ROOTS Is a New Casual Social Game You're Going to Want to Play

Geeks love social games. I don’t know why, but we do. Have you seen the dice booth at Comic-Con? It is row after row of glittering gems in myriad shapes and colors, all for different tabletop games. It is my all time favorite thing at the con, and there is always a giant crowd of people around it. Geeks also love to argue, as evidenced by the comments sections on any GeekTyrant post in which a writer expresses an opinion.

These loves of gaming and arguing combine in the new casual tabletop game Roots. The creator describes it as “Apples to Apples meets Scrabble meets a philosophy class,” and it looks hella fun. The premise is similar to Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity — a subject card hits the table, and everyone throws out whatever cards they have that best fit. Only unlike other games, you can use multiple prefix and suffix cards to build the perfect word, then those words remain in play and can be built upon in other rounds. That’s the scrabble-esque element that will make word nerds everywhere rejoice. (The philosophy class element comes in because roughly 90% of any philosophy class is spent discussing the meaning, boundaries, and constraints of language. It’s way more fun than it sounds.)

Once everyone’s words are down you make the case for your word, and everyone votes. The voting aspect prevents the practice of the Judge or Czar just giving the win to whomever they have a crush on. Not that I’ve ever done that. The scoring mechanism is a little more complicated than in Apples to Apples,* but it’s clearly explained in the gameplay demo below. Also explained in the video are power cards, which give you the chance to create chaos by messing with your opponents.

Predicate, the studio that created Roots, is funding the game through a Kickstarter campaign, which you can see here. They are already funded, but if they reach their stretch goals, the game will get some cool upgrades. Who doesn’t want rounded corners on their cards? Plus, they have cool backer perks with even cooler names. All the backer levels are named after trees. They start out with basics — sapling, oak — and go on up to Yggdrasil, with a bunch of geeky trees in between. So at least check out their campaign to see if you can identify all the trees without googling. And even most of the lower levels will get you a copy of the game, which you want anyway.

*I once played Apples to Apples with a group of people who had a “no arguing” rule. You just silently put your card down and the judge silently selected. It was the worst.