With two Kallax cubes dedicated to the work of this one designer, I think it’s time to compare and contrast the work of the truly inimitable Cole Wehrle. I first discovered Cole’s unique design style in November 2018 while at the Netrunner World Championships at the FFG headquarters in Minnesota. I’d never heard of Root before that fateful day, but between dozens of Netrunner games, a friend pulled out a copy of Root, started explaining it, and I was hooked. It was a bit reminiscent of when I was at a Magic: The Gathering event in 1996, and between games of Magic, someone pulled out a copy of Settlers of Catan, and I was simply drawn to it in a powerful and inexplicable way. Root has been an all-time favorite since then, rocketing up my list of favorites and my played games list, and overtaking thousands of others games in the process. But of course, Cole didn’t stop at Root, and while many of his subsequent games have an aesthetic that is extremely similar to Root, the differences among his underlying creations are striking.
My thesis is that each of Cole’s creations fills a very different niche in the hobby and in my collection, and each excels at something distinct (not unlike the Clash of Civilization Games). Root is the four-player free-for-all extraordinarily asymmetric combat game for bashing your friends while playing the psychological warfare of demurring and finger-pointing that was pioneered in 1959 by Diplomacy and perfected in 1995 by El Grande. By contrast, Oath, Pax Pamir, and Arcs all offer something very different and unique, despite their seeming similarity…
When it comes to Root, I chafe at the recurring debates over the “best” or “worst” factions because I think they miss the point entirely. The game is about playing your fellow players, full stop. The faction’s unique powers are entirely secondary to ensuring the other three people always see each other as more of a threat, no matter what the victory point track happens to say at any given time. This is not unlike the joys of Imperial, Nexus Ops, Time of Crisis, or Scythe, but there’s something truly magical about Root. I think it derives from the fact that each player is almost playing a different game, and each of those separate game systems is ultimately fairly simple, but the complexity and nuance comes from smashing those 4 different systems/factions against each other to see which comes out on top. Most four-player free-for-all games have players vying to outcompete each other in the same sandbox with the same tools, but Root gives players entirely different tools such that it feels like you’re in a different sandbox building and maneuvering your independent animal empire. This is why my 56 plays do not feel like nearly enough, and why I’m always hungry to play again right after finishing a game. It has that same severe asymmetric magic as the 1979 Avalon Hill Dune, but in a package that doesn’t take all day, while still making you simultaneously want to try the same system/faction again and also try every other distinct faction right away as well. I’m confident that a great manipulator (I mean player) can win with any faction, but the joy comes from seeing how your woodcutters or roosts match up against their crossbows or revolts.
Pax Pamir gets compared to Root the least, but feels the most vaguely like Root to me. I see Pax Pamir as the three-player free-for-all combat game in which there is no starting asymmetry, but in which highly asymmetric positions and abilities quickly emerge and evolve based on the tableau that each player purchases and builds. While I’ve only played Pax Pamir 24 times so far, I cannot imagine turning down a game if two people were around and we had 75-90 minutes to brawl.
Pax Pamir has the benefit of being remarkably simple for what it offers. The teach is a million times easier than Root, and you can competently play after a game or two, whereas that takes many more plays to achieve with Root. The look-and-feel of Pax Pamir (Second Edition) sets it apart completely from Cole’s other creations, but the game has that similar feeling of not shying away from kingmaking (or queenmaking, if you will). Everyone needs to know going in that the game is as much about the relationships and negotiations as it is about the mechanisms of the cards and units. Of course, Pax Pamir adds the tactical decision-making of managing and planning for the card market, as well as challenging decisions around placement of spies, tribes, armies, and roads that benefit from anticipating which way the winds are blowing.
The beauty of three-player Pax Pamir is that it often shifts between and among a game where each of the three factions have one player representing them, to a game where it becomes 2 vs. 1 with two players supporting the same faction (albeit not remotely on the “same team” since they’re now competing to have the most support among that faction), to the more rare occasion where everyone supports the same faction, which almost inevitably leads to someone breaking away to prop up an opposing faction. This ebb and flow of the game reminds me of the beautiful ebb and flow of civilizations in Tigris & Euphrates.
The gradual tableau building (and tableau management) keeps the beginning comprehensible and ramps up the decision space over the first 30-45 minutes. Pax Pamir also adds the unpredictable timing of scoring to the mix (very unlike Root), which gives it a tense Twilight Struggle-style of gameplay, in which you don’t know how long you have to respond to an opponent’s aggression in one corner or other of the map. With only 2 actions per turn, Pax Pamir asks you to make difficult and meaningful decisions about prioritization, which is exactly what makes tight games like this, Caylus, and King of Siam such a painstaking joy.
Oath may have disappointed a lot of folks because it looked like a sequel to Root, but feels absolutely nothing like Root. I’ve had the great pleasure of playing Oath 32 times, and I can’t wait to spend another whole afternoon playing it over-and-over. Oath is a mainstay of a weeklong convention that I attend each spring, at which I try to play Oath as many times and with as many people as possible.
Oath has the most flexible player count because it’s the most chaotic and absurd of the bunch. I use absurd as a compliment here. I think of Oath almost like a D&D-lite campaign in which the eventual winner is definitely not the point. I tell people when asking if they want to play the game that they should only do so if they are okay with strategizing for 90 minutes just to end up laughing and applauding when your opponent plays a card that upends the game and devastates your position at the very end. You have to be willing to love the narrative aspects of that sort of thing and enjoy (or at least admire) the cruel twists of fate. If your opponent recovers a bandit crown next to a buried giant and proceeds to demolish your carefully formulated victory condition, you need to be prepared to enjoy the ride.
The ridiculous stories that emerge from Oath are the point for me. I enjoy the game with 3 or 4 players, and I’ll even play with 5 experienced players, provided we keep the downtime as low as possible. After all, why obsess over decisions that may end up like dust in the narrative wind. With the right crowd, Oath shines singularly as the zany lush story machine that it is.
This brings us to Arcs. I dove into Arcs headfirst over the summer, playing it 14 times, including at every player count, and both with and without the Blighted Reach campaign. I backed Arcs on Kickstarter the moment it published, and I want to love Arcs so much. While Root is easily a 10 out of 10 game for me, among the top 1% of all games that I’ve ever tried and rated, and both Pax Pamir and Oath are at least a 9 out of 10 (among the top 5% of all games), I’m wavering between a 7 or 8 out of 10 for Arcs at the moment. It’s above average, somewhere in the top 35-40% of the 2,083 games that I’ve had the opportunity to try.
Root excels among asymmetric four-player free-for-all combat, Pax Pamir excels among three-player tableau building area control combat, and Oath excels among narrative adventure games, but Arcs does not seem to excel in any category (except possibly as a two-player head-to-head card-driven wargame, which is of course a crowded field). I have enjoyed two-player games of Arcs as a 45-60 minute battle that revolves around your adaptability to the cards you’re dealt and the ambitions that you can declare (and that your opponent declares). The heart and soul of the game seems to be incredibly restrictive card play that deals you a hand of action points that you mostly will not be able to use. The game asks you to reimagine your approach each chapter based on those cards and to engage in a form of “trick-taking” that confines your action points to mostly 1 per round. I have to assume that this highly restrictive space, and the joys of successfully navigating it, are what is driving all of the positive reviews to date.
I found the multiplayer game of Arcs to be unduly frustrating and laborious, wishing that I was playing the free-wheeling Root or Pax Pamir by comparison, especially given how much less frequently any one player has the initiative in multiplayer Arcs and how much more unpredictable the seizing and surpassing of initiative is with more players. If I want a clever four-player approach to trick-taking as a board game then I’ll pull out Brian Boru. If I want a four-player combat game with incredible Kyle Ferrin art then Root is still easily the reigning champion. If I want a narrative campaign to play three games in a row that build a storytelling arc, then I’ll definitely go with Oath (with my variants to give players more control over the game end deck and map adjustments).
If I want a two-player card and dice-driven wargame, then I’d obviously go with Twilight Struggle or War of the Ring if I had time, but Arcs does have the virtue of taking under an hour. I think it competes with the incredible Watergate in that space (or even Radlands perhaps), but it does excel over most space combat games due to its speed and simplicity (at least as long as you don’t weigh it down with the chaff of imperial navy, crises and edicts, summits, and blight). That being said, I just don’t feel like I’m playing in outer space in Arcs or that there is really any sci-fi essence, unlike the thematic feelings evoked by Galaxy Trucker, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, Nexus Ops, or even the abhorrently long Twilight Imperium. Arcs is ultimately a clever tactical game of timing your card plays, declaring ambitions in which you have an edge, managing vital resources, and dice-rolling combat, but I think it could just as easily be set on horseback as in space.
With all that being said, there is one notable game missing here, which is of course John Company. I’ve read and listened to plenty about it and I’ve seen it being played at conventions, but I’m just not sure it’s for me. I found the Slate article about it fascinating, and I loved listening to Cole talk about it on the recent Civics 101 podcast, but there’s something about it that reminds me of Splotter’s 2006 Indonesia (and other “not for me” Splotter games over the years like Greed Inc. and Horseless Carriage), which was a very popular game back then that is very much not for me. There’s something about games of corporate financial wrangling that I can’t get into.
At the end of the day, Cole’s games definitely deserve those Kallax cubes. They each scratch a very different itch and do so in ways that continue to surprise and delight after dozens of plays. The production values on these games are all phenomenal, and the depth-to-complexity ratio is refreshingly high (especially as compared to the latest “kitchen sink” tyrants). I expect to be playing Root, Pax Pamir, and Oath many years from now, depending largely on the context and people at the table on any given game day. I look forward to the day that I hit 100 plays of Root, or 50 plays of Pax Pamir and Oath. With over 14,000 plays under my belt since I started keeping track in 2005, it’s a rare game that breaks 50 plays (in fact only 41 games out of 2,083 tried, or just under 2 percent), so Root stands in august company, and Cole’s other creations are well on their way. With frogs and bats on the way, as well as New Foundations, I look forward to getting in many more plays of these wide-ranging gems in the years ahead.
