Performing actions largely comes down to revealing more cards from the deck and using their abilities - denizens can occupy a site, making them available to whoever has control of the location and anyone passing through, or be recruited as personal advisors for one player’s exclusive use - or trading in Oath’s two key resources of favour and secrets.
They move their character between three regions - the Cradle’s seat of power, its outlying Provinces and the distant Hinterlands - to visit locations, represented by site cards, and interact with the denizens of the land, represented by yet more cards. Unlike designer Cole Wehrle’s breakout hit Root, all of the players have the same set of options and actions - for the most part - at their disposal. The rest of the group, at least to begin with, are exiles: upstarts that lack the chancellor’s dominance and strength, but have the ability to amass their power, carve out a piece of the empire for themselves and ultimately wrest control from the current ruler. It’s a land ruled by a chancellor - one of the players. The game takes place in an unnamed empire. What makes Oath unlike any board game I’ve played before, though, is that it’s a game that remembers these stories as much as the players who experience them. Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile sits at the intersection of these two story types it’s as much a game explicitly about stories as it is a game that inspires stories among its players. Other games are stories, providing - at the extreme - little more than a mechanical skeleton of rules for players to flesh out with their own memorable moments that happen around the table rather than on it. Some board games tell stories - your narrative-driven adventures that weave together players’ actions with licks of flavour text on cards, branching passages in dedicated storybooks or a lore dump at the front of the rulebook.
In board games, perhaps more than any art form, there are two types of story.
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