For all of the new features that we are building into New Foundations, the expansion boils down to a pretty simple realignment of the game. Previously, most players would direct their entire attention towards winning. Each game culminates with a gigantic scrum, or, what folks sometimes call a “crab bucket.” I have no idea if this term is used affectionately, but I’ve often liked the image. Certainly the end of a game of Oath can feel like you are trapped with a bucket of pointy little creatures trying climb over each other in a mad scramble to get to the top.
The core argument of Oath (and the thing that separated it from other games in this crab bucket mode) is that it mattered who won. Not all crabs were the same. If you won the game by tearing apart the world, the next game would bear those scars. The winning crab, to a degree, got to pick the next game’s bucket.
New Foundations takes this further. The crab bucket is still very much present, but not all crabs will be as interested in making it the top. They might hang up their dreams of crab-ascendance and settle down and start a family. Perhaps a little strength training is in order so they can climb better next game. Maybe they decide they are interested in redesigning one aspect of the bucket. Previously, the winner made most of the choices about the game’s evolution. New Foundations breaks that monopoly on change.
There were a couple things that led me to this approach, including a concern over Oath’s narrative range. While the individual turn in Oath could produce grounded storytelling beats, often the end of the game failed to capture those moments. Or, perhaps what I mean is that, while the game was filled with specific storytelling, the end could often feel muddy. One crab bucket tends to look like another. In addition, I found that Oath’s memory—that is, the fact that the game’s world persisted from game to game—wasn’t proving expressive enough to generate the amount of player investment that was needed to guide players during those last few turns. That’s not quite true, of course. Some players did find themselves invested. I’ve heard fan-written songs, poetry, and even little videos that offered tributes to the worlds the players were helping craft. But these were the exceptions, not the rule.
During the development of New Foundations, many of these design intuitions bore fruit almost instantly. Even though the expansion was quite rough, little improvements such as the trait system and the revised chronicle steps provided players with a more meaningful role in shaping the world they were playing in. At the same time, we started encountering new problems. It turned out to be pretty easy to get the game to remember more—it was quite another challenge to make players care about what it remembered.
This problem was most apparent in the foundation system. This is the system that let players alter the core rules of the game. In the version we worked on in the fall, I imagined the foundation as a little deck of cards. Each card represented a “switch” that could toggle one of the key elements of the game system. At the end of the game, the player with the Darkest Secret would get to draw a few cards from this deck and select one to enact. Then, depending on the value of the Darkest Secret, they would have the option to reorder the next set of switches, essentially determine what sorts of options the next generation would have.
This was all neat, but it took work. For one, those little foundation decks required maintenance. As cards were chosen, other cards would need introduced or removed from the deck. The logic of any individual card was pretty simple, but even a simple logic can be a real chore. Oh, you changed how mustering works in the game? Well, make sure to add the cards to reverse that and check for any possible interactions that choice might have on adjacent foundations. The system could be incredibly robust, but players had to pay a price for that.
The more immediate problem was the investment of the player making the choice. The system expected players to think like designers—it wanted them to have opinions about the shape of the design and be curious about what else the game might do. In practice, the only time we saw investment here is when the players were mad about the game. If they had a bad roll, maybe they’d feel the desire to kick out that mechanism from the game. It was fully deconstructive.
To counter this, in November we introduced the scion system. The scion system basically awarded the player who made a fundamental rules change with a trait which would benefit their player position for the next game. Break the scepter? Okay, you’re the Scion of the Scepter Breaker next game and have some special ability allows you to profit from that mechanical change. This was really neat and helped players deepen their investment in the world.
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But, it didn’t fix the whole problem. Consider what happened next. After picking your rules change and gaining your scion power, the player with the Darkest Secret would get to determine the next set of foundations that might be altered in a future game. I was thinking, in particular, of the way one generation seems to establish the sense of possibility that will be felt by the next generation. But, for a player at that moment, after a long game of Oath and looking at a dizzying range of system alterations, the choice tended to be random.
Around this time we were sorting through some other elements of the game on the testing discord a playtester noticed a conceptual overlap. The scion powers were basically traits and vice-versa. Why were these things different? Could the systems be unified? It was a great insight and a great instance of how when, in design, you notice two things doing the same thing either mechanically or thematically, that some kind of unification is usually called for.
I loved how evocative this was. If my exile came from a wealthy family, then their ability to shape the foundation of the game should be linked to their lineage in some way. We are, in so many ways, the products of our upbringing and education. It determines how we see the world and informs our politics more than anything else. It would make sense that the traits could be seen as ideological anchors.
So, spurred by this line of thinking, I looked at the traits alongside the foundations. I drew up a little table of all of the possible rule changes in the game (there’s around 26). Then, I gathered all all of my trait powers and scion powers. With those lists at hand, I played matchmaker over a long weekend and soon found myself with a newly imagined set of trait cards.
Consider the breaking of the scepter, as show in the previous image. With the unification of traits and foundation cards, we were able to link that element of play to a pair of trait cards.
This also has a nice effect of organically regulating the flow of change in the game. Previously, one foundation changed each game, like clockwork. With the new system, players were free to enact any foundation in their area. That means that if the same player won the Darkest Secret (and therefore the Chronicle Task of enacting a foundation), they likely would not be able to change the game dramatically, as they had already “flipped” the switches on their families traits and families generally gain traits slowly. However, if a rival family with a long and developed lineage took the reigns, the game might be in for a tumultuous period. Lineages can also be quite hard to maintain, so a tug-of-war between these two players would likely result in some shedding of trait cards which meant the game would naturally settle into a new status quo. But, rather than this kind of conflict becoming muddy, it would produce a unique game-state where the very rules of the game reflected generations of contention.
This was really the heart of New Foundations. There player actions had to have consequences that could not only be felt on the scale of the game, but also on the chronicle itself. Next week, I’ll talk a bit about the Govern phase, and how a few simple adjustments helped us create a lot more imperial identity both before, during, and after a game was played.
Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.