[RogerBW]

I've not played Root, though I'm broadly familiar with it, but I did play Vast on Saturday.

It seemed to me that in Vast every player can impair every other, and it's a matter of choosing whom to go after and how it'll help you. Something several reviews of Root have said is that for each player there's one other player who needs to be doing the job of stopping them from winning, or they'll just run away with it.

Another thing said about Root is that you can often get a clear winner half-way through, and it can become anticlimactic to play it out. In my 5-player game of Vast, we were all within a turn or two of winning by the time somebody did.