Project Updates for Oath: New Foundations on BackerKit Page 2

Rulebooks!
8 months ago – Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 12:53:24 PM

Dear Backers,

I hope this finds you all well. We've already had a busy, snowy winter here in Saint Paul. I'm happy to report that we've made a lot of progress on tying up the final elements of Oath: New Foundations.

We are still waiting on a few production samples, but basically all of the print files are ready for the pre-press process.

If you'd like to read the (near final) rulebooks, you can find them in their final form here.

There is one rulebook that still needs a bit of graphics work: Liz and Ricky's base game servant rulebook is still in final layout. We should have it ready soon (though perhaps after the holidays). However, if you have any questions about how the servant works, the New Foundations servant rulebook will give you a very good sense of just that.

Closed for the Holidays

As usual, the office will be closed for the final two weeks of the month. Things will reopen on January 5th. If you reach out during that time, please give us a little grace upon our return to respond. We appreciate your patience!

Support Questions

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected]. Please don’t use the Kickstarter messaging system.

Final Layout Progress and New Samples Arrive
10 months ago – Tue, Nov 04, 2025 at 07:36:19 AM

Dear Backers

We have a short update for you all today. Over the past several weeks, the team has been busy finalizing the design and moving all of the assets through the final layout process. We are on schedule to have all of the files finished by the end of this month and in the prepress process.

Here's a near-final image of the punchboard components. Everything on this sheet is either done or nearly done.

We are also taking the rules through their final usability pass in the next couple of weeks. If you want to see where the rulebooks have landed, you can find the Returning to Oath playbook here.

The full Oath rules (with New Foundations included) can be found here.

In terms of physical samples, there are a few things that we are still waiting on, mostly relating to the Storage Box. Thankfully, this won’t delay work on the expansion and we have plenty to do while we wait for samples and make the necessary adjustments.

This is our working prototype of the box. You can see some of the factory-made samples on the right.

As you can see, we've got little removable trays in the base of each storage box now. These little trays are also used to keep your warbands nice and organized when you pack up your lineage in its box.

We also got a wood sample for all of the materials in the Clockwork Adversaries expansion. They look great! We’ve got some small color adjustments to make and will be making the minion pieces a little less thick, but we love how the metallic purple turned out.

Finally, we’ve approved some revisions to the higher denomination coin and secret pieces. We've looked at a few variants of the secret over this project, but have decided to go with the red design similar to the one we had on the initial campaign page. We've also made some adjustments to the x3 coin to better emphasize the number.

That’s it for now. By our next update, I hope to be able to share the final rulebooks and reveal the final box designs. I’ll also be putting together a capstone development diary sometime this month to cover all of the adjustments to the game and share more about this project’s journey.

Support Questions

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected]. Please don’t use the Kickstarter messaging system.

Schedule and Development Update
11 months ago – Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 08:22:07 AM

Hello Backers,

We’ve got a big update for you all today.

If you don’t have time to read this, know that the project is in great shape. We’re in the final weeks of development and hope to deliver files to the factory in October. This translates into a likely Spring 2026 fulfillment. This is a few months later than our original schedule, but the extra time has allowed us to build a lot of content.

Because we still have a bit of time before the project is finalized, the pledge manager will remain open for the rest of the year.

What You’re Getting

During development, we often juggle elements of the expansion across the core product and the free products. In the case of New Foundations, there were some additional questions around the project’s budget and if certain elements should be included in the New Foundations box or the second Deluxe Components box. And, to this there’s always the question of what we should do with some of the new elements which we didn’t even know we’d want to add back during the Kickstarter campaign.

Oath: New Foundations

The New Foundations expansion includes two additional player colors, 30 legacy cards, a dual layered Foundation Board, new banners, 30 edifices, a set of chronicle task cards, and a set of bandit warbands. In addition, we’re including quite a few revised components that will replace or upgrade components from the base game. This includes an expanded relic deck (with over twice as many relics), a revised set of sites with some UI improvements, 30 adjusted denizen cards, and a new set of player boards and aids.

To help you navigate through all of this, we’re also providing two rulebooks. The first is a short “Returning to Oath” rulebook which is directed at experienced Oath players and will guide them through just the new content. The second is a dramatically expanded Oath rulebook done in the style of the Arcs rulebook. This book is meant to replace both the playbook and law from the original game and is meant to serve as a comprehensive rulebook for new and old players alike. We know that there will be many players whose first experience with Oath will include New Foundations, and we wanted to make the learning process as smooth as possible.

Here's the shorter, Returning to Oath rulebook.

And here's the comprehensive rulebook.

Denizen Pack

Backers will also be getting a new set of 60 denizens (10 of each suit). These denizens can be mixed into the archive or you can start a new chronicle using all of these cards as the starting world deck.

Deluxe Components II

For the deluxe components box, we’ve moved things around just a bit. The kit still includes extra dice (4 blue and 6 orange), but we’ve changed the resin secrets to x3s instead of x5s. This was mostly because, in testing, we found the x5s were just seldom needed whereas the x3s had pretty broad utility. Finally, by moving the player colors and bandits to New Foundations, we had room in the budget to introduce a new denomination of metal favor. Like the secrets, they are in a x3 denomination and can be really handy in those high favor games, and, like the original favor, they are fully stackable with either denomination!

Oath: Clockwork Adversaries

The Clockwork Adversaries box has a new name to better reflect its content. It’s now called Oath: Clockwork Adversaries and the Queen of Shadows. This name reflects the fact that backers are getting two things. The first is a new, fully-featured bot, the Servant. This bot can serve as Chancellor, Citizen, or Exile. In addition, it’s easy to clone the bot if you want to include more than one in a game. And, as a gift to our backers, Liz and Ricky have also created an amazing cooperative mode where players square off against the Queen of Shadows. If you want to learn more about this mode, take a look at our most recent studio stream:

As you can see from the video, the Queen of Shadows also requires some extra wood and some additional art. Here's her character design along with some of the wooden pieces she'll need.

Storage Box

We’ve talked quite a bit about the storage box in a previous update. We’re still waiting on a few samples from the factory before we share any images. But, as we noted back then, this box will be the size of the Arcs: Blighted Reach expansion box and include custom player boxes for all player colors and the Chancellor as well as a few fun usability aids like warband trackers and an improved box for storing your world and empire.

Development Update: Tightening the Foundations

From the start of the project, one of our primary goals with this expansion was to keep it as simple and as accessible as possible. We know that expansions are fundamentally additive and even excellent expansions can add a lot of extra complexity that can push a game past its limits. Oath certainly didn’t need any extra rules! This goal was informed by the game’s release. While Oath had done quite well, we also knew that it had missed many folks who wanted to love the game. New Foundations offered us the possibility of giving the game a second introduction, something in-between a patch and a second edition. To meet that challenge, we spent months on an extended investigation into the core game and looked for the places where the game’s initial goals were not met and where a few careful cuts and adjustments could result in a substantially more interesting game that would also be easier to teach and easier to expand. We wanted, quite literary, to build a new foundation for Oath.

I should note that this is exactly the sort of development strategy that would never have received a green-light at another studio. Part of the advantage of working on an expansion is that they have far less development liability. By this I mean that expansions often take less time to design and to develop than new games. This means that it’s easier for a team to build a schedule around an expansion and this can free up studio resources to pursue new projects. Thankfully this was not asked of New Foundations. Heck, we spent the first 6 months of development looking for every liability we could find! Each core action in the game and system was interrogated. More than once I had folks ask me why we were bothering to do all of this work on a game we had already published. It was a fair question.

Now that we’ve close to the finish line, I think it’s pretty clear how much has been gained. During Gen Con I had the chance to teach a lot of new players and, as we’ve taken the game through usability testing in the weeks since, we’ve found that Oath has never been easier to teach or to play—and that includes all of the new concepts we introduced in New Foundations. In basically every case, the adjustments we made to the core game have allowed us to fold in the new systems in a way that is completely organic. These changes have also brightened some of the game’s existing dynamics.

To illustrate this, I want to talk about a couple alterations to a core system in Oath: the favor economy. For the last six months or so, Oath has adjusted how much favor was in the game based on the number of denizens in the world. During setup, players would stock each bank with 2 or 3 favor, depending on the player count. Then, players add 1 additional favor for every denizen at a site to the matching card. This means that big empires will have “richer” games and small bandit kingdoms will have a more constricted economy. It also means that if one suit is dominant, that suit will have more favor in its bank, which will stop it from just getting zapped during the first round of play.

While the favor economy was looking good, I started looking towards the flow of secrets in the game. This actually had been a persistent irritation for me. The core issue, I felt, really came when you had two players with the same strong portfolio (say heavily invested in the Arcane suit) generating piles of secrets. Usually, between these players, there was enough favor that they could just keep cycling favor in and out of their shared banks as needed while their secrets piled up. In a game of such limited actions and with so many good hydraulic gameplay systems, it didn’t seem right that the most sacred and mysterious of resources should be so abundant.

Even back in the days of the base game development, I wanted secrets to be suited or limited in some way. Throughout the development of New Foundations, I made several attempts, including looking into a limited bank of secrets (say 3 per suit) or suiting the secrets themselves. Surely secrets should be proprietary! I even spent a while looking at secret carrying limits or other ways that they could generate supply liability. Each time it felt like any improvement came at the expense of some other part of the design. For instance, supply made the most sense when tied to warbands.

Last month, while going through the final design review, I decided to make one more attempt. This time I thought about the issue from the perspective of the flow of favor and how closed the favor loop was. When players with the same suit position were generating secrets, they were essentially creating a semi-closed favor system. As long as there was enough favor for each player to “pump” the system, secrets would flow without end. The game was designed to have this flow interrupted, and, when it did (say with Memory of Home) the results could be quite interesting. However, the system needed those card effects in order to work. Something foundational needed to be done.

With this in mind, the solution actually became very obvious. Instead of costing 2 favor to trade for secrets, it should cost 1 favor and 1 favor burn. This adjustment worked almost instantly. Now heavy secret games would have a real effect on the game’s favor economy. Two or three players pulling from the same bank would gradually erode the favor in circulation between them and that specific bank. In order to get it to work properly, we had to boost the favor in each bank by 1 (which, fortunately, put us at exactly the same numbers that happen to be printed on Oath’s map).

In many games, this dynamic is not felt too strongly, but in tight races for the Darkest Secret it can start to warp things in interesting ways in the mid- and late-game. It also gives an added sting to high favor burn games or games where favor is in short supply. And, even though they are unchanged, cards like Tutor, Elders, and Old Oak gain a richer resonance because they provide ways of getting around this favor burn. While not set in stone yet, I've been really happy with how this change has subtly adjusted the shape of the game.

Speaking of denizen powers. I suppose now is a good time to look at some of the cards we’ve adjusted. We have a couple dozen or so edits that we are putting into the existing cards. In about half of these, the edits are simply for consistency of language and rules. (For instance, the Recover action is now called the Challenge action when getting banners.) However, for the remainder of the edits, we looked at a number of cards whose effects were not nearly as interesting as their art or names promised.

For instance, the original version of Salt the Earth as a “when played” sorta misses the fact that its effect should follow some climatic defeat. Relic Thief is now cast, more correctly as a cousin to a card like Gambling Hall. And, most recently, Python has been transformed into something more monstrous.

Finally, I want to talk just a bit about the legacies (formerly called traits). This has been one of the most difficult elements of the game’s design. At various points they have been closer to side-quests or alternate victory conditions. Their present incarnation is both the simplest and, I think, the most smoothly integrated. At the start of each game, players draw 2 legacies. They choose one to become dormant and the other is discarded. At the end of the game, players examine their dormant legacies. If they meet the requirement, it becomes active, otherwise it’s discarded.

Legacies allow players to do things that no other card in Oath could allow. They can alter the setup or give them huge, game-changing powers. A lot of the game’s modular foundations from previous drafts slowly morphed into legacies because it was just such a robust class of card.

We're still working through the final card layout, but this is also getting pretty close!

For instance, Seer becomes active if a player ends the game with the Darkest Secret. Now, that player will construct the world deck each game, and has full knowledge of the position of the Vision cards. Royal Line requires ending the game with the Scepter. If that player is an imperial, it gives them full control over succession!

Unlike the old trait system, legacies do not need to be maintained. If you earn Seer, you will keep Seer. There are a couple important exceptions. First, you can only have three active legacies. If you earn a 4th, you have to discard one of your others. Second, when an exile wins the game, all imperial players have their legacies go dormant. This can be reversed if one of those former Imperials is offered citizenship in the new empire, but otherwise it might take a generation or more for them to rebuild their legacies. This creates a really interesting dynamic where some of Oath’s most game-changing powers are linked to the political status of the game. The game can produce a highly articulated empire with lots of interesting privileges. When that empire collapses, those legacies will go dormant, dramatically changing the character of the game.

The suit icon on the cards also informs a player’s loyalties to the game’s suits. The winner scores points for their active legacies, scoring 1 point for each matching card they rule. This helps create a big strategic space for multi-game strategic play and can make the play of each and every card have all the more impact.

There is so much more to write about. The revised Chronicle tasks, new relics, altered banners, and different foundations really widen the game’s horizons. Once we get the game into pre-press properly, I’ll do my best to put together a video covering all of the new content in the game and we might even put together a recording of a studio stream or two.