Thread by @colewehrle

While chatting with playtesters last night, I happened to find myself wandering through some old Oath files. Since the game is wrapping up now, it seemed a good time to share them more widely.

I also wanted to share them because so much of my design writing is in the middle distance between design and publication.

I rarely stand back and look at the whole process, because I think that this vantage point is probably the one more susceptible to sneaky bits of nostalgia and misrepresentations of process.

That said, that vantage point can reveal useful things too. So, before I jump into an exceptionally busy week helping to get Oath ready, let's look at some old files!

At this point, I have been working full-time on Oath for about 13 months. (That's more than twice as long as Root!) The pictures I'll share come from the August 20th, 2019 kit. This kit was built after a month after I had a major design breakthrough.

Player boards were there from the start. As was the notion of a personal cohort and a set of advisers. The action structure was different and there was also something called alignment which was sorta like an additional suit portfolio not based on cards.

So much of the logic of the action structure remains. Learn and Establish got combined to search. Travel and Survey just became Travel. But the cool system for strategic inertia got dropped because it was too restrictive. I'd like to use it in the Reconstruction game perhaps.

The rough size of the deck and archive was almost locked even at this early point. Because of how much stuff I needed all of those cards to do both within the game and the metagame, I was pretty sure about the precise numbers.

One exception were the vision cards which at this point were called futures (in purple). Originally I had separate cards to generate deck friction by making drawing more expensive. I think at some point in late September I combined these two card types into Visions.

The actual denizens were considerably more restrictive. Instead of any card being able to be used for trade/muster/etc, I had specific resource icons. I liked this idea in principle but it was just too limiting and needed dropped.

If the cards and player boards were somewhat in line with where the game ended up, the Chancellor was not. At this point he didn't exist at all! Instead, I had different government boards (each for the 4 different Oaths).

Each board offered a set of shared rules and restrictions to the current game. I really liked these boards but they had problems. The biggest problem was that they were just too hard for the players to track. There was simply too much going on.

To combat this I made the visions/futures that were paired with each Oath board with very simple versions of that victory condition. I actually liked this quite a bit, but the vision wins often felt too "gotcha" and it wasn't satisfying for anyone.

(Oath's solution to this problem average out the complexity level of the victory conditions and then make the Visions match the Oaths. Though I tried to keep them simple, it can still be hard to juggle since it's a step more complicated than having Pax-like victory currencies.

But, it also gives the game a lot of depth and more fully engages the full card list because card powers can be more specifically oriented towards the different victory conditions without worrying about if that condition might be in play or buried.

Looking at these files now, I'm struck both by how much of Oath existed in that first iteration and also how much of the game just fundamentally didn't work. As we played it in the office, a lot of the early work on development was focused around fixing really basic problems.

I think it's also worth mentioning how bland the cards were at the start. While I had a list of narrative beats I wanted the game to hit, I didn't know enough about the system to design cards that would help hit those beats.

In fact, the card list didn't really start coming together till early October. Basically the first 4 months of the game's development were just an attempt to feel out the shape of the design that formed around the project's central idea.

Around that same time--right after I got back from paternity leave for kid #3, the project got officially green-lit by the studio.

Even though much of the design was still in flux, it was proving itself as the sort of project that could be finished and one that had urgency. It made a lot of sense for us, as a studio, to tackle something like it.

Or, as I frequently tell folks who ask about the game: Oath was too expensive and complicated for a small studio to undertake and it was too risky and weird for a larger studio. In other words, it was just the kind of project that could find a home at @LederGames .

Alright, now it's time for me to get back to August 2020 and get this game finished. Have a great week everyone!