Somebody described this to me before I ever played it as the Vagabond plays an RPG, the Woodland Alliance plays an insurgency, and the Marquise and Eyrie are playing something closer to straight area control, and once you sit down and actually feel that, it recontextualizes the whole box. This isn’t four factions with different colors on the same rules, it’s four genuinely different games stapled into one map, which is either the smartest design decision in modern board gaming or a teaching nightmare, and honestly it’s both.
The atmosphere works because of the mismatch between the cute forest-animal art and how ruthless the actual play gets. Somebody put it best, loved the juxtaposition between cute forest animals and ruthless gameplay, and that’s exactly the tension I feel every session, adorable woodland critters engaged in what is functionally a counter-insurgency war. The rulebook leans into it too, little catchphrases attached to easy-to-forget rules, “the Vagabond is nimble,” that make the fiddlier corners of the ruleset actually stick in your memory instead of requiring a lookup every turn.
Teaching this is genuinely hard, I won’t pretend otherwise, because you’re not teaching one rule set, you’re teaching four simultaneously, and until everyone at the table has internalized their own faction the game reads as chaos. That’s also where the multiplayer-solitaire risk creeps in, the Vagabond especially can end up quietly doing its own thing in the corner of the map while the two area-control factions duke it out, and I’ve had games where it felt less like four people at war and more like four people running separate solo campaigns that occasionally bump into each other. Downtime can get real too, waiting five minutes to take a ten second turn is a genuine complaint I’ve felt myself, especially in a four player game where someone’s still puzzling out what their board even lets them do.
Once everyone knows their faction though, this becomes one of the most replayable games on my shelf, because a completely different opening from the Eyrie changes what game the Woodland Alliance is even playing that session. It rewards the group that’s willing to actually learn it properly, not the group looking for something quick on a weeknight.