Oath-Chronicles of Empire and Exile

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is an ambitious combination of a designer's wishes to make a message work within board games and an attempt at trying to honour the value of replayability expected of board games. While the execution makes it feel like the designer is trying to have his cake and eat it, it is hard not to be impressed by how well he goes about doing it. The game is turn based, with each player having usually up to five victory conditions to pursue after. The players take on one of the three specific roles within the game's world- the chancellor, an exile, or a citizen.

The chancellor's only concern is not to lose, since victory is (almost) guaranteed to happen by the end of the game. An exile is trying to usurp the chancellor's title by either appearing the one keeping the chancellor's oath better than him, or by finding and rallying behind another oath. A citizen cannot usurp the title but might win instead of the chancellor if he helps the latter keep his oath. As simplified as this description is, the game presents a series of systems that interact with each other in ways that reflects the specific group which plays the game.

The specific habits and tendencies of the group are reflected in the world deck that keeps changing at the end of each game. This is where the game tries to differentiate itself in its own unique way- whereas board games have attempted to deliver messages- see Brenda Romero's Train, for example- they have never developed in order to be commercially successful. The game wants the players to see themselves as participating in a complex world filled with a specific (and surprisingly flexible) political system whose history, outside of the first game, is made up of the memory of the myriad previous games that were played. However, where history itself is concerned, there is very little the players can do to change the material conditions of the world the game takes place in. Surely the political system would change if factories came to replace the artisans... right? This simply means that multiple different games offer a formal coherence that does not stand up to any major scrutiny if its message is analysed. You might say, then, that the game represents an alternative to wargames in particular, and games featuring conquest of people and lands in general. I would simply respond by noting how Oath, while part of a growing class of games, is still outnumbered by and not as well regarded as the class of games where conquest is a routine action taken in the path to victory.

Of course, many might play the game and enjoy the number of possibilities it offers, which is why I certainly bought it. However, if you do plan on buying it, make sure that you know that you are buying an experiment that may fail to work with your group.