Oath expansion

I refuse to do discord, so I have no idea if those of you who were active in the Oath thread have already discussed this, but I'd love to hear people's thoughts and any info they may be able to share about the currently active kickstarter for the Oath expansions.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/2074786394/oath-new-foundations

There's a solo mode (sigh) and a separate expansion that adds some things that sound pretty interesting. I haven't played Oath enough to really know whether I would benefit from it, but I always appreciate people's thoughts when they are shared on this forum.

I doubt most people have played enough Oath to truly benefit from the expansion .

My take, and I think the broad consensus amongst the group that used to play this on TWBG, is that nothing in this expansion is really wowing us but they all seem like good and welcome additions to the game. The feeling is that this is not exactly a big ambitious expansion, but more of a scaled back tinkering around the edges one.

I'm also cautiously optimistic about the co-op/solo/bot expansion. The design vision seems low overhead and making Oath work solo or at low player counts will make it much easier to get the game played. I've played Oath 3 handed before and had a good time due to the interesting emergent narrative; I'll be happy to pull the same levers against a bot if it ends up working out.

My biggest concern design wise is that the current single minded focus on win conditions means almost every game of Oath builds to a big climactic, risk filled conclusion making the game inherently dramatic. Adding personal/alternative win conditions could potentially remove that tension which would not be great.

Messing with the chronicle and adding module doo dads around the edges are pretty high value adds, but I can't say I'm like excited about what he is describing specifically. Even his original sell on the invader idea was much more interesting than these, though these provide a lot given that they flesh out an underbaked part of the game that was begging for more content. It's a safe, logical expansion imho.

Oath is one of my favorite games (still got it, btw), so it doesn't matter, I'm all in on it.

In terms of worries, my worry is that Cole caters to the loud group of consistent players whose campaigns are heavy RP and meta continuity between games. Oath's whose value to me is in the single games itself, and if you read the kind of shit people get up to divorced from the game, I would not enjoy an expansion catering to that crowd. That said, Cole doesn't appear to play this way but more like how I enjoy Oath (opportunistic combination based king of the hill game with an evolving world downstream of those in game decisions) so I think that's a stretch.

I watched their quick livestream of the draft expansion material and it was pretty fun, it definitely sold me more than their pretty flat designer diaries and stuff, only the last one of those I thought was interesting. It really just is about adding doodads in the campaign but injects a lot of little angles and stuff into the game, their game went off the rails in an appealing way, still based on systems, that just made Oath even more Oath-ey. I especially *loved* the shadow denizen dynamic they introduced and would love to see even more content like it---they're basically denizen cards that help no one and just cause chaos on the board unless you defeat them in battle. One of them entered the game, an arcane hunter denizen, and started smashing arcane denizens off the map which really was going to fuck with the player who was clearly planning on leaning into Alchemist in their advisers. Adding different versions of the people's favor and darkest secret is also a huge value add for the game, creating a big multiplier on the types of textures of games you could have beyond the four in the base box.

So actually, somewhat impressed by what I saw, looks fun and the overhead isn't that large. Game ended on a classic 6 roll on first roll that no one was planning for, which is Oath to a T. Game took like 45 minutes with 3 which I can't help but look side eye at Arcs which takes us 3 1/2 hours with 3. Which I also got my box for, incidentally, beautiful production.