History Repeated
I love the stories that games craft, both within the confines of the game and around the table between players. We share moments of defeat and victory that we retell over and over. Tales emerge from mechanisms of play that surprise, shock, and entertain. Oath is the first game I’ve played that brings a generational element to the stories that board games can tell, with all the positives and negatives that implies.
Oath is designed by Cole Wehrle, published by Leder Games, with art from Kyle Ferrin. This is the team that brought us the wonderful Root which is in my collection. Regular readers will know that I try to keep my collection small and that it isn’t easy to get into those hallowed halls. I backed Oath on the strength of Root when it came to Kickstarter but it has taken me a while to get a handle on it.
Oath sees you taking on one of two roles. The Chancellor represents the old order. A creaking, towering, bureaucratic organisation that rules far and wide. Even at the far reaches of the Hinterlands their troops exert power and control.
The Exiles have lived under the Chancellor’s thumb for a long time. Now they see a chance to take away that power. They plot, scheme, and gather forces. Denizens of the world rally to their various banners. Some will even strike bargains with the Chancellor. This gives them citizenship but also an opportunity to stab the Chancellor in the back. In the end only one of the Exiles can come out on top, no matter their shared enemy.
The objectives for your first game are to either control the most territory if you are an Exile, or to have the most banners and relics if you get to cozy up to the Chancellor and become a Citizen. The Chancellor wins by making sure neither of these happen by the end of the game. That end is determined by an increasingly likely roll of the dice from round 5 onwards. If the game hasn’t ended before then, it will close out at the end of the eighth round.
When you crack open Oath for your first game, one player is the Chancellor and everyone else is an Exile. The game has a fantastic 4-player walkthrough that I really recommend not ignoring. It will teach you the basics and tell you not only how to play the game, but the reasons behind the various actions you are going to have at your disposal.
The core of Oath is a little hard to describe, but a friend said it felt like an open-world adventure game. I agree with this. In Root you have a singular objective, get to 30 points, and different ways to get there depending on the faction you play. Often in Root you’ll find your options restricted by that faction choice, easing you into the wider complexities of the game. Oath starts with two victory conditions, and a smorgasbord of options that are the same for everyone. This can initially feel overwhelming as you try and figure out how to manipulate its systems.
Whenever you do anything you spend Supply, an abstract representation of your resources and connection to the wider world. This is your core ‘how much can I do on my turn?’ resource. As you gather more troops for your cause, the amount of supply you start with each turn gets smaller. It’s a smart abstraction of how military operations take up resources even if you aren’t actively waging war.
Supply may tell you how much you can do, but Favour and Secrets are the currency of those options. Both can be gained in a variety of ways. Favour when spent disappears, ephemeral as the social capital it represents. Secrets return to your player board (most of the time). They are more pervasive. Insidious even. Both of these resources allow you to interact with the cards that present so many options for you across the game.
These cards are one of the weirdest engine builders I’ve seen in a game. Oath does not allow you to keep a hand of cards. Instead you can have up to 3 ‘Advisers’ beside your board. These cards can represent everything from you having archers in your army to suddenly revealing you are the long lost heir to the Chancellor. All of course beautifully, and entertainingly, illustrated by Kyle Ferrin. Whenever you draw cards from one of the decks you get to choose only one of them to play. The rest are discarded to places that others can pick them up from. In this way the players begin to learn what is available, and you’ll see cards recycled until claimed.
On top of having cards that are yours beside your board, locations across the map can also have cards played to them. If your big pawn, which sort of represents where your focus is at the moment, is there you can use those cards. You can also use them if you have troops there controlling the location. Lovely as the long neoprene map is that you play Oath on, I sometimes found that having all these cards spread out across the place meant that parsing what you could do at a given moment could be a bit of a chore.
This combination of the 3 resources and all the cards gives you a lot of options on your turn. You can use your advisers of course. Move to a location, costing Supply, now you can use the cards there by spending Favour and Secrets. There is a dance between the 3 resources and the cards strewn around the world. Once you get into the rhythm of it, you can pull of some really cool moves. Until then you might stand on some feet.
I mentioned troops controlling locations. In its Campaign action, Oath manages to run the gamut from border skirmishes to world ending military operations. By engaging in a campaign you can have multiple targets, be that land masses or historic artifacts. The odds are in the defenders favour, but there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the dice roll that determines the outcome. This simple mechanism expresses a huge range of conflicts in an easy to understand manner. It is masterful design.
You’ll recall I said that we started with two objectives. One of those the Exiles and the Chancellor fight over. One the Citizens and the Chancellor fight over. Over the course of the game the exiles can also dig out other objectives, changing the goal posts of how they can win.
The core issues I have with Oath brings me back to my Root comparisons. Root you have a single objective, and your faction tells you what you can do on your turn to achieve it. Oath has a large menu of actions and your path to your objective is unclear. Even your objective can be unclear as more are revealed! I always felt slightly overwhelmed by Oath, and that feeling never entirely went away over all my plays of the game.
Now, I have kind of buried the lede with Oath. We’ve looked at how an individual game runs, and the issues I have. Oath isn’t only about a single game of conquest and power. It’s about history and legend.
When you wrap your first game of Oath you change the setup for the next time you play. Based on the locations the winner owned the map changes. History is altered. Monuments are raised and shattered.
The cards the winner had as advisers change the makeup of the cards you play with in the future. Maybe the deck drifts towards Chaos, or warms itself with Hearth. Each of the 6 suits present in the deck have their own flavour it imparts to your games. The deck doesn’t change massively from game to game, but you can definitely feel the influence of suits waxing and waning.
Even the artifacts discovered and the status of the players is preserved for the next game. That session will carry the weight of a shared history. The passage of time between games is left undefined, but the implication is years, possibly decades. The winner of the first game is now the chancellor, their controlled territories at the end of the last game, become their fiefdom in this one. Artifacts they owned become objects of ceremony and reverence. A hero becomes the conqueror and villain of the next chapter in this story.
I have never experienced a board game that really gives you that feeling of shaping and controlling the history of a world. Its the feature that makes me admire Oath greatly. It’s also the game’s greatest weakness.
I knew Oath was a campaign game with legacy style elements going in. The latter, if you aren’t familiar, means the game changes between each play. I thought it would be a game I could play with different groups, as there is no legacy element beyond the changed setup. Factions don’t gain experience and change, so the same player doesn’t need to control them. You absolutely can do this, but in doing so you would lose a lot of what makes Oath unique.
The legends of your copy of Oath belong to the group of players you set out on that journey with. Telling others of those tales is fun. Trying to bring them into a game that has already experienced radical change, feels like being the only on left out of a private joke. It would feel liked adding a new player to an RPG that has been running for years. You all have a built shared history, and anyone coming into that is going to feel left out no matter how hard you try to make them feel welcome.
Let me give you an example. Our first game I was the Chancellor. I was usurped by my long lost heir who took control. Then I took over again in game 3. We thought of this as different lines of the same family fighting for control over the land. It was perfect and created a wonderful story we still chat about. However, you really had to be there to experience it properly.
I greatly admire Oath. It’s an ambitious game that achieves what it sets out to do. It’s Campaign action is one of the best abstractions I have seen of military conquest in a game. The core systems take a bit of learning, but once you have them you can really do a lot with your turn. It is a sandbox of a game that lets you forge a path as you see fit. If you can see the path at all!
Much as I admire all these elements, I just can’t get it to the table as much as I would like. The history it so expertly creates, is a barrier to introducing new people to it. It is a game I respect more than I can play. That is a real shame as I think the team behind it have created something that is really unique in the board gaming space. Oath is a game that weaves a shared history between the players and the game. It gives you options, perhaps too many, but all to answer one question:
“What does your legend look like?”
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