Design Diary: Oath's Long List of Cards
about 6 years ago – Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 01:11:35 PM

Hi everyone, 

Today I'm going to share with you the next designer diary. If you've already read it on BoardGameGeek, this is basically the same thing. We are just posting them here as well so that folks don't feel obligated to dig through BGG.

In terms of the scale of its card design, Oath is much more easily compared to something like one of the card games produced by Fantasy Flight Games rather than something like Dominion. While Oath has fewer cards in it's pool than the first set of KeyForge, it's quite comparable to something like Netrunner plus a few expansions. Remember, I'm talking about unique card design. Obviously a game like Dominion has more raw cards than Oath. But Dominion only contains 25 different kingdom card piles—the vast bulk of the game is duplicates.

Most games with a large number of unique cards demand such robust card lists because they need deck variety. Each card is a little tool that the players might use to build a strategy around or supplement an existing strategy. The card list is essentially where the game and all of it's various strategic potentials exists.

Oath isn't quite like that. In Oath all cards sit on top of the game's strategic and tactical framework. You could play game after game of oath with just a suited deck without abilities and the design would work just fine. In fact, for many months of development, this is exactly what I did.

Don't get me wrong here, the cards are not extraneous to the design. In fact, they are essential. As I worked on the primary systems of the game, I did my best to create a place for literary hundreds of unique powers and cards. The cards were going to be critical for the game's storytelling framework and critical for how the game grows and changes.

The ability of the game to adapt from play to play was the primary driver in determining the game's shape and the demands of its card list. I wrote about that at length here: Designer Diary 5 – Cards and Continuity. The short version is basically if I wanted to use the game's cards as a kind of memory system, I was going to need a bank of at least 120 to 140 cards in addition to the game's site cards (24), starting deck (54), and visions (5).

I had worked with large card lists before. Pamir has around 100 unique game cards, and I learned a lot working on Pamir's card list. Oath would put those lessons to the test.

The key problem is figuring out how to think about large card lists so that you can work in a purposeful way without getting lost in the weeds. It's a little like painting a mural. Though you might use many of the same materials and skills to paint a mural on the side of a building as painting a small piece, the method of production is completely different. You have to adjust your procedure to be able to quickly go between thinking big and thinking small. I'll stop the painterly comparison here before I get into too much trouble with Kyle.

Let me give you another example. When I build proof-of-concept playtesting kits, I try to get the entire game down to around 5 pages. I build these pages as artboards in Adobe Illustrator not because it's the right program to work in, but because I can work quickly and can easily zoom out and see the entire project all at once. I'll usually use small versions of the cards and a tiny version of the board that fits in a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper. Such a kit is easily edited and allows me to rapidly iterate during the early stages of a design.

 A Root kit from September 2017, about a month before launch. As you can see, my graphic design work is sloppy, but the basic framework is easy to iterate on the fly.

Oath was initially quite helpful in this regard. The game only uses about 20-25 cards per game and it was easy to build a representative deck. However, as soon as the design started taking off I was faced with the prospect of wrangling a truly massive card list. It was clear that I needed to adjust my methods.

The first thing I did was establish some core archetypes to each of the game's six suits. These wouldn't be hard and fast rules. Instead, they were guidelines that should inform the general attitude of each suit. Next, I created a list of different “roles” that cards could play in the game. I knew I wanted some portion of the game's cards to be battle plans and another portion to have one time when-played effects.

With these general principles in mind, I laid out all of the cards in a kind of atlas and broke each suit up into little chunks. Now, I could go into each chunk with some big picture ideas in mind before I started getting deep into their design. Here's what one version of that atlas looked like back when I was still calling the game Saga:

Funnily enough, though everything else from that iteration sank like a brick, this way of tackling Oath's larger-than-life card list stuck. This is one reason why the various terms and symbols in the image above might not make any sense to those of you who have already developed some familiarity with the game.

As I iterated the game, I began to get more comfortable thinking on the macro level and started to create some basic guidelines that would inform the design of each set of cards. Here, I decided to imagine that the different suits in the game would have certain natural affinities and antipathies. The basic idea was that the deeper you got into a suit in the archive, the more you would start to see abilities bleed into the domains of the other suits. (Sidenote: by reversing this “wheel” of relationships, I was able to come up with the natural combat counters in that suit's battle plans.)

I could then put this affinity into a revised card atlas.

 Note: somewhere along the way I had to drop the Clockwork suit from the deck. There's probably a another whole post about why the game has six suits and not four or five or seven, I'll spare you for the moment. 

In this atlas, each square is a card. The black squares represent core card types associated with that suit. Then any block matching that color will be associated with that suit's abilities. So, a gray "Order" block in a hearth row is going to be a Hearth card that has some affinity with the Order type, perhaps it's a battle plan. Then, using the affinity/hostility wheels above, I could create a "Captain" type card that would be good against beast cards.

Again, none of these things are hard and fast rules. The main purpose of the exercise was just to provide a general framework so that I could easily shift my focus from small scale card design to the larger picture.

 You'll soon see some of these dynamics work out in practice when I take you through the first two suits in our tour through the starting deck later this week.

Alright, that's it for now. As with last week, I'll do my best to answer any specific questions you might have in the comments below.

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.

Coming Print-and-Play/TTS, a Bit About the Sites, and Last Night's Stream.
about 6 years ago – Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 04:08:07 AM

Hello everyone,

I've got lots to share with you all today. First, the big news. On Tuesday the 28th we will be releasing print-and-play PDFs and a Tabletop Simulator mod for Oath! 

These kits won't be the full game, but they will include enough cards so that you can see all of the systems at work and even start a chronicle of your own. I'm guessing that the bot (for solo and two-player) won't be ready yet, but I'll have more to say about its design in the coming weeks. 

One thing that we mentioned at the start of the stream was that we're happy to announce that we'll be sharing a print-and-play kit and a mod for Tabletop Simulator publicly on the 28th. This won't include the full card archive or the solo/2-player mode, but it's fully playable and all of the gameplay systems and features will work just fine. 

A Few Words about the Sites in Oath

A couple days ago I mentioned that I would be writing more about some of the card design in Oath. I thought it would be best to start by talking about the sites. A couple months back, I wrote at length about the development of Oath's general geography here: Designer Diary 4 – A Map that Remembers. What follows is a kind of sequel to that post.

For those that haven't read the original post, the short version is that after a lot of futzing around I found that the only essential structural element I needed in terms of the game's geography was to be able to handle the difference between core and periphery. Thankfully, that's an easy enough thing to collapse down to a single stack of cards, which is critical to how the game stores its map.

But that single requirement didn't mean that I wanted the game to have a simple geography. Rather, I felt that within that basic framework, I could provide all of the color I needed with the site card powers themselves.

Here I should say that I was heavily influenced by Christian Martinez's game Inis. Inis has a remarkable geography. This has less to do with the clever way its tiles fit together than the design of those tiles. In Inis, every land tile in the game is unique. This is a critical feature. By keeping the tiles unique, the game design is able to create some wickedly strong powers that wouldn't work if there were duplicates. In addition, the unique tiles make the game feel dense with tactical possibilities. There just isn't any filler.

Each land's power has a clear thematic justification that is deeply thought out in terms of the game's storytelling. Consider, for instance, the Swamp. The power of the Swamp is simple: the card can be played instead of passing. The game doesn't rely on any silly event table (“Roll to see what you encounter in the swamp!”) to generate it's effect. The effect is so simple as to seem anti-thematic. But it's perfect. The swamp allows you to hide out and bid your time. It fits perfectly within the logic of the game and the stories Inis is able to tell well. Likewise, the power of the Cove card is also brilliant. The Cove allows you to swap one of your cards from the one absent card. It's entirely about the arrival of an unexpected visitor. I could go through each and every land power in Inis like this. Even though there are only 16 land tiles in Inis the geography feels richer than far more complex games with two or three times the number of land tiles.

Oath has 24 site cards at the moment. Like the denizen cards in the game, each one is unique. With the land cards in Oath, my priority was the complicating the game's geography and fleshing out the world with abilities that resonated with those places. One of the things I most like about Oath is how wide the design space is and how easy it is to fold thematic powers into the design space without resorting to blocks of rules text or heavy-handed storytelling techniques. If the denizen cards were giving me lots of actors and actions, I wanted the site cards to give me interesting backdrops for the game's drama.

Let's highlight a few:

Just an FYI none of this layout is final and much of the art is serving as a placeholder. Don't worry!

There are six “homeland” sites, one for each suit (you can see one of these on the left). Control of these sites confers extra popular support only for the purpose of scoring either the Oath of the People or attempting to secure its corresponding Vision. Usually this Oath has almost no geographic or military component, but if the right site cards are out it essentially adds a second theater to the struggle.
You'll note too that every site card also has a number in the top right, indicating how many cards can be played at this site. Some site's can't support any cards while others can support as many as three.

Some cards contain ability augmentations. Many of these are obvious, such as the Mountains adding to the defenders advantage and the Plains adding to the attacker's advantage. Even small shifts like this are critical. There's nothing overly clever about the design of many of the land tiles—it's far more important that they simply make sense within the game's world. In some places it's easier to raise armies and in other players it's easy to find magic. I tried to keep these powers simple where I could and allow the storytelling ramifications to be handled by the system itself.

All that said, there are a few tiles which can radically change up the game's geography. One of my favorites is The Narrow Pass.

The Narrow Pass has a global modifier on it, which means that all players are affected by the site, even if they have no direct connection to it. The effect is fairly straightforward though it takes some text to cover all of my bases. Basically, if you are moving to a region with The Narrow Pass, you've got to move to that site first. It essentially creates a bottleneck that players can transform into a critical defensive bulwark.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of some of the geographic variety of the game. On Monday I'll talk a little about establishing the different suits in the game and some of the core rules behind the game's deck design. From there, we should be able to finally be able to start looking at some specific denizen cards.

Last Night's Stream

For those that missed it, last night we had a lovely and vicious game of Oath with help from MeepleLady, Ella from Ella Loves Boardgames, and Matt and Hunter from Space Cats Peace Turtles. It was a blast to help run this game and answering all of your questions. 

We've recorded the stream and you can access it here:

Though Matt narrowly took the game, the story is far from over! If you'd like to follow along with the campaign, keep an eye on the Space Cats Peace Turtles podcast here as they continue to develop the world. They plan to stream the campaign Saturdays 10 am PST. 

Live play-through tonight and PAX South
about 6 years ago – Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 05:21:49 AM

Hey Friends!

I want to introduce myself quickly, my name is Gates, and I am the Marketing and Events Coordinator at Leder Games. It has been a joy to see when we share and get excited about a project, the Leder Games community echos that excitement! We still have so much more to share about Oath, and one way we are doing that throughout this campaign is with our Thursday live streams on Twitch and Facebook Live!

Tonight at 6 PM CST, Cole Wehrle will be hosting a live play-through of Oath on Tabletop Simulator joined by Matt and Hunter of SpaceCatsPeaceTurtles, Ellalovesboardgames, and Meeple Lady! We hope that you can join us in the chat tonight, but if not, we will be uploading a recording to Youtube tomorrow.

Also, this weekend Marshall and Nick will be attending PAX South in San Antonio, TX, and will be playing games of Oath in the First Look area! Keep an eye out on Twitter to know when we arrive and how long we will be running games. If you aren't going to be able to make it to PAX South, we are plan on having a prototype of Oath at PAX East, Origins, and Gen Con!

Other Questions?

For any other questions, please email us at [email protected] and refrain from using the Kickstarter messaging system so we can better help you.

Thanks for the support,

Gates

Introducing Oath
about 6 years ago – Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 01:17:07 PM

Hi everyone,

I'm Cole, the game's designer. Many of you will already know me (and Oath) already. All the same, I wanted to take everyone through a little of the game's backstory and some of the writing that I've done over the past few months. In the coming days, I'll have lots of new writing to share as well, but I figured we should introduce ourselves properly first.

Introducing Oath is a tough thing. When the project began to take off last year, I found myself struggling to describe it. I'm not usually at a loss for words, so this was a worrying experience. All of my other projects boiled down to such clean pitches, but the more I tried to explain Oath the more I found myself gesturing wildly with my hands and sounding a little like a street-corner conspiracy theorist.

Actually, it wasn't until I was talking to Patrick recently that I figured out what I think is Oath's central intervention. For as long as I've been playing games, designs have been trying to get smaller. Even when I was a kid, games like HeroQuest (1989) promised the drama of a Dungeons and Dragon's style adventure game in a short afternoon with a fraction of the rules. This trend continued right up through my formative years with games like Runebound (2004) trying to miniaturize the epic fantasy campaign to a single session. It continues today as well with most every civilization builder and 4X space on the market trying to find ways to collapse a ten-hour experience into 90 minutes. Compression is the order of the day.

Oath, I think, offers a different solution. Rather than trying to compress those big experiences, Oath's design breaks them into segments. I miss having time to play games that took an entire day, and I've never been satisfied with the lighter versions of those experiences. My hope is that Oath offers an experience that doesn't leave players feeling shortchanged by the expediency of modern design. It's a fast game that tells its stories slowly.

It has not been an easy thing to build this game. If you'd like to learn more about the back story, I've been publishing designer diaries on BoardGameGeek that contain a ton of information. It took me a few posts to cover the origins. I gave a general overview here and then I got into the game's prehistory here.  I capped off that first series by working through some of the thematic problems I ran into and talking a bit about the books that helped me through this problem. 

Then I started writing about some of the core gameplay systems that allowed me to build Oath. First, I covered the map itself and the difficulties that come with making physical games without resorting to apps or lots of written record-keeping. Along those same lines, I talked a bit about the importance of cards in the design here and how they were critical to making the whole project work.

From there, I started a series of three essays on the game's victory condition that covered: the general shape of victory, the citizenship/exile divide, and the different paths to victory in detail.

Then things got specific. I wrote (lots) about how and why Oath's combat system is so strange and followed that piece with a description of the game's core economy. Most recently, I described some of the core principles behind the card design in the game.

Of course none of this is required reading! I just wanted to share this little index with everyone so those that wanted to read more could do so without wading through BoardGameGeek's somewhat complicated forum structure. 

Alright, that's all for now. I'm happy to field any questions you might have about the game's origins here in this comment thread and look forward to sharing more about the design over the course of the campaign. 

Remember too that tomorrow at 6PM CST, we'll be hosting a livestream of the game. I hope you can join us!

Day 1: We're funded, what's next!?
about 6 years ago – Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 02:55:20 PM

We're Funded!

First, thank you all so much for your support. We have blown past our funding goal and far exceeded our expectations. We could not have done it without you all.

In this first update, I wanted to say a few things about me and the history of our company. When I first set out to build Leder Games, my goal was to make games that were artistic and that push the boundaries of what's possible. At the same time, I knew I needed to be able to support my family. And, having experienced years of frustration with my career, I wanted to create the kind of workplace that would empower every employee. Though much has changed over the years, each Kickstarter remains an experiment for Leder Games. We want to grow both as a business and in our creative practice, while also making sure that we are able to take care of our people.

For those that don’t know us, here’s the story in brief. We launched our first large Kickstarter back in 2016 for Vast: The Crystal Caverns. The conceit of the game was, "Can we unfold the dungeon crawler experience and stretch the roles over a few competitive players?" instead of making a cooperative dungeon crawler. Even in the early days of its design, it always felt like we were pushing on the edge of what a tabletop game could do. And, better yet, the attempt paid off with a substantial amount of sales. The team grew, and I left my day job.

When Root came around, we had a few employees, and things were rolling. We went back to asymmetry and pushed gaming again. This time Cole and the studio built an area control game within the asymmetric framework of dividing up all the components of a broader experience into small roles. Combined with Kyle's art, the results were a resounding success. This success bought us more time to design and increased staff to attempt bigger projects.

Back in August of 2018, Cole pitched to me what I believe to be his most ambitious project, which is now Oath. He worked on it steadily throughout the year as we wrapped up Vast: The Mysterious Manor and Root: Underworld. He brought in prototype after prototype, and was never frustrated, always having faith the project would work. If you look at Cole's design diaries, you will see that the game asks many questions that I feel haven't been answered in the market today. The most important thing is that Oath lets you capture the pivotal moment in a country's history, and It expressed my desire to continue pushing gaming forward. The trust I placed in Cole has been well rewarded.

You, the backers, have provided us not just with your support; you have given us the mandate to make Oath great. I would like to thank my team for more reasons than I can express. Most importantly, for letting me take 2 months of paternity leave. When I arrived back in the office, they were ready to start the Oath Kickstarter with minimal direction from myself. I also want to thank them for their hard work. I’ll have much more to say about all that hard work later, but for now I just wanted to again thank you all for joining us on our next experiment.

Thanks,

Patrick Leder

What's to come ...

Over the next 20 days, we will be posting updates that give a deeper look into the game design, art direction, and everything that comes inside the Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile game box! 

Most importantly, this Thursday we continue our live stream schedule with designer Cole Wehrle, Matt and Hunter from SpaceCatsandPeaceTurtles, Meeple Lady, and EllaLovesBoardGames running a live playthrough of Oath on Tabletop Simulator. Make sure to follow us on Twitch and Facebook Live!