So who here has played Cole Wehrle's Oath: Chronicles of Empires & Exiles?

Games
1

I haven’t. I hadn’t even heard of it until @Brooski texted me after having sampled it and come away fascinated. At which point I decided I’d pick it up to try next week, when I’ll be visiting with @Jason_McMaster and @marquac, both of whom have agreed to try it with me.

It’ll be all our first times, and basically, I’m looking for any suggestions, warnings, epiphanies, tips, anecdotes, musings, etc. I’m especially interested in any tips for the best way to teach/learn it. The combat (i.e. Campaign action) seems difficult to wrap your head around.

So surely some of you here have played it, and probably even held forth about it in one of the general threads. I’d love to hear from you, and in exchange, I’ll let you know how our game(s) goes next week.

2

I have this. As a huge fan of Cole’s work I was following this for a long time. I haven’t figured out how to present it to a group and it’s been a while since I had a fresh rule review. So, I haven’t been able to play. I also am very interested to hear others experience and how it goes. This is my idea of a legacy game. Don’t make me rip things up or mark things but make the world seem dynamic.

3

I’ve had it since it came out (I must have Kickstarted it?), still have yet to play it. I will be interested in reading how your experience goes.

4

I have played it but only once, and mainly because of my agreement with what you wrote above I don’t think I can tell you very much that would be helpful. I’m thinking one playthrough probably isn’t enough to give me much in the way of any real insights. I can say that I thought it was an interesting experience and I would love to play it again, and also hear your (and Jason and marquac’s) impressions. It’s the only Wehrle game I’ve played so far, though I’ve heard good things about John Company and I also kickstarted Arcs, which should be a kind of sci-fi Oath I think.

5

I ended up not liking it, although my friend who owns it loves it and has a campaign going with a group that doesn’t include me.

I have two problems with it: as mentioned above, it is super fiddly. The rules for combat are like two pages of super dense if/elses and exceptions. I think in most cases it isn’t that hard, but it is super hard to get a grasp on what you can actually attack, what you should actually attack, and what of yours can be attacked and if you can or should defend it, or how you would if you wanted to. And then there’s all the citizen/usurper/whatever rules. Should I offer a bribe to someone to become a citizen? How do I do that? Should I accept the bribe? What happens if I do? So much like that in this game.

The second problem is that it presents this big world with all these moving parts and things you want to do, but you get this really tiny number of actions which in most cases don’t really give you much option. You want more knowledge? Well, you better have the right cards. Don’t have the right cards? Well, go get some. Didn’t get the right cards? Too bad, your turn is over, and you have like 5 more before the game is over (or fewer, if someone wins before that). Or maybe you thought you got the right cards, but before your turn comes around again somebody changed something so now you can’t use those cards to get knowledge anymore. Oh well, you wasted one of your 6-ish turns of the whole game. Maybe instead of knowledge you need coins? Well, that is basically exactly the same.

The flow of the game seems to be: You get one chance to sprint for the victory. If you go too soon, everybody will take you down and you won’t win. If you wait too late, someone else will win before you. It seems like you want to be, like, the 3rd player to go for the win. That way everyone else is too depleted from taking everyone else down to stop you from winning.

And then there’s the way the world changes between games. I didn’t play many times, but this just seems super inconsequential. I mean, maybe it isn’t, but I certainly couldn’t figure out how I would play differently knowing the deck is slightly tilted towards a certain suit. It’s not like you generally have much control over which cards you get anyway.

6

I bought this and played it twice with the same two other people. I like it, but want to acknowledge: 1) we found it difficult to wrap our heads around for at least a few turns in the first game, and then had to re-wrap our heads around it when we played it again a year later, and 2) the rules read as a bit arcane, but ultimately not as complicated as it may seem.

In our first game, we nominated the player-who-wins-boardgames-most-often as the inaugural chancellor (or emperor or whatever the ruler is called, I forget). The other player used a secret tunnels card to build up a shadow-kingdom of bandits and outcasts in the Hinterlands, raiding into the imperial core (the Provinces and Heartland) enough that it seemed like he might win the game as imperial military control collapsed under that pressure.

I managed to convince the chancellor to make me a Citizen. That meant I could prop up the empire with my troops, but then I acquired the Banner of the People’s Favor, so that when the “game over; oathkeeper or usurper wins” roll happened, I won as a Citizen because the active Oath let me succeed to the chancellery.

I thought that (external pressure leads an empire to incorporate an ostensible opponent, who then uses popular support to assume power) was a pretty cool thing to happen dynamically in a boardgame. I don’t know if it’s unique, but I thought it was interesting.

The legacy/campaign stuff is pretty fiddly and we found it difficult to manage even with the copious instructions and the little box they give you to save your game-state. It is cool that the terrain changes based on what the empire/usurper controls at game-end.

The second game ended with a usurpation; I don’t remember exactly what happened. I think it may have been the Darkest Secret (representing victory through intrigue, I think), or it may have simply been conquest.

This reminds me we should play it again, perhaps with a larger group than three.

7

I like Oath a lot. It’s very much its own thing, which makes it difficult to pick up at first. This is especially true of the combat. But once you’re over that hump, it tell wonderful stories. Here’s the chronicle I wrote after my one and only victory. Most of the important words in here - citizenship, cradle, bandit crown, vision of sanctuary, etc - are specific terms from the game.

A dark shadow had fallen over the land. In every glade and field, imperial forces - former bandits - were on the march, and the people cowered in fear.

A handful of brave exiles worked in secret to topple the cruel Chancellor from his throne of iron and lies. The most conniving of them, DV, hatched an audacious conspiracy to steal the Grand Scepter out from under the Chancellor’s nose. Against all odds, his plan worked, and in one stroke the empire’s greatest power - the power of exile and citizenship - lay with an outsider.

DV wasted no time declaring himself a loyal citizen of the empire, pledging obedience to the Chancellor while secretly plotting to seize power for himself.

The people, shocked at DV’s betrayal, turned to the last living exile, Andrew, to free them from imperial oppression. But AWS’s small band of rebels, eking out a meager existence in the hinterlands, could do little.

In the meantime, trouble brewed within the empire. The growing tension between Chancellor and citizen soon broke out into open conflict. In a titanic battle, the armies of both DV and the Chancellor were decimated - leaving AWS with an opportunity to strike.

He moved his troops swiftly from the hinterlands to the empire’s cradle, attacking the Chancellor and winning the bandit crown: the relic that gives its owner command of the roving barbarian hordes that now controlled most of the land. In one swift stroke, AWS had gained military supremacy, breaking the Chancellor’s oath.

The people, tired of war, cried out for a leader with the vision to lead them into a peaceful and prosperous future. AWS answered their call, sharing his vision of sanctuary for the land’s powerful relics. With near-universal support, he began forging a new government for a grateful populace, ushering in a golden age that would last for nearly a century.

8

That’s a really cool story. Yeah, I think that’s the kind of thing that really sets this game apart.

This is pretty much what got my attention in the first game: we were all playing against the chancellor and then a guy got a good thing going and the chancellor offered another guy a citizenship and all of a sudden all these new purple pieces came onto the board and the thought struck me OMFG Cole Wehrle is a genius.

The rules I don’t think are that complicated but they are finicky in a way that anyone who plays certain wargames would understand. In fact, the wargamers we were playing with consistently had a hard time answering the classic @tomchick question WHAT U R ATTACKING

We only played two games but the entire night afterward I was consumed by the idea of how I could adapt the system to make a game about the Holy Roman Empire.

9

Oath was a huge miss for me. It’s trying to straddle an odd line between hardcore strategy game (with all the rulesgrit and outward trappings) and role-playing experience where you’re supposed to journal your experiences and “get into your role.” That RPG element just isn’t where my group is at (also why we’d probably not enjoy King’s Dilemma), so this felt like a very messy and frustrating strategy game for us.

Here’s what I wrote on BGG after 3 plays:

There are obviously some clever game design elements here, but overall the experience is muddled, tedious, exhausting, and frustrating. Not only are the rules opaque, but the many card effects and interactions lead to constant cases of wondering whether rules have been violated. This is a game that most people are going to play wrong. The engine/economy-building is slow, very random, and unsatisfying. The ratio of time actually playing versus watching others play or looking up rules is very poor. The end-game whack-a-mole kingleader is exasperating. I suppose it could be your thing, but it just takes so much set-up and luck to successfully make a play and defend it against the table. If everyone is playing to win (which is our default mode), then the game drags and drags because it’s not that hard to knock someone down. You have to shift to a “narrative” mode of play to make things more interesting and not just let every game end with the Chancellor rolling dice or things coming down to an exhausting last round. Oath’s confused identity - is it a pure strategy game? is it a narrative RPG? - makes it a bit of a mess, in my book. I think the gaming and review community are seeing stars here because they want to - giving Cole a pass, because he’s brilliant and we all want to like what he makes - but Oath isn’t what I would call fun.

10

Was really interested in this when the ks campaign launched but ultimately decided I didn’t have a group to play it with and wasn’t as hyped up about the solo mode. Can’t wait to see what you think, especially if you get around to comparing multiplayer vs solo.

11

I keep looking at Oath at my FLGS and wondering if maybe I need to buy it. This thread is doing a good job of convincing me that no, I do not. Fiddly combat rules? I ain’t got time for that!

12

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13

I have played it perhaps 8 times, with the same group, 4 of us, so sharing thoughts!

Minimal legacy / persistence longer than one game
First up, I mistakenly thought that there was some form of legacy / meta progression / campaign for the first few games. There is no such thing. The end-state for one game does influence the starting-state for the next in a significant way, but there is nothing of the game itself which is more persistent than that. You are encouraged to role-play by keeping a journal, and we did, and that is kinda fun, but it is otherwise not comparable to games like Gloomhaven, Pandemic Legacy etc, which have persistent elements.

Update: Credit to @Brooski (below) for correcting that there is some form of legacy. I completely missed it, which might indicate it is negligible.

Campaigning is complex
Honestly, within 8 games, I never ever really clicked with campaigns. The options you have for “targets” just seemed to me so counter-intuitive that I never learned what they were, and always had to refer to a guide. As a result, I hardly ever campaigned, probably to my in-game performance detriment. To really give this a fair shot, I might suggest walking through sample campaigns several times, and ensuring each player understands it well. The tutorial scenario has you do this once, I might have liked if it were done several times.

Compounding that a bit, is that some of the board items and concepts have - for me - some odd names. Worst of all (IMHO) was that you had a “Pawn” which acted as your Avatar / Commander. I was also often forgetting the difference between terms like “your site” and “site you rule”.

Winning thanks to others not stopping you
The biggest issue some of our group felt was that the win-states for the players that are not the Chancellor were always highly visible and highly stoppable by one or more other players before they could be fulfilled. As a result, whenever one emerged, other players essentially had a choice:

A. Prevent the win state (in turn, essentially advancing the Chancellor win-state)
B. Do not prevent the win state (thus ending the game)

Problem here is that whilst A may seem obvious, it seem impossible much of the time to do that AND make any kind of win-state play for yourself, with the implication that preventing the win-state for other non-Chancellor players kinda just advanced towards the win-state for the Chancellor. This felt like it led to players essentially just having to make a choice about which king to make, the Chancellor or the other.

In theory, this could lead to a whole lot of fun bargaining and banter, but . . . I never felt there was much payoff to “winning” really, since there was no ongoing benefit to it, and given it relied on others to some extent letting it happen . . . it fell flat.

I know all the above sounds kinda negative, yet I do not think any of my group really disliked the game, we just did not love it. One of us might have liked it a lot more than others given how different each individual game could be, with lots of possible win-solutions and game worlds, and for sure, it did have that.

14

What about the evolution of the cards by the fact that after each game some of them are removed from the game and placed in The Dispossessed and replaced by other cards? The card population definitely does not stay the same o er multiple games. This is definitely a “legacy” element in that it changes over time.

15

Huh! Thanks for correcting (I have updated my post to reflect it)

Honestly, we almost definitely did this, as the game owner is great at learning and administrating games. The card pool did feel diverse and interesting. I really did not notice this happening though.

16

Ok I think we need a game update @tomchick. Don’t tell me you guys are all just sitting around discussing Theodore Dreiser.

17

Well, the update is not so good. I had a medical incident during my drive from LA to New Mexico and arrived two days late after a stay at the world-renowned Flagstaff Medical Center (which is now in the running for my top three worst hospitals: 2 stars!). Unfortunately, my vocal cords are inflamed and I’ve only been able to manage a hoarse whisper, so an Oath teach has not been in the cards. Even if my voice comes back tomorrow morning, that only leaves us a day to play. : (

So basically the update is we played a game of Chronicle (gratz to @marquac!) and a game of Marvel United (gratz to Red Skull). But I’m still determined to make Oath happen, because I’m pretty sure I’ve absolutely fallen for it even if it sucks. I’m enamored with how it’s built to be a game about relationships without leaving a bunch of empty space where negotiation is supposed to go (a la John Company). I’m obviously deeply curious to sample the asymmetry among the empire and exile players. I love the dynamics of this being a scoreless game, and I’m even okay with how often it comes down to kingmaking (highly underrated dynamic, IMO). And I really want to see how the Chronicle system comes into play.

I will update you on one thing I did, which was watch a bunch of full playthroughs. There’s a dude on the internet who runs a channel called Heavy Cardboard. I find him intensely unlikeable for his boorish manner. He’s ungracious with other players and constantly puts himself front and center, freely interrupting other players, framing the camera around himself to the detriment of other players, and cracking jokes at an otherwise mostly subdued table interested in getting on with the game. But to his credit, he gets deeply invested in the kinds of complex games I like and he’s posted at least eight full runthroughs of Oath. I’ve watched about four or five, scrubbing through the pauses just to watch how games play out.

Watching those games, and how those players interacted with each other, how they built and evolved a matrix of relationships over time, has made me more eager to play than ever. So while I’m not able to provide an Oath update now, I intend to make it happen somehow, and hopefully soon.

18

Oath is one of my favorite games - but sadly the teach is really difficult and I don’t have a regular group to play it with where you can really experience the narrative.

There is an expansion going into design from Cole right now!

19

Sorry to hear that, Tom. Hope the last day goes well and you get some good games in.

I feel exactly the same about that clown on heavy cardboard, but like you I watched that channel for a while because I like a lot of the games they play and their production quality is good. I eventually just put the channel on ignore, though. Guy is intolerable. In one game of Teotihuacan he insisted on doing a stupid cartoon bird call (“ka-caw”) every time someone said “cacao”, which is the main currency of the game. ffs my dude.

One of my favorite videos on their channel is a game of Brass Birmingham they played with computer programming author Martin Fowler. The HC guy let Martin teach the game, which was interesting even if you know the rules as he inserts a lot of history and commentary into it. It’s a long teach but you can tell he really loves the game.

20

I had an absolutely fantastic time, all things considered. But I’d brought a ton of interesting games, and @Jason_McMaster had a ton of interesting games, but without my voice, I wasn’t able to teach any of them. So goddamn frustrating! But everyone was very gracious, they took great care of me while I was recovering, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to hang out with friends. We did manage to get in some Marvel United, which I have a real soft spot for.

But all those games…just…beyond…our reach. So…close!

That sounds really cool, so I went to find it. And sure enough, Martin Fowler’s name isn’t even part of the title:

But I’ve got it queued up to watch. I love seeing the different ways people teach boardgames and I’m eager to watch Fowler’s Brass Birmingham. Thanks for the heads-up, @Mike_Cathcart.