Leder games Oath chatter

The Nomad vow where you use the nomad bank as your own bank can be extremely fun.

I’ve had that card in hand so many times but always been too wary to play it! I can see how strongly it could be leveraged but it also feels super vulnerable.

I think it'd be especially dangerous with many players, who could easily draw your bank down immediately.

Still on my Oath kick (solo Chronicle, game 6 or so). Still loving it.

A weirdly powerful card is the Nomad card that makes you play any Vision face up at it. If you drop it in the hinterlands just to fuck with people, that's a large part of your move right there just to flip your vision, which is huge because the main strength of the vision is its surprise nature and only 1 turn to prevent a win. It minimizes your ability to entrench.

Also, honorable mention to the Hearth Edifice, which fucking rules. Prevents anyone from targeting the people's favor in a battle which... ouch. That's the poor man's way to deal with someone out economy-ing you for a people's favor oath or vision.

Ring of Devotion is *savage* for the banner and relic game. I also like the relic and banner game a lot more with the adjustment to paying location costs for relics at the sites.

I've played only a couple of games now of Oath, one in an earlier iteration and one with the current rule set. Newer rules are much clearer and it feels like you can do more. I have a concern though, and this may disappear after more plays. The game feels very sandboxy in a way that it is very hard to tell sometimes how to get to a certain point. You can see what you need to do, but getting there is very opaque.

I think this is partly due to the way the two main resources work, favour and secrets. Understanding the manipulation of these seems key to the game, but it is quite a thing to wrap your brain around. I also think the lack of holding a hand of cards, means it is much harder to plan ahead, but again that might just me being unfamiliar with the game and it's foibles.

Keen to play more, just have a worry that folk have backed this expecting Root 2, and this game is not that. The teach is super hard and it is not accessible in the way Root is. Not to say Root isn't a hard game to master, just easier to teach, or so I have found.

I totally agree, it's very opaque. The weirdest thing, which takes a few games to become apparent, is this sense that you are sometimes playing a strategy in relation to the next and future games and not just immediate victory. There are times where it is an uphill battle to force out an incumbent Chancellor so you either have to band together and maybe accept Citizenship in the next game as your reward, or just focus on killing off a particular card or edifice so that the playing field is leveled for the next game. Even with quite a few games under my belt I find it hard to wrap my head around this concept.

Further up this thread I posed a thought that Root might be a game where you want to consistently play with the same people but with Oath you would always want to continue the chronicle even if players are in rotation, but I wonder now how much someone would invest into a game where their goal might be to lay a foundation for someone else to play from in the next game. It might be something that has a better experience when playing two or three times in a row so that there is a tangible sense of continuation. I don't think that victory is as clear-cut or definitive as it first seems; for example a win for a battered Chancellor leaning heavily on Citizens is somewhat pyrrhic as they start the next game up against the odds, or just struggling to victory whilst wiping the board leaves you weak with limited options and support.

Regarding the options for plotting and planning, although you don't have a hand of cards I feel that the ability to put cards face down in your advisors is super important and often overlooked because it is unintuitive to do so. Unless I need an advisor ability right now or am leaning into one particular faction in order to maximise the return on trading I now habitually play face-down. That little bit of hidden information helps to keep the opposition slightly off-balance and allows you to plot away in relative secrecy with your hidden capabilities somewhat masking your strategy.

nb if you want to play on TTS sometime then we're both in the same time-zone along with Sornars, I'm sure we could get a game going one night.

giantbrain, I think you've articulated a lot of my observations about the game too in this long, long thread (which is nevertheless like a solid 10 for me so far, I've played a lot on the recent near-final rules kits). I think there are going to be some very unhappy people when it comes in the mail... if they play it and don't just admire the production.

As I said upthread somewhere, this game has a pretty unforgiving and kinfe-edge economy system that feels like it was taken from some other, much more economy focused game. The very limited favor banks and the difficulty getting secrets means that getting your basic economy engine up and running takes some practice---and may never actually be worth it under certain circumstances. For me, the economy system is actually the game's secret weapon to always keep it interesting. Very few unique-card-fest type games are paired with a truly savage economy system that wants you to think and scrap hard to amass money, secrets, armies, etc. It's what makes the unique powers system work, I think. Even adjusting one of the levers of the economy systems by just a little bit can completely alter your gameplan and parameters, which is exactly what these sorts of big deck, unique card systems want. The alternative is to include a giant deck of incremental improvement cards but this game thankfully steers away from this pretty hard.

FYI, looking very pretty.

Continued my many game solo 3p chronicle. I think the only oath objective I don't love is supremacy for reasons I articulated above about stickiness. I played the relic/banner oath and had a nice back and forth that ended with a chancellor stability win after a climactic battle against the usurper. There are lots of fun, subtle little denizen and advisor cards that can really make the relic objective fun---the circlet of command came out (nothing can be taken from you but the circlet) and the relic hunter site (3 supply when recovering a relic). The circlet is especially interesting because it prevents *recoveries of banners* too, which makes it extra powerful.

As an exile I think you have to think very, very hard before helping the chancellor stop a win unless citizenship and other goodies are involved. Stopping the leader is almost always just going to let the chancellor roll to win w/o citizenship.

I found this thread on the Darkest Secret insightful, particularly the last comment in terms of contextualising the rules around when you can recover it:
boardgamegeek.com/thread/2535086/article/36255129#36255129

To be very clear about intent here, you can only recover the Darkest Secret if (1) the holder has an adviser (someone who might leak the secret), and (2) the site has a card (someone who might hear the secret), and (3) the card at the site and the adviser do not match in suit (wider circles you don't have an ear on that will disseminate the secret).

They're quite unintuitive rules, on first glance, that makes sense.

The TWBG Oath society got together again, with Mezike emerging victorious. But only after two final round win takeways by me on NotSure and then Sornars on me.

The game goes down so smooth and quickly that it really forgives the things that might drive you crazy in a longer game. If you look at the early marketing materials, you can see this is the way Wehrle was thinking about it---play, someone wins with a clever combo or deal, then set it up and play again the next day or whatever. We're at a flat two hours on the game, with almost an hour of it consisting of some dealmaking, key moves, and discussion during the last two turns.

Mezike said he won by looking at the card he got on the first draw---Tome Guardians---and then vaguely working his win around that. I think this is perfectly good for a two hour game, and, moreover, does suggest there is some strategy in the game. He also did a great job realizing what a boon the nomad card "Oracle" was, his strategy would never, ever have worked without it.

So Mezike played 3-4 cleverly combined cards to win that made him extremely difficult to overcome, when combined with some board situations which allowed him to win. And that's Oath! I don't think I'd want to play 6p Oath, though I'd consider 5p.

If you have the patience to get through your first couple plays on this, which run long, I think you'll find a meaty but short game with lots of drama underneath that. I've played about 25 times, though about half of those are solo multiple handed.

What was interesting for me was how I built that strategy. I didn't fancy my chances slugging it out for Usurper as trying to hold several sites for two whole rounds is a tall order. I figured that I would instead need to try for a Vision. Tome Guardians was an easy one to keep because a) it might help me to win on a Vision and b) I didn't want to put it into circulation for someone else to take for much the same reason. At my site was a relic that would get me secrets instead of favour so there was an instant synergy between the two and that narrowed my focus. I had fully resigned myself to having to slowly mine the World Deck in order to find the appropriate Vision so 'The Oracle' was a massive boon when I lucked upon it and that was the point that I committed fully to this approach. I was always worried about Gary Sax holding the People's Favour and therefore being able to kick out the guardians, but ultimately everybody did me a favour by leaving me alone in the Hinterlands so that it became irrelevant in the end due to the constraints on supply. I was very deliberate in ruling only a single site as it made it a massive unattractive pain for anybody to target me - the opportunities elsewhere to target multiple bandit sites or to get a double gain from a direct opponent were far more dynamic. That single site caused two things to happen - everybody left me well alone in my little corner and I had a place where I could finally drop Tome Guardians in order to protect my push for victory. It may not have looked like it at the time but persuading Not Sure to take my offer of free movement in order to exit from that site (shrouded woods) instead of fighting me for it was the biggest moment of the game for me; that was the point where I finally felt confident of achieving victory.

If I hadn't found the Vision that I needed then I would most likely have given the Chancellor (Sornars) a black eye in order to dent his ability to win alone and then immediately begged for redemption via citizenship. I think that is a sound strategy during supremacy because it is so attractive to the Chancellor as they can immediately gain some sites "for free." Got to remember though that as long as the Chancellor has their sceptre they can kick citizens back out into being exiles, I don't believe I have yet seen anyone make use of that as a double-cross.

Up until the final round it looked like it could have been anybody's game, I just happened to have an ace up my sleeve when everybody else had (literally) played all their cards. I was thoroughly amused at the back-and-forth over the promise of future citizenship with Gary Sax; I should probably have pressed for that a little more as the next game could be rough for the Chancellor having to hold the Darkest Secret with very little opening reach.

Will be an interesting next game. Like I said somewhere upthread, in my experience, the Darkest Secret is the stickiest prize that is most easily won against all comers rather than brokered deal or something.