Thanks for taking the time to comment and for your positive feedback.

I'll be honest - I haven't learned all the factions yet (including moles) so I'm sure there are some balancing issues that I'm oblivious to with certain factions. Good that you think it wouldn't be too harsh on lizards and cats though - I know they need all the help they can get!

You know what, infecting warriors is the first thing I mention in the Law of Root, but I haven't mentioned it once on the actual board - whoops. So Infected warriors are laid down, while virus markers are placed over tokens and buildings (and were designed to be half as wide so you can still see which tokens and buildings are underneath). That was part of the pun with DOWN with the sickness, but it doesn't totally work if it's not clear you lay them down!

Yes, I was trying to get some good push and pull with the two VP systems. I'm sure there would be tweaking necessary for the values. 1 VP per entirely Infected clearing worked pretty well until I played against the rats. They were up against birds and vagabond - birds were having a disaster and vagabond has no presence. So the rats logically put one warrior in as many clearings as possible for Oppress points, but that meant it was easy for the Cabal to entirely infect clearings and they were getting 6+ Endemic points for a few turns and raced away with it.

I'm very intrigued by factions that don't battle and ways to use the dice numbers to represent different things, but it's definitely still a work in progress. Removing such a core concept to Root as the ability to battle probably isn't a smart thing to do, but I'm interested in playing around with it anyway!

Thanks so much for the feedback and questions. I'm really intrigued by factions that don't battle, although it is a pain to make them work well while missing a core component of Root.

To answer your questions:

1. There is not a mechanical way - players just remember. It did cross my mind it could be an issue but in the few playtests I managed, it was usually clear as the Consulted Healer was in a clearing dominated by one faction. Plus I figured even if the Cabal player forgets who consulted who, the individual players wouldn't.

2. Once an Antidote is gained, it is a permanent buff for that player who can use it to cure any infected piece in a matching clearing. So the more Antidotes they gain, the more pieces they can cure at the start of each and every turn. In the Law of Root, I have added a suggestion to place your Antidotes along the Birdsong banner as a visual reminder.

3. When a Purify marker is used, the player who gained it places it in any clearing. All infection is removed from that clearing immediately and infection cannot spread there for the rest of the game. So potentially 4 of the 12 clearings will be unavailable to the Cabal player towards the end of the game.