What's In The Box?! Live Play-through Today!
about 6 years ago – Sun, Feb 09, 2020 at 07:50:25 AM

Hey Friends! 

Today I wanted to share our mockup of the insert and how we plan to everything inside the box! Even though Cole is still working on wrapping up the design, the creative team felt like they were in a place to start visualizing the layout of the components and usability of the insert. Compared to Root, Oath will have over 2 times the amount of components, cards, and just sheer amount of "stuff" that will need to fit inside the box. By starting on the insert now, we can get ahead of any manufacturing problems and design an insert that players will want to keep. 

Just a note before we go on this journey: the insert, components, and art are not final and are subject to change. These are 3-D mockups for planning purposes. In these images, the deluxe favor coins and resin magic tokens are being represented over the cardboard versions.  

Important things we considered when designing the insert were being able to have space for sleeved cards, that the neoprene game mat wouldn't be rolled too tightly, and the deluxe components would also be able to be stored neatly and in a tray to be played out of. The insert is also built to be able to "save" your game state in between sessions by having a separate slot for your world deck, archive, and a place to display the order of the suit supplies when going into your next game.

I hope that these images help visualize that not only the amount of physical stuff in the box, but also a sense of the sheer scope of this project in terms of design and production. By any metric, this is our most ambitious project yet!

Reminders

This afternoon at 2 PM CST the Leder Games office crew will be streaming two games of Oath back to back on Twitch and Facebook.  A recording will be posted on YouTube tomorrow. 

Tomorrow at 11 PM CST Cole, Patrick, and Nick will be taking part in an AMA over on the boardgame subreddit, answering questions about Oath and everything Leder Games!  

Lastly, the Print and Play and Tabletop Simulator mod were released on the 28th, and we've really enjoyed seeing everyone's printed kits and reading the session reports. If you happened to have missed the update here is a link to where you can access the kits.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]. Please refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so that we may better assist you.

Thanks for all the support!

- Gates

Public Print and Play
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 01:52:01 PM

Hello everyone,

Get your printers warmed up and your scissors ready. Today we are releasing a public print-and-play kit for Oath!  

Before I get to the links, I want to say a few words about this release. Like other print-and-plays we've released publicly, this won't be supported exhaustively. We'll do our best to answer any questions you have of course, but this kit will not see active updates.  If you do have questions, you should send them here. 

I also want to make it clear that this isn't a development kit. We are not currently looking for playtesters. Instead, the kit is meant as a fully-featured demo. Outside of the automated player, you get all of the printed components you need to enjoy 3-6 player games. I've also severely truncated the game's archive of cards mostly to save you all ink but also because the archive currently contains many duplicates and cards still in development. 

All that being said, if you would like to submit reports from your game, you are welcome to. That form can be found in the link below. Longer and more exhaustive comments (espeically on the rules) should be sent directly to [email protected].

Alright, that's it. If you'd like access to the print-and-play PDF, the Tabletop Simulator Mod, or if you wish to leave feedback about your games, click here.

What's Next?

Finally, I wanted to let you all know about a few things that are coming up. First, tomorrow at 8:30 PM CST Girls' Game Shelf with be streaming their first game of Oath over on Twitch. Second, we've got lots of stuff for you on Thursday, including an in-depth look at what's in the box as well as an office live stream of an Oath double header. Then, on Friday at 11 AM CST, Nick, Patrick, and I will be on Reddit for an AMA over at r/boardgames. 

Questions?

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]. Please refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so that we may better assist you.

Updated Shipping Price Estimates and Pledging for Multiple Copies
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 01:49:28 PM

Hey everyone!

We've gotten a lot of feedback regarding our shipping prices and your voices were heard. We've been working hard at finding alternate solutions on how to make Oath as accessible as possible and we're happy to say that we've updated most of our shipping prices :)

New Shipping Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet on the project page has now been updated, but you can also view it here.

To summarize, we have reduced shipping prices to Europe and some parts of Asia, as well as provided additional shipping costs if multiple copies were purchased (more on that below). 

Please note that we are still trying researching alternate shipping solutions for New Zealand and Australia so these prices have not changed. Another announcement will be made if a cheaper solution can be found. This is, however, still a work in progress and not a guarantee. We will certainly do what we can.

Pledging for Multiple Copies

This is definitely one of our most asked questions and the short answer is that you can definitely pledge for multiple copies. Each account will be limited to a maximum of 4 copies of Oath and each copy will incur additional shipping on top of your base shipping rate as detailed on our new spreadsheet (for example, a backer in Germany would pay shipping as $13usd + $5usd per copy added).

To pledge for multiple copies, you're welcome to adjust your pledge amount accordingly during this campaign but you will also be able to add these additional copies in the pledge management platform shortly after the campaign closes. We'll create a separate "how-to" update that will detail exactly how to do this once the pledge manager is set up. 

Backers at the "Oath Pledge" level ($90) in the pledge manager will be able to add copies at the Kickstarter offered price, however, this offer will not extend to our $1 backers as prices for Oath in the post-campaign manager will increase unless in the "Oath Pledge" level.

Retailers

If you are a retailer interested in backing the campaign, please contact our sales manager at [email protected] for further details.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]. Please refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so that we may better assist you.

Thanks!

Leder Games

Live stream with Kyle Ferrin and Oath Play-throughs
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 01:46:29 PM

Hey Friends! 

I just wanted to come in and write a quick update reminding everyone today's stream and featuring some gameplay videos! 

Today at 2 PM CST Oath's artist, Kyle Ferrin, is going to go live on Twitch and Facebook to talk about the world and art of Oath. Kyle will be answering questions covering everything from concept art, style changes, and the creative direction from the game board! There will be art that you haven't seen! 

For those who couldn't catch our play through stream on the 16th, we have the recording now up on Youtube, PLUS SpaceCatsPeaceTurles will be continuing the campaign on their Twitch channel every Saturday! On top of that, for more Oath gameplay goodness, I wanted to make sure we feature Quackalope's playthrough of the game: 

Also as a reminder, we will be releasing our Tabletop Simulator mod and Print and Play of Oath on the 28th. 

Thanks for all the support!

- Gates

Questions and Support?

Please send all inquiries to our support email, [email protected], and to refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so we can better help you.

A Peek into the Process Behind Oath's Setting
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 01:45:48 PM

Hi everyone,

First, I wanted to let everyone know that we'll be having an AMA on Reddit next Friday (the 31st) at 11 am CST. Nick, Patrick, and myself will all be on hand to answer any questions you might have about Oath or Leder Games in general. 

Today I'll be writing a little about the creative process here at Leder Games and sharing a little of the history behind Oath's world-building.

As you've probably gathered, Leder Games is a bit of a strange game company. Over the past few years  I've gotten to know a lot of folks who work in the game industry, and I am consistently surprised in the variety of company structures and procedures that exist. That's especially true of creative teams. I hesitate to draw broad conclusions from what I know. Some companies give a lot of creative control to the originator of the game. Other companies attempt to shoehorn their games under the demands of a particular creative license. And, probably most commonly, many publishers also take a very active role in deciding what the proper theme for a game should be based upon market demands. That said, each company is responding to the challenges of its own position, and there's no single right way to make a game.

Over the past few years we've developed a very “bottom-up” approach to creating our games. Though we of course react to pressures of the market, in general decisions about how a game should look and feel stay with the creative team for the duration of the project.

In another setting, I might have come to Patrick and said, “I want to make a political fantasy game.” That didn't happen here at all. Instead, my first pitches to Patrick were mostly about feeling and shape. I wanted to make a strategy game that was able to remember how it was played. I wanted to do a game about history. What would the game look like? Where would it be set? Should we seek a license partner? Who would buy such a game? I didn't know the answer to these questions and I didn't pretend to. The project seemed urgent and intriguing and that was enough to justify the work. I'm glad Patrick agreed.

After I began to work on the design seriously, some thematic challenges and constraints began to take shape. For instance, I knew that I wanted the game's cast of characters, places, technologies, and institutions, to develop and to grow. However, I wanted to avoid both anachronism and the kinds of long causal chains and tech trees that are associated with civilization games.

This is about the time that I started talking with Kyle about the project. I offered Kyle a bird's eye view of the game and what the material demands of the design would likely be. I knew I needed lots of cards and art. I knew the cards would likely be suited. I knew who the players would be and the rough shape of the game.

As we talked about the game, it was abundantly clear that we would need some kind of fantasy setting. A historical setting would be too rife with goofy history. A science fiction setting was too oriented towards progress. Of course, we could possible attempt something like sci-fi feudalism such as Dune or Emperor of the Fading Suns (a personal favorite). That option was enticing, but the mechanisms in the game were much more closely linked to land warfare and single-state politics. If we wanted to go in the direction of science fiction, the game should meaningfully grapple with the strangeness of that scale and subject.

(Some art from the Fading Suns roleplaying game which was also used as a setting in an excellent PC strategy game. Though we moved away from sciefence fiction, many of that setting's features stayed in the back of my mind.)

Around this time I was reading a lot of history that ran the gamut from Bronze Age epics to late Roman and Byzantine accounts of their empire's slow declines. Kyle and I were also both talking quite a bit about fantasy novels in general and some of the interesting problems and possibilities of the form.

Fantasy seemed like a natural fit for the game's subject material. This was mostly because of it's ability to tolerate anachronism without clearly signaling any kind of progression. For instance, in a Civilization game a tank can fight a phalanx. It's clear to every player which one of those two things is “advanced,” and there's a huge bias in the player's mind towards their own present moment and how that moment might imagine the future to look. Basically, civ games pretend to empower players to write their own history, but in practice the players already know how the story goes.

(This image may come from a Civilization mod, but it pretty well captures the kinds of tropes I wanted to avoid in Oath.)

In a fantasy setting the futuristic and the ancient and co-mingle in ways that we both found quite provocative. So, we were off to the races and Kyle went to work.

For the first several months the game was set in an inflected Norse-style fantasy setting. The suits of the deck were broken into various peoples and groups of peoples. One suit might be the Dwarves. Another suit might be the Trolls.

As I played the game I found this racial/species structure for the deck was severely limiting the scope of the game. For one, such divisions are almost never immutable. Definitions of peoples and cultures are porous. Folks move around and are influenced by everything they come into contact with. It's easy to forget this by looking at old political maps. It was increasingly important that the game's suits not be link to any specific people.

Kyle and I talked a lot (a lot) about this. We chatted through the relationship between racial tropes in fantasy and the history of racism in the 19th and 20th centuries. We passed some articles back and forth. And, in the end, it was clear that we needed a better framework for thinking through the game's world.

After much discussion, Kyle suggest pivoting the suits from particular groups of people to more elemental ethical and ideological positions. He offered me a list of different suits with descriptive modifiers and even a sketch of how these suits might grow and change.

I was immediately convinced of the idea. For one, this conception of the different suits offered a solution to a host of thorny design problems I was having. For another, I thought it gave both of a lot more room to flesh out this world without being too chained to the standard fantasy tropes.

Once we had that framework in place we established some basic rules for the world-building. First, the world would be old. To borrow Caves of Qud's excellent tagline, the world of Oath would be a layer cake of thousand-year old civilizations. Second, though the world would be filled with strange and wondrous peoples, they wouldn't be organized into tribes based on their strangeness. The world of Oath would be filled with travelers and exiles and found communities.

Next, we wouldn't be overly judgmental. There are no bad guys or good guys in this world. We likewise wouldn't attempt to explain too much about the world though much can be inferred. I think it was important for both of us that the look of the game be as open as the game's design.

Tomorrow, Kyle will be streaming a little and talking about the process behind both creating the game's art and some more specific history about why the game looks the way it does. You'll find that stream here.

Questions and Support?

Please send all inquiries to our support email, [email protected], and to refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so we can better help you.