Welcome to Round One of the 2023 Root Winter Tournament!! I am so excited to see the newest breakdown of trends from this year. I will be updating this post sporadically throughout round one and you can check out the 2023 Root Winter Tournament Post for more details on the overall tournament! This post covers all the games of Round One!

Check out Guerric Samples Games Twitch Channel to watch the games in real-time (the schedule is below) or check out the Guerric Samples Game YouTube Channel where the games will be posted about a week after they air. There are a lot of fun games so I highly recommend you check them out!!
Also check out the round one examination of the twitch gamble!
This post does contain spoilers to the winners of the round one games!! Read at your own risk!
Game Set-Up
There have been a good spread of faction chosen from the draft. We have seen all faction in the draft and all the faction have been chosen!
The Eyrie Dynasty, Vagabond, and the Underground Duchy have tied for the title of the most picked faction.


We are now seeing more diversity in the unchosen factions! The Vagabond has taken the title of the most hated faction but the Vagabond is coming up and attempting to take the title.
I find it hilarious that the Vagabond is the most pick and unpicked faction. It is truly a curse.
Eyrie Dynasty and the Underground Duchy have never been unchosen.
I adore how much the winter map has been chosen this tournament. mainly because it is my favorite tournament map!
Mountain has gained in popularity toward the final third of the first round. And Summer and Lake map remain tied.

We have officially seen ever single faction in the draft. The second Vagabond, Keepers in Iron, and Lizard Cult have been on the more unloved side by the randomness of AdSet.
AdSet draft has given a ridiculous amount of love to the Vagabond. It has been in the draft for seventeen of the twenty-three games. That’s 79% of the time. The Eyrie Dynasty and the Underground Duchy have are tied for the second most love faction of the AdSet draft.


Game Outcomes

The Woodland Alliance has taken the lead of winning the most games in round one! The Underground Duchy and Eyrie Dynasty put up a good fight but only tied for second.
But we are still waiting to see the Riverfolk Company and the Second Vagabond to make it onto the scoreboard.
The seat position wins have been relatively even. Seat three is holding the advantage at the end of round one but there isn’t much of a difference between the four seats.
Now this does include two three player game so keep that in mind as it does skew some of the statistics.

The Woodland Alliance is holding the top of the win rate of 55% and there isn’t really a strong second since the Eyrie Dynasty and Underground Duchy have tied at 31%. We are starting to see some of the win rates settle down with more games being played.
The win rates are Woodland Alliance (55%), Eyrie Dynasty (31%), Underground Duchy (31%), Marquise de Cat (27%), Lord of the Hundreds (27%), Corvid Conspiracy (22%), Vagabond (19%), Keepers in Iron (13%), Lizard Cult (13%), Vagabond 2 (0%), and Riverfolk Company (0%)

More Graphs
Vagabond
We are seeing both more diversity in the types of Vagabond that I expect but less than I would have liked to see. And of those Vagabonds, the Thief has been the most popular. Mainly because it showed up the most in the draft. I still feel like Guerric rigged that one.


Factions Vs Seat Vs Map
I still love seeing if there are any trends between the chosen faction and the seat, the chosen faction and the map, and the unchosen faction and the map. It’s a little early to see if there are any trends this tournament but keep checking in for changes!



Round by Round
Round One Winners
Congrats to all our round one winners!
- Cosmic Cant
- Magic_Zamboni
- RootManuvas
- ArgentBurnsRed
- Burnie
- Cyro
- Randy
- Nitrorev
- Elivaras
- Natedog
- Thewy
- McWarmaker
- Insolent Noisemaker
- Boo Human
- FrancisS
- Pliskin
- Charoscu
- AquamanBoss
- MonteCristo
- jazmorow
- ETO
- WalrasLaw
- OvertheMorrow
- Moss
- Levi
- Waterman
- Bodison
- Treefense
- Switch
I think a really cool graphic to see would be each faction’s average score through time across plays. So basically the same as the plots of the round-by-round score, but averaged over every appearance for a single faction. That would give some insight into each faction’s scoring pace through the game.
Check out this article! I think this similar to what you’re asking for! https://makecraftgame.com/2022/04/15/root-faction-scoring-models/
Nice, this is pretty much exactly what I was asking about. I’ll give this a deeper read later today. Did you ever look at an overlay of each faction’s average? Basically, looking at all of the thick purple curves together?
PS In your regression, are you using equally weighted least squares on the average (purple) curve? What happens if you put less weight on larger rounds if games rarely last that long? I think the slopes (scoring rates) that you have here are underestimates of the true values.
Yea! I pulled all the thick purple lines to create a linear projection (each set of data supported it with the R^2 value). All the factions together are the graphs at the top of the article.
It’s harder to pull out outliers which is why I did all of the games and they pulled out the games where the factions specifically won.
I think the stats with the wins separated out is the most interesting thing to see. There are some surprises there with how some factions are consistent whether they win or not versus just how much faster they score in their winning games.
Is the data you used for this public?