Marquise de Cat

Build your industrial empire one sawmill at a time — then defend every inch of it.

Easy

Background

The Marquise de Cat arrived in the Woodland as a conquering industrial power and never left. At the start of the game you control most of the map, with warriors garrisoned across nearly every clearing and buildings already anchoring your economic machine.

Your faction runs on a network of Sawmills, Workshops, and Recruiters — each type feeding a different part of your engine. You are the faction everyone else will be gunning for from turn one, so the question is never whether you'll be attacked, but how well you can absorb the pressure and keep building.

How you win

You score victory points every Evening based on how far you've pushed each of your three building tracks — Sawmill, Workshop, and Recruiter. The deeper the track, the more points each building in that line contributes.

Your primary job is to keep placing buildings: spend wood produced by your Sawmills to construct new buildings in clearings you rule, which earns more points and produces more resources. You can also score by winning battles. The goal is to build fast enough that nobody can tear down your lead before you hit 30.

How they play

Each Birdsong you place one wood token at every Sawmill on the board — your only resource and the lifeblood of your economy. In Daylight you take exactly three actions from a menu of five:

March — move warriors across two sub-moves
Recruit — place warriors at every Recruiter (once per turn)
Build — spend wood to place a building in a clearing you rule
Battle — fight in any clearing where you have warriors
Overwork — discard a suited card to drop extra wood at a Sawmill

Field Hospitals let you pay a card to return slain warriors to your supply rather than losing them, giving you real staying power in attrition fights. In Evening you score VP from your tracks, then draw cards. The whole rhythm is: make wood, spend wood on buildings, score from buildings, repeat.

Strengths

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You start with warriors everywhere and buildings already on the board. No other faction hits the ground running the way the Marquise does — you're already scoring points before anyone else has assembled their engine.
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Your supply holds 25 warriors. Combined with Field Hospitals returning casualties, you can absorb a lot of damage and still maintain board presence.
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The Daylight action menu lets you respond to whatever the board demands — build when safe, recruit when thinned out, battle when an opponent overextends, or march to plug a gap.

Weaknesses

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Because you control most of the map at the start, every other faction has an incentive to tear your buildings down. Expect coordinated pressure from multiple directions, especially at higher player counts.
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Your scoring depends on buildings staying on the board. If opponents knock out a high-tier building, your VP output drops sharply and you may not have enough wood or actions to rebuild quickly.
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Covering a large map means your warriors are diluted. With only three actions per turn, some clearings will be lightly defended — smart opponents will probe for those gaps.

Tips & tricks

Tip
Sawmills are your single most important building. Without wood you can't build anything, and without buildings you can't score. Keep at least one warrior on every Sawmill clearing whenever possible.
Tip
Resist the urge to spread into every corner of the map. Concentrated presence in key clearings is easier to defend and cheaper to maintain than a thin garrison everywhere.
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Recruit is powerful because it fills every Recruiter at once for just one action. Use it after you've taken losses rather than holding it — a full board of warriors is harder to attack than a stretched one.
Tip
Battle only when it serves your larger plan — removing a threat to a Sawmill, securing a clearing to build in, or punishing an opponent who overextended. Picking fights for their own sake wastes actions you could spend building.

Walk through a turn →

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