Oath Review - 2021's Most Exciting Board Game

[Music] hello board games i've been very busy thinking about him [Music] he's been haunting my dreams whispering secrets into my ears consuming my waking thoughts i've written dreams and reams of notes words and noises trying to pin down this game and sum up its joys and at the end i've come up with a review that's passable oats is the latest game designed by cole worley and illustrated by kyle ferran and published by leader games the same gilded trio that brought the world root a game that shut up and sit down found close to greatness but not quite the slam dunk success of our dreams and after amassing a few pounds on kickstarter their next big project is being released into the hands of eager backers and perplexed retailers the premise is a stunningly gorgeous game of conflict in all of its forms but most importantly a game that remembers a legacy light rolling campaign box that stores up all of the history that you pump into it a game of empires rising and falling and the naughty stories and history that rise from the ashes does it succeed or does it not it's time to put this bad boy to the test so basically it's a multiple choice paper with an essay section at the end each of the smaller sections is worth five marks and the essay is worth 15 and you've got an hour you go when you're ready every game of oath starts with a land in turmoil and one of you is gonna play as the once great leader of that land the chancellor decked out in sweet purple they are gonna try and rule with an iron fist to keep their land turmoil free but above all keep their promise to the people in practice that means that each game starts with a chancellor trying to keep an oath and in this game the oath is the oath of supremacy which means that the chancellor simply needs to rule as much of the board as possible and here the chancellor is doing just that with one of their warbands on every single location in the game isn't he doing such a good job all they've got to do is keep that up throughout each round of the game because if the chancellor is still the oath keeper in these later rounds they'll roll this dice to see if they win or not first thing there's six then five or more then a three or more and then everyone gets kind of knackered and someone wins by default but we'll get to that later so that's the chancellor and that's their deal keeping the oath but what about everyone else if we're talking about everyone else that's great because it means i can take this costume off because it's really warm if you're not the chancellor of this game then you're gonna start off as an exile most likely and these guys have it a little bit tougher than the chancellor because they start off a lot weaker but they've got multiple different ways of winning to compensate first off they can win by keeping the oath better than the chancellor taking the oath keeper title and becoming the usurper and if they hold on to that for a whole turn then they will win the game immediately the other way an exile might win is by having a vision these are cards drawn from the big main world deck in the game and they'll give you a specific criteria for how to win at the start of your turn these can be things like holding a dark and terrible secret having the favor of the people or just hoarding loads of lovely treasure if you're still with me great because there is another way to win if the chancellor gets a little bit knackered ruling over their vast unconquerable territory all on their own they can offer any exile citizenship effectively making them another arm in the chancellor's empire so surely this means that the exile wins if the chancellor wins no not really well sort of for a citizen to win all they need to do is get the chancellor to win first having them roll the dice for victory and then fulfill their very own successor goal as listed on the bottom of the oath in this example it's half the most relics and banners nice and simple but you've got to remember that there are four different oaths in the game and each one has their own victory condition and their very own successor goal and a little tier list of victories at the end and they correspond to the four different visions that are in the game and they're unique and they're cool and there's also the secret fifth vision the conspiracy everyone forgets the conspiracy where you just need a secret and you need to travel to a site and have a matching advisor and you can steal things and that's it i promise those are just the victory conditions in oath and already you've got a game that's looking a little bit chancellors of dunsia but i promise you that they serve a greater purpose in making a game that is truly deeply political knotted and hard to pass but stuffed with as much intrigue as a filled with i see with these knots of victory conditions you can have a game that simulates anything from bold rebellions to squabbles within the court of an unruly monarch and these snap oath into a game that's frighteningly immediate with no points to speak of someone's victory could hinge on holding one thing that someone else has like king of the slippery slippery hill but what it means in social terms is that players are gonna get complicated relationships fast so now that that is out of the way we can talk about how you play oath properly it's divided into eight rounds on each round each player is going to take their turn and on your turn you spend your supply to take any number of actions something to keep in mind is that a lot of these actions are going to be supplemented replaced or changed by cards the real backbone of oath each one has its own totally unique effect and artwork and belongs to one of six thematically different suits order discord nomad beast half and arcane cards can be played or used at sites if you're either there or if you rule them with your little coloured warbands or you can smash them in your advisors allowing you to have their powers portably the best way to think of it is you're creating a shared tableau in the middle of the table and then you're creating your own means of interacting with that tableau over on your player board but how do you obtain these cards well you're gonna get them through searching which is action number one searching has you scrambling around in the depth or discard piles grabbing a card and trickling the rest down into the next region along leaving other players to the scraps the people ideas and structures that you might not fancy but could be useful allies later on but let's say i fancy holding power over one of these cards that means i need a fighting force and mustering is the quickest way to get them to muster you spend a favor one of the two currencies in oath to recruit a couple of warbands onto your player board ready to do some campaigning with later on and how do you get that favor well trading with a card will let you swap secrets the other currency and oath for favors and you get more favor from that suit if you have advisors of that kind in your party and of course you can swap a couple of favor for a secret in this way too but bear in mind the oath has a closed economy if there's no money in the bank of the suit you're trading with you better go and make some new friends or make your old friends richer first now that you've got a spot of cash you might want to spend it and one of the ways you can spend it is by recovering pulling ancient relics out of the ground to harness their weird magical powers maybe you've found an oracular pig a deafening war drum or wizard napalm this action is also the one that lets you grab one of the two banners in the game but if we talk about the banners we're gonna have to get the whiteboard out again the penultimate action is traveling which lets you move around the map it's cheaper to move around in the cradle the seat of power and gets more expensive to move around the regions the further out you go in a delicious thematic touch but maybe all of that is expedited by a coast-to-coast transfer or a friendly giant giving you a lift or maybe slowed by being forced through a narrow pass or getting lost in a hidden forest and last but by no means least we have campaigning arguably the most complex action in oath because it's the most broad essentially campaigning reflects conflict in all of its many forms anything from a tiny bar room brawl to a few skirmishes over patches of land to a massive all-encompassing military campaign right back to the daring heist of a precious artifact and this is because oath's combat system allows you to target as many things as you want and anything that any player has but often taking on more targets increases the amount of dice rolled and these dice are incredibly fickle masters defense that can be blank one two or multipliers become exponentially more scary the more that are rolled and attacked ice can be impotent just right or so chunky that they have you offing your own troops so those are the actions of oath and on paper they sound kind of unremarkable sure there are clever little twists and they're all done under these weird victory conditions but what makes them sing what makes them special the way that i've explained those actions in that order sounds like a pretty typical war game but those actions are not that and oath is not one of those games what oath is is one of the most evocative games i have ever played these cards and the game as a whole have the most charming and gorgeous artwork that i've ever seen in a game where every single card is a treat to look at with their own quirks and details they are hugely evocative and i would buy a full-sized print of all of them and i should probably mention here that if you haven't noticed already the production here is gorgeous unique screen printed meeples a neoprene board with chunky custom dice chest kiss but let's get back on track here the reason that these cards having so much love on them is so important is because they might be the most powerful thing in the game or just be entirely useless depending on the game you're currently playing they are the cornerstone of your game the actors on the stage the world that you are building together but the truly smart stuff here is how these cards create spontaneous narrative and seamless role play on the fly because of how well they link with the brass tacks of the rest of the game every single action you take in this turn will link player location denizen and action all together locking them in like a sort of narrative lego i muster troops at a rowdy pub in the charming valley i trade secrets with the elders in the marshes i campaign against the bandit keep in the salt flats this obviously isn't unusual in games if you've played any highly thematic game you've probably had a dog save a man from a zombie before but in oath it's entirely different because of how these smaller actions linked together to make a bigger more cohesive whole that utilizes every cog at its disposal for example one of my most vivid games involved a chancellor who found a denizen so powerful they had to be contained the bandit chief whose power was to absolutely blast everything from the map this card would have totally scuppered them keeping their oath so that player decided to imprison the bandit chief locking them away in their advisors so no one else could get to them and so was the story until a usurper arose who managed to claim the land for themselves at which point the chancellor running out of options decided to free the bandit chief allowing them to run rampant across the empire desecrating it entirely wiping every site clean so that they could pick up the pieces but then at the 11th hour a third player emerges as the bandit chief finding a long-lost crown to take over those swathes of empty land and rule over the wreckage of that once great empire that's just one tale from one game and it's all driven entirely by the systems on show so little needs to be read or inferred it just happens but each game provides its own unique narrative a powerless puppet ruler watches their citizens squabble over petty trinkets a strict trading curfew is imposed forcing a remaining band of freedom fighters to take up home in a bustling hub of trade or an endless siege tries to prize a terrible secret from a cult holed up in a magical keep and this is where i think oath is truly different from other games the stories here aren't a sideline to the systems or in spite of the systems the stories and the systems are the same thing and that is expounded by the fact that there's no flavor text or law in this game whatsoever in my second or third game of oath a new player asked the table what's the story here and that's where i realized oath is so so different there just isn't any text that wants to explain any of that to you oath is confident enough in narratives that are entirely player driven that it hands off the building blocks to you in their entirety and it does so with that level of confidence because here the broad strokes that the game paints with and the intelligent and evocative names of the cards create a world that effortlessly comes together through systems artwork and name alone and because of all that the best plays the most successes that i've seen in my games of oath don't come from players strategically reading the board state and identifying weak points they come from players just feeling out the story and finding their place within it and those stories can be so wide-ranging and so diverse they can be game of thrones in fighting or lord of the rings high fantasy looney tunes levels of absurdity or the thick of it political vitriol or a mix of all of those at once at different times and you know what gathers all of that into one sumptuous bouquet let's finally talk about history and legacy so before getting into the weeds with any of this i should probably explain how the legacy [Music] systems work in oath on a game by game basis at the end of any game of oath whoever wins and however they win will become the chancellor for the next game and the sights they rule are the only ones that survive between games and they survive with all their denizens intact meaning people and places important to that new society remain in place between games the winning player then moves these up the board to form the new cradle and then vows an oath for the next game if that player won by a vision then they will vow that as the oath for the next game they're redefining what victory means in between games in this world and anyone that helped them do it well the winning player can offer citizenship to most of the players sat around the table so alliances get strung from game to game so far so neat but the real star here are the tweaks to the deck because of what they mean within the future of your copy of oath at the end of the game the winner chooses the suit of one of their advisors and filters in new cards of that suit into the game they'll also put in a couple of other stragglers and then gather up all the cards from the losing players and slide six of them into the dispossessed well they might as well have been put in a history bin so what does this add up to well oath promises to be a game that remembers and it certainly certainly does but in a way that gradually creeps up on you rather than bombastically flourishes all at once see my group keep adding in order and discord cards making my world gradually more authoritarian and backstabby this is a nightmare world but it's only become that way through decades and decades of abuse because each win with these cards makes their suits more prevalent in the deck and by extension other cards less prevalent so change in this world needs to be more seismic and deliberate to let another kind of card went out but here as well something fascinating is happening because abuses of power are gradually folding themselves into future generations in most of my games these days people are getting discord advisors then comboing them with cards that come from the deck because there are discord cards in the deck then because of that they win and then those discord cards get filtered into the new deck creating a world that is gradually getting more and more backstabbing and cutthroat and horrible and my goodness this is better legacy than most dedicated legacy games even can dream to provide because it's so organic and so yours but what it also means is that future becomes a factor in every single player's consideration for who wins and when it becomes a whole lot easier to give the victory to someone with a true vision for what this world could look like rather than maintaining the rubbish status quo think of it this way you know how in a cooperative legacy game a player might have a move that will win you the scenario but hurt the long term stakes of the game as a whole think about that but competitive and juicier for it shalom and sit down favorite the king's dilemma had this in spades but imagine instead of voting in the king's dilemma you were acting you are the agent of the actual change not sending faceless people to do the battle in a far-off land you stake your claim personally the metagame and the game are won but unlike the king's dilemma none of this narrative is offered it all emerges from the board and through people through the players through their relationships between games and their knowledge of the history that came before them this is where oath shines in ways that are broader and more glittering than even the remit of this review the history in this game recontextualizes redefines everything it filters into the cracks of every single decision you make turning a mess of systems into a game that is unlike anything i've ever played but if this all sounds quite horribly academic sure it can be but it also just isn't because it's all driven by these cards this deck players get so invested in their favorite or least favorite denizens between games there was a collective agonized cry around my table when erendboy a card that everyone adored got unceremoniously dumped into the dispossessed never to be seen again and then an ecstatic cheer when a player used some arcane wizard tower to bring him back from the dead and then on the other end of the spectrum this blackmail card has become so ubiquitous within my games of oath that its arrival is expected at this point it's like when do we signal the backstabbing to begin by someone playing the blackmail card and the card gaining that history is something that could only happen in this very game okay so i've written most of this review in one sitting and i've now come to a point where if left to talk about this game i will talk about it forever i want to get into the weeds i want to tell you about the imperial reliquary i want to tell you about the banners and the closed economy i want to tell you about edifices in the chronicle book but ultimately these are things that you will discover yourself through playing around in the sandbox the experience that i would most like an oath to is dipping into the discography of a new favorite band for the first time finding out all the little quirks and strange things about the discography that you'd never noticed before and that's kind of what oath is it feels so refreshing and new and cumulative it takes all the strengths of coleworley's previous works and puts them into one game that just sticks together so well in a way that is pure genius and so perfect for me right now [Music] we all knew it was coming we all knew it was gonna happen there can't be a shut up and sit down review without a couple of problems caveats and turnarounds and the first of these is something you could probably tell from the rest of the review already these cards because they are so powerful and so unique and so randomly pulled from the deck this game gets pretty horribly unfair and unbalanced and it is riddled with king making now i think those are features rather than bugs they prompt a sort of player driven approach to balancing the game and keeping everyone's power levels in check but if you want a cut and dry strategic experience that is going to be above all things fair that's not what this game is and you can't make it that even though it might present like that in some ways but before we get into the weeds of talking about that a little later on a bit of housekeeping a lot of people have been talking about how fierce oath is as a teach but honestly i'm gonna go against the grain here if you understand your first game as likely a bit of a wash it's not really as bad as you might expect at all if one player learns the game fully and then teaches using the walkthrough and expects to have queries you'll have a slow first game but a slow first game where everyone will just about know the rules by the end but strategy that's something else it won't come to you for multiple games so i would encourage you just to play in the sandpit which might lead to some or many dud turns while you work it all out or turns where you aren't a big player in the narrative and i think that is the biggest of the rubs i think that a lot of players who are approaching this game are going to be frustrated by what it is rather than what it might present as a lot of players are going to get this to the table and be frustrated that some of their turns are short nothings where they are nobody in the narrative and like i say that can happen frighteningly often because this game is so willfully imbalanced and full of king making you can go from top dog to absolutely nobody in seconds and your turns can be reduced to well i guess i shuffle over here and play a secret and that's kind of it that's what this game is but it's what this game needs to work on the level that it wants to work at to make this all crystal clear let's have an example in this game of oath you're lagging behind but you've got nine whole supply to spend on your turn you want to grab a cool card so you search the deck but don't find anything immediately useful then you want to go and trade with a suit that has money in it so you travel to a site and then trade with a card that's it that that move could be all of your supply gone for your whole turn and all you have is a bit of money to show for it and that's one of your eight turns for the whole game the game hinges on finding the right cards at the right time to the extent that your turns are nothing if you've not got some infrastructure going and if you get beaten down by the other players and have that infrastructure taken away you must be so invested in the story that you're content to be that nobody will the best player win no but the fun and intrigue that arises from these systems is so good that the game being cut and dry competition should not matter if this was always a three-hour experience like your first walkthrough game likely will be then this would suck but if your players are well versed in the systems you can bash this game out in an hour and a half and get ready to go again that'll mitigate some of the bad feelings but you can see how a lot of people will just not gel with this game and you know if you are uncertain about this game and you don't know whether you'll like it or not i would encourage you to take a look at quinze's root review i watched that review literally just before writing this paragraph of my script and yeah all the criticisms that quinn's levels at root in that review are still true of oath if anything it's expounding further on those points it's going more and more off the deep end of experimentation and strangeness but i think the difference here is that by dropping victory points and a symmetry of mechanics for approved king making and a symmetry of power and then slathering it all up in narrative like a big story cake you have a game that delivers on its most lofty of ideas but don't let this game become an aspirational purchase with something this atypical it requires investment from the group that you're gonna put it in front of oh it's basically just root two it's kinda like root legacy don't be that person because that's not what this game is it is very niche weird and particular it's just stolen a troops on a map game's clothes but on that note let's talk about people and let's talk about cost at the time of writing on board game prices and board game atlas you're looking at a cool 100 pounds or 100 for this game you're looking at buckets of plastic space opera twilight imperium money for this game and that's gonna cut out a bunch of people instantly personally i prefer it to ti it takes the best parts of that game the stories and role-playing and makes it bigger and better do you get a luxury product that is worth the money absolutely you do this thing is made with so much love and attention the production is magnificent do you get a game that you will play enough times to justify the cost probably if you've got the right group but even then this is still a game that is so out of most people's regular purchase price range so here's my advice if you don't have a group in mind for this game just don't buy it at all you need a group ready and waiting to give it a go if you do have a group in mind but you're uncertain as to whether they will like it consider splitting the cost between you that way you're investing in this weird experience together and you can take the lion's share of the costs if you're the one that is holding the copy oh and a last stop on this tour of ills is player count this game says on the side of the box that it's for one to six players and i don't think that's true uh this is a three to five player game in my opinion with one player you're playing against the clockwork prince a robot player and i think that it's kinda interesting it just doesn't have the same longevity as playing it with multiple people just because the joy of the game is in the stories and it's more fun sharing those stories and experiencing and playing those stories with real people rather than a robot two you also have to use the clockwork prince it's a little bit more interesting but still not the fully featured package three four and five are perfect six probably too many and at that point you might have someone that's new to the game and that'll be a nightmare just stick to three to five for the best experience but even with all of those caveats and considerations including the ones about player count i will always play this game if someone fancies giving it a go i delight in showing it to new people i delight in furthering the history of this box and unpicking and unraveling all of the systems inside this thing it is by quite a margin my favorite game but even with a statement as big and chunky as that my review feels inadequate in capturing the hugeness of what this game can be i've been poking and prodding at my script trying to get it just right given the balance of rules to magic perfect but it's hard it's hard capturing the essence of this thing it's like a giant greased up tiger made of history look if you want to get straight to that magic i would encourage you to read the charlie thiel and space biff reviews of oath they do a really good job of summarizing the greatness of this thing in fewer words and fewer bad jokes and with that i think that is all the review i think we're done in just under some minutes hey did we remember to set up the time travel joke at the start of the review what we did the hair thing so we get like older huh like a legacy throughout the review doesn't sound like a great joke yeah well but i mean it's a lot of effort to do this for the video like there should have been like you know set up yeah and payoff would be great as well no can do buddy i've just told them i'm finished but hey at least we made the sweet costume though right hell yeah we did [Music] [Music] ah i'm so tired

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 270,469

Rating: 4.9338017 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Tom Brewster, Oath

Id: bkYNFiJ6xLo

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kungfugleek]

My group tried to play this a few weeks ago, but the owner had carelessly opened all the packets and shuffled everything together, thinking "we don't need no learning game".

We did. We absolutely did need a learning game.

I hear he's reassembled the packets now and maybe we can try it again sometime.

[u/mysticpickle]

The best gag was the beard stealthily growing as the review went on.

[u/DuckDrunkLove]

Oath - the best game I'll never play

[u/RentFree323]

Whoa whoa whoa.

It should be noted - It's currently $120 on Ledergames. That makes sense for the price point Tom is talking about here.

But what's being shown is not the game you get for $120. You get cardboard components for 120, not the shiny metal coins or resin secret books.

If you're going to get the game, for sure get the game - but be careful if you're expecting to spend $120 for a "premium" experience. Premium components are +$30. The logbook is an additional +$10. So the price point isn't "$100" like Tom says in the review, to get what's shown you're actually looking at $160.

[u/Doctor_Impossible_]

the story and the systems are the same thing

Yup. Good review.

[u/SqueakyPlatypus]

I'm sad this game is out now and not 6 years ago when all of my friends who would like this still lived close enough that we could all play it together, and also had the time to invest into it.

[u/laxar2]

I wonder if Quinns would have given this a recommendation. I know Tom was a much bigger fan of Root than Quinns.

[u/CheerfulSunsinger]

Oh, blessed Dire Wolf Digital, please digitize this so my friends can more easily mentally process this game.

[u/_Underleveled]

If my girlfriend didnt just buy me Gloomhaven, and my group wasn't already overloaded with heavy fantasy strategy games (because of me), then...

I'm going to buy this anyway.