Today we’re releasing a massive print-and-play kit for Oath: New Foundations. Just about every element seen in the previous kit has received some polish, and, if you haven’t paid attention to the expansion since the Kickstarter, this is a pretty good time to take a look at how the design is shaping up.
If you want to read the rules, you can find them here.
The kit is here (as pdfs) or here (for digital play).
This expansion has been an interesting project for many reasons. In a lot of ways, it’s reminded me most of working on Root. Unlike Arcs, the Oath: New Foundations team is small and, outside of myself, it will be the first game for many of its staff. This was very much by design. I wanted to use a project like this to bring a new part of the creative team into the studio process, and I wanted to make sure that the studio’s other projects (including the new Root expansion) had a lot of our senior talent. I also knew that Oath would be a strange project. I had a lot of lofty goals for what I hoped to accomplish, but I also wanted time for the project to find its own footing. If Arcs had taught me anything, it was that there’s no substitute for taking one’s time. The patience and flexibility afforded to me and, eventually, to the wider Arcs team were a big part in the successful of that project. I wanted to bring that same spirit to Oath.
My strategy here was a little less obvious than it might appear at first. Usually, when we set out to work on an expansion, the various restrictions on the design are what animate the schedule, both in terms of the creative challenge of making the expansion good and in terms of the urgency to get the new design to market as quickly and well as we can—that is, there’s an audience already waiting for it! Put another way, we work on a Root expansion, there’s an incredible amount of restrictions that have slowly accrued over the game’s seven year life. And, we know that there’s a very eager corps of Root players who would prefer to have the new factions delivered to them yesterday. When we were working on Arcs, I spent a lot of extra time making sure that we had guides in place that would let us build out new plotlines, leaders, and other types of material very quickly. Those guides and restrictions can be very useful. You really do feel like you’re building on solid ground, but they can also feel a little claustrophobic.
New Foundations has no such problem. When I started seriously working on this project, about a year ago, my main aim was to figure out what it would mean to expand Oath and, to my mind, what it would take to get Oath to better live up to its original promises. Over the past year, it’s been a real pleasure to just push on that aim without worrying too much about how one adjustment might make a specific card or component in the original game not work. Anything that needs updated or reprinted can be. I don’t have to fret about the implications a design choice might have for a line of a half dozen expansions. There’s just Oath and New Foundations.
This is just to say, as I mentioned in in the December Kickstarter update, that this this is a deeply experimental project. We tried to emphasize this on the Kickstarter page itself, and it’s worth restating here: we simply have never made an expansion like this before. Most of our expansions are purely additive and therefore conservative in terms of their design sensibility. If you’re building a second floor on a building, you don’t want to mess up the first floor too badly in the process. That sensibility describes very little of my design philosophy for this game.
Though this expansion offers a huge amount of new material, it is not merely an expansion of core design. Instead, it is a dramatic reimagining of the game. I began the development process by looking closely at incomplete drafts for Oath and essentially rewound the design to where it was about six months before its completion, and then, armed with the lessons of Arcs and a few more years of experience generally, we essentially finished the game a second time. In this effort, I’ve tried my best to realize the game’s highest ambitions. Does that count as a second edition? A 1.5? Super Oath? Call it whatever you want. For me, it is what it says on the tin: a New Foundation for Oath.
Over the past year, we’ve been very busy on this game. Kickstarter backers will likely have read some of our updates over the past several months, and I’ve tried to bring folks into the design’s ups and downs. But, I realized the other day that I hadn’t written much on BGG about our progress. This didn’t sit right with me. A Kickstarter update can only do so much and a lot of what I might say about the design is better suited to BGG. Heck, my personal design journal for the Oath expansion is, so far, about half as long as that of Arcs and we’re only a year in!
I aim to set this right. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be spotlighting some of the work we’ve done since the crowdfunding campaign and try to tell the story of what New Foundations has become. I don’t know how many of these essays it’s going to take, but I imagine I’ve got at least four or five ahead of me to do any justice to the work we’ve done on the design.
Before that, however, I want to talk a bit about the game’s schedule. Since the crowdfunding campaign, we’ve completed three “passes” over the game. The first, extending to the early fall, allowed us to survey the broadest reaches of the game’s possible design space. We had time for all sorts of weird design experiments. Some worked (like reimagining the sites, relics, and edifices of the base game) and others fell flat on their face (like an altered action system). Then, in the fall, I picked the elements that felt most in keeping with the spirit of the game and pursued those more seriously. We spent a lot of time building and rebuilding our physical kits. We brought the game to our public playtesting nights here in Saint Paul, and we started mapping out the work it would take the finish the game. This second wave resulted in the version we showed at Pax Unplugged and the Christmas Kit which we published in December. This second wave produced a version of the game that was broadly realizing my hopes for the expansion, but still left considerable room for improvement.
This brings us to the third wave. Though the design was complete, there were some elements of the game that were a little frustrating. One of the biggest of these were the foundation cards. The idea of the foundation “switchboard” where rules could be turned on-and-off had proven itself. However, maintaining a deck of switches in their proper state was a hassle. I also wasn’t happy with where the People’s Favor and Darkest Secret had settled and there were a couple odds and ends in other parts of the design which were proving stubborn. Should the card Sacred Ground be classed as an edifice? What exactly separated an edifice from a locked site-only denizen anyway? Was the new relic recovery system capturing the spirit of adventure or just rewarding players for cautious play and late-game spending sprees.
At another studio, these questions would be classed as “Development Questions” in the sense that they could probably be answered through the play-testing process and content-level adjustments. However, I had the sneaking suspicion that they would be better addressed with a few little alterations at the level of the game’s design. So, I spent December and January on a third design pass. During this pass, we looked closely at the structure of the game and trying to see what we could knock loose before we put up the drywall. Boy I’m glad we did. Over the past two months we have cleaned up quite a bit of the design.
With the competition of this pass, we’ve entered the final segment of studio production. Over the next few months, we’ll be taking the game through the paces, balancing the new content, making the various foundations as dramatic and interesting as they can be, and honing the game’s physical elements and rulebooks. Don’t get me wrong; this will be a lot of work! But, I love the nitty-gritty of game development, rules-writing, and general usability. I am confident that we’ll have this project wrapped up before summer and broadly keep to our original Kickstarter schedule.
The clockwork expansion, headed by Liz and Ricky, is proceeding at about a six week delay from the rest of the design. This delay is by design. It allows the expansion content to stabilize before the solo team begins to adapt the new material. I suspect the all of the clockwork expansions interactions with New Foundations will be ready for testing within a month.
That’s where things stand now. There’s a lot of work to be done, but the team is energized and, frankly, pretty delighted to play the 100 or so games of Oath that will be required to properly finish this thing. And, while we’re deep long and quiet work of game-finishing, I figured it would be a good time to start a new series of development diaries that talk a bit about the progress of the design over the past few months.
I'll start posting those diaries next week, where we'll cover how New Foundations alters relics, their recovery, and how the game's world generates them.
Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.