Enlarge (credit: Charlie Theel)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Root does something special: it breaks a conflict-heavy wargame with fully asymmetric roles into easily digestible chunks, then wraps these complex bits in stylized fur and medieval garb.

It’s a sophisticated design that owes as much to Brian Jacques’s charming Redwall series of animal books as it does to GMT’s COIN series of wargames.