In terms of actual gameplay mechanisms, Oath prefers to keep the fundamentals pretty basic. On your turn, you will simply do as many actions as you want from 6 options. Each action will cost varying amounts of supply, which is essentially your mana for the turn. Most of these will be basically what you’d expect: moving, attacking, recruiting, etc. But with how crazy Oath gets, players will quickly see their actions getting improved by different card abilities.

Also, having more troops at the ready makes you refresh less supply after your turn, meaning that it’s basically impossible for any individual to be a runaway powerhouse without playing the table’s politics well. After all there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to hold multiple areas when your turns are half as efficient as someone who has few troops. Supply cost scaling is a very well designed balancing aspect of Oath that not only feels thematic, but also encourages a more careful managing of everyone’s units.

Oath is a surprisingly well balanced game for how complicated game states can get with dozens of bizarre card effects running amok. A big part of this is supply, but also how costs are managed because pretty every card is a once per turn effect that costs something to utilize, so don’t expect to find crazy infinite combos with tons of recursion here.

But perhaps the biggest deal is the fact that there’s multiple win conditions to chase after. Each win condition never overlaps that much with another one, so because everyone has asymmetric abilities that are never that overtuned by crazy amounts, there can never be a game state where someone can hold complete dominance over a victory. It’s impossible to be able to contest everything all at once while also fighting off multiple other players who are all going to be better than someone else at doing their own specific thing. As a result, it’s quite common for victories to be incredibly close calls, won through hilarious moments of diplomacy and sneaking in more of your leverage than what was expected. And the craziest part of Oath’s politics? Deals can not only last across multiple games, but they can tangibly be noticed because of the ever changing nature of the board’s state.

Nitpicks

Oath doesn’t really have anything wrong with the game if we’re trying to be critical, as it hits all its design goals incredibly well, and those goals did in fact produce an amazing game. There are some nitpicks to point out like how the game lacks its political depth when played at smaller player counts, but that’s unfortunately going to be expected when the meat of this game’s interactions comes from fascinating table politics. There is a bot included, and while it is functional and great as a bot for having nicely complex decision tree, that’s never going to be another physical, talking human being that you can negotiate with.

There’s also the classic problem that every complicated game has to address at some point, which is figuring out just how complicated they want the design to be, and how to succinctly convey that information to players. Oath’s locations all have unique icons that hint at what they do, but most of them aren’t self explanatory and will require looking at the player aid to decipher. Annoyingly, there’s only 2 player aids for locations, so unfortunately they’re going to have to be passed around quite a bit at first. Fortunately, the icons make complete sense, and it’s really easy to re-remember what they mean once you know what it does, so this nitpick stops mattering extremely quickly, even more so if the next game has mostly the same areas.

In fact, the only gripes one could reasonably point out are the more convoluted aspects of Oath, but again, they aren’t hard to parse at all since the game’s fundamentals are so simple and the complications come from so many crazy effects everywhere. In fact, that’s something Oath does really well, because for how often bonkers events are happening, we’ve never had to consult the rulebook to see how 2 cards interacted with one another because of their clearly worded timings and phrases.

There’s also some gripes we have about the chronicle journal deluxe component not being something that comes in the box, but to be fair, Oath is already over 100 bucks which can be a tough sell. At the same time though, that awesome playmat you see everyone playing on? That isn’t deluxe, it comes in every copy of Oath, plus there’s so many cards and pieces that comes with in the game. Regardless, we only bring up the chronicle journal because 1: it’s only 10 bucks on Leder Game’s webstore so it totally could’ve been included, and 2: that little book has been paramount for our group to fully experience how Oath makes history happen, and it just wouldn’t be the same showing new/returning players how the world has changed without it. But at the end of the day, you could always just toss in any old notepad into the box for this purpose.

Ultimately, these “complaints” really don’t matter at all. Oath is definitely a masterpiece!