I finally got Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile to the table in circumstances unintended. I had planned the first game to be a three player game to get the main players in my group up to speed with what has turned out to be my favourite game of the year so far. Yet, with Covid app pings encircling me, I had to isolate, cancelling those plans.
And so, my first games of Oath were against the Clockwork Prince – an AI with a spaghetti junction of a flowchart of intention. In a very simple ‘do this, if that’ pathway through the flowchart, players can get the approximation of a strong(ish) player (infinitely better as chancellor) to play against. This isn’t the best way to play Oath, and the Clockwork Prince is really no replacement for the joy of this impossibly enjoyable semi-abstract sort-of-wargame with other human beings.
But this solo solution allowed me to do one thing before bringing the game to my gaming groups – and that’s play with the ‘legacy’ elements of the game. While in other games legacy means ‘rip something up’ in Oath it means that after each game, the faction that owns the most sites influences the ‘world deck’ for the next game. This comes in the form of removing six cards randomly from the discarded cards from the game, and adding six cards using the faction’s most numerous supporters and a kind of faction wheel.
Everything else on the board is destroyed, edifices of the loser (powerful cards attached to locations with two sides) are cast to the Hinterland and ruined. You draw new site cards. The world decks are remade, this time a little more in the winner’s image.