, you’ll need the aid of advocates from your supporter deck, a small deck of cards on your faction board, separate from your hand cards, that is limited to five cards until you establish yourself more firmly in the Woodland. Once you Mobilize cards from your hand to your supporter deck, you can spend those cards to garner support in new clearings, placing sympathy tokens and scoring increasing victory points for each token placed. While your first sympathy token can be placed anywhere on the map, subsequent tokens must be placed in new clearings connected to existing sympathetic clearings. Additionally, the supporter cost to place new sympathy tokens increases as your cause spreads, and the presence of an opponent’s warriors can trigger Martial Law, further increasing the cost.

Your sympathy tokens also impede your opponents as sympathetic clearings become intolerant of their military actions. Whenever an opponent moves warriors into a clearing with a sympathy token or removes a sympathy token (such as by battling), they spark outrage, forcing them to pay a card from their hand matching the clearing’s suit into your supporter deck. If they can’t pay, they show you their hand as proof, and you take the top card of the draw pile and place it in your supporter deck.

Sympathy alone won’t win you the Woodland, however. By spending supporters at a sympathetic clearing, you can lead the citizens of that clearing in revolt. A revolt immediately removes all non-Woodland Alliance pieces from that clearing and constructs a base. Having a base on the map lifts the five-card limit on your supporter deck and enables you to Train officers, warriors placed in the Officer box on your faction board. These officers can then be used to Recruit warriors at bases, as well as send those warriors into new clearings to Organize the locals, garnering sympathy in that clearing while bypassing the supporter cost.

Be careful though, as your bases are both limited and pivotal. You only have three bases total, one for each of the board’s three clearing suits, and once you’ve revolted in a clearing of a certain suit, you can’t revolt in another clearing of that suit unless the matching base is removed first. However, losing a base comes at a high price, costing you half your officers and all the cards in your supporter deck that match the suit of the lost base (including bird cards). To aid you in defending yourself is your expertise in Guerrilla War, which allows you to always take the higher roll in battle, even as the defender.

Strategy

As the Woodland Alliance, your strategy is both singular and straightforward: place sympathy tokens. Your Sympathy track alone is worth 22 victory points, which doesn’t account for points gained from sympathy tokens that are removed and replaced, or points gained from pieces removed during a revolt. Given that, Woodland Alliance strategy is largely focused on setting yourself up to be able to place the number of sympathy tokens necessary to win the game.

The Opening

Starting the game with nothing on the board keeps the Woodland Alliance’s opening fairly standard, if somewhat contingent on your starting hand: use the three starting cards in your supporter deck to place three sympathy tokens on the map, then Mobilize the three starting cards in your hand to your supporter deck. Finally, on the following turn, spend two of those supporter cards to revolt in one of the three clearings you placed sympathy tokens in to establish your first base.

This opening is more nuanced than it sounds, however, and it immediately confronts you with the core question of the Woodland Alliance, which is where to place your sympathy tokens. It can be tempting to place your tokens in very central clearings to trigger more Outrage, but a particularly inconvenient sympathy token will probably get removed by an opponent who also wants a centralized position. On the other hand, a token that is too safely out of the way can also mean a base that is too out of the way to effectively spread sympathy later in the game. It’s a balancing act that’s determined in no small part by how aggressive the other players at the table are. The worst outcome, however, is to have all three sympathy tokens removed before your second turn, which will effectively put you back at square one and a turn behind everyone else, so be wary of playing too riskily.

Once you’ve established your first base, your supporter deck is no longer capped at five cards and the rest of the game becomes more open-ended in terms of placing sympathy tokens. You’ll want to quickly establish a second base that is two or more clearings away from the first base, as this will give you the necessary reach to spread sympathy to most of the board using your Organize action, saving your supporter cards for more distant clearings. Building your third base, however, is often not necessary for most Woodland Alliance games, and can sometimes even be a hindrance by requiring you to devote too many warriors to defense. This is also why you need to be wary of training too many officers, as the increased actions are pointless if there aren’t enough warriors on the board to use them with.

As an aside, the Woodland Alliance can be oppressive at tables that are new to the game, and while part of that comes from players still learning how to disrupt the Woodland Alliance’s scoring engine, it also often comes from players misunderstanding the faction’s rules. In particular, the ability to directly battle sympathy tokens and score a victory point for removing them, as well as the Martial Law penalty on the cost of placing sympathy tokens, are often unknown or overlooked by new tables, and worth a reminder if your table is struggling with the faction.

The Win

The Woodland Alliance has one of the strongest victory point bursts of all the factions in the game, evidenced by the oft-cited wisdom that you should not cross 20 victory points except on the turn where you plan to reach 30 victory points and win. This is entirely plausible since the last three tokens on your Sympathy track alone are worth 12 victory points, meaning you can go from 18 points to victory with as little as three officers, nine supporter cards, or some combination thereof.

The key to this kind of victory is in the setup beforehand, but even that differs little from the Woodland Alliance’s strategy for the rest of the game. Defending your bases is the biggest concern, as losing one will slash both your officers and your supporters, leaving you without the actions to close out the game. While most opponents won’t want to dedicate the warriors or actions necessary to remove a base, an opponent whose only alternative is losing certainly will, and this goes doubly for factions that can remove your bases more easily such as the Lizard Cult or the Lord of the Hundreds.

Resources

• [Gittin Gud] Woodland Alliance Advanced Strategy Guide for Root — I don’t know if I should call this a Nevakanezah video since he contracted so much of it out to subject-matter experts, but I suppose he did make the memes, so I’ll give it to him this time. Raucously funny, irreverent, and insightful, this is a must-watch for anyone looking to master the Woodland Alliance. He also occasionally uploads narrated Root gameplay videos, so his Woodland Alliance video (here) may also interest you.
• Root Strategy Guide | Woodland Alliance | — A key contributor to the above video, Lord of the Board also has his own strategy guide for the Woodland Alliance. This one has 10 tips and strategies for leading the rebellion, and at 6-1/2 minutes, it’s well worth your time.
• Episode #08 - Rebels with a Cause — If listening is your preference, this episode of the Woodland War Machine podcast will be right up your alley. A nearly 2-hour deep-dive into playing the Woodland Alliance, it’s also very beginner-friendly since the hosts read the rule descriptions as they talk about them.