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If there's a common thread that connects the designs I've worked on over the last several years, it's that they are preoccupied with “bad marriages” between players where one or more members must simultaneously work together and against their partners. A victory is never earned alone—the trick is figuring out how to get others to help you win.

Back when I was working on Root, I was often asked what victory meant in terms of the game. Partly this was the design's fault. Root uses generic victory points. The first player to 30 points wins. This metric is pretty convenient and also allows players to easily understand the current game state at a glance. But, it also hid some of the game's thematic framework. What was a victory point supposed to actually mean?

In the first diary I posted, I mentioned the centrality of cards to the design of Oath. Most of my games feature cares prominently, but none are anything like Oath.

Last week I mentioned how I didn't want to first build a game and then bolt on a suite of legacy mechanisms. If I was going to build a robust game that changed based on the decisions of the players, the game design needed to be built from the ground up to adapt to those choices.

When I started to build Oath, I had a very limited sense of what I wanted the game to be like. I really can't overstate this point. Most of my other projects brim with specificity, even early in the design. Oath was different. I knew that I wanted a game to tell something like a multi-generational story and I wanted that story guided by the decisions of the players.

Last week I mentioned how the origins of Oath were complicated, spanning many years and many influences. In fact, for a long time it wasn't clear that my work on this material would even coalesce into a game

I've been working on Oath off-and-on since Root was in development. Like Root, the origins of the project are complex and go back several years. I'll be detailing the design as well as its thematic and mechanical antecedents (and arguments) in posts over the next few months

Despite its dense, interactive design, Vast: The Crystal Caverns scales very well across its player counts. Still, for my money, the game thrives at three or four players. At three players, each role can easily understand the capabilities of the other roles. This transparency makes for tighter, meaner games. At four players, the delicious emergent alliances have enough space to twist the players into all sorts of strange configurations

During the early stages of Root, Patrick was indispensable to the game’s development. He guided the project, establishing its ethos and its general shape. But, once development heated up after the Kickstarter was completed, he started turning his energies towards the studio’s next project, Vast: The Mysterious Manor. At this point TMM had been in development for over a year. In some respects, the design was about as far along as Root, but Patrick wanted more time with the design.