Oath: New Foundations

Solo/Co-Op Update and Come See Us at Gen Con!
8 months ago – Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 09:53:22 AM

Hello everyone! Liz here, with a solo update from Ricky and me. Since a few people have asked, this update is all about what's going into the Clockwork Adversaries box! 

A lot of the work of solo design involves keeping up with Cole–he iterates very quickly, and it’s on us to adapt. Happily, I can report that we are doing so. The Servant, our bot that acts as an opponent in competitive games of Oath, has been fully adapted to the most recent version of New Foundations. (And don’t worry, the Servant has been working well in the base game for a long time now!)

We’ll of course have a few changes left to make to mirror any last shifts in New Foundations as a whole, but I feel confident that we can handle that. The Servant will interact with the entire world of Oath, and will be able to shift foundations on you if you aren’t careful. So keep an eye on those bots!

In addition to working on the Servant, Ricky and I have also been building a fully cooperative mode for Oath where players will face off against the Queen of Shadows. This mode can easily inserted into a new or existing Chronicle and works with either the base game or for New Foundations. In terms of gameplay, the Queen of Shadows is doing wonderfully, in that she starts out mean and then gets meaner. She also offers a very different way of playing Oath. I've recorded a very brief video to give you a sense of what the mode will be like, but expect some changes--we are doing a lot of development right now! (In fact, this video is already slightly outdated, surprise!) 

When you and your friends go up against the Queen of Shadows, you are confronting an entity who doesn’t operate according to the normal rules of Oath. Instead, she will try to take over sites and then take actions at them based on cards from her shadow deck. She’ll start out with a nice deck of easy blue cards, but as you figure out how to beat her, she will respond–and you’ll confront a deck increasingly stacked with red cards that bring a lot more heat. Her actions are simple and punchy, and their locations are dependent on numbered tokens placed at the sites on the map.

You will take on the role of Adventurers who are working together to keep the Queen of Shadows at bay. Instead of one person winning the game with one of Oath’s victory conditions, you’ll each need to fulfil a victory condition and claim the related Title card. You’ll also have to free up any denizens the Queen of Shadows has imprisoned during her hostile takeover. 

Right now, most of our work is centered on making sure the Queen of Shadows has a natural game-to-game flow, just like any game of Oath should. We want players to be able to switch seamlessly between competitive and cooperative play, and for co-op games to have a real impact on the world of Oath, even if they look a bit different from competitive games. That means that players will earn and maintain traits, build edifices, and shift foundations even while playing cooperatively. I think we have come up with some solid solutions to make this possible, and we will be playtesting them more widely in the coming weeks. I am very grateful to everyone else in the studio for letting Ricky and me create a game mode for Oath that we deeply wanted to see, and for their patience when stress testing solo/cooperative prototypes. This may be an office full of highly competitive gamers, but we’re getting into that co-op spirit. 

On a somewhat sappy note, I hit my one-year work anniversary this week, on July 15. This has been among the best years of my life in general, and the best one ever in terms of doing work that I’m excited to do every single day.

Thanks to all of you! If you've got questions about the solo/co-op mode (or other Leder games!) we have a great community over on Discord. Join the Woodland Warriors! 

Come See Us at Gen Con!

We'll be in Indianapolis later this month for the Best Four Days in Gaming! If you'll be there, stop by and see us in booth #643 and room #135. We'll be talking a lot about the new expansions for Ahoy, and we've got events surrounding your favorite Leder titles planned! Check out the full rundown here. 

As always if you have questions about this project, or other Leder-adjacent needs, reach out to us at [email protected]. Please do not use the Kickstarter messaging system.

Storage Solution Corrected Link!
10 months ago – Tue, May 13, 2025 at 03:13:28 PM

Hey folks!

We just wanted to send out a quick correction regarding the link we shared earlier today.

Existing Backers

If you're already a backer of Oath: New Foundations, you do not need to create a new pledge. Instead, use this link to access your existing pledge. From there, click "Edit Your Order" to add the storage solution or any other add-ons you'd like.

If you followed the incorrect link earlier and accidentally created a new pledge—don’t worry! Our customer service team is already working to consolidate those duplicate orders. No further action is needed on your part.

New Backers/Pre-Orders

If you’re not a backer yet, but want to pledge for Oath: New Foundations, the storage solution, or other items, head to our pre-order page here to get started. 

Missed the Studio Chat?

You can catch the full discussion and excitement from today's studio chat on Youtube here (link will be live on Wednesday) or on our Twitch channel now!

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected]. 

Thanks for your patience, and thank you as always for your support!

Dev Update and a New Storage Solution
10 months ago – Tue, May 13, 2025 at 01:18:13 PM

Hello backers! 

Over the past month, we’ve been busy taking New Foundations through the final stages of development. The design is very nearly done and most of the work ahead of us is mostly editorial in nature.

This is always a tremendously fun part of the process. We’ve learned a lot over the past year of work and we’ve been able to really push the limits of the design. Here’s a preview of some of the wilder foundations and traits we’ve been testing recently.

Next month, we’ll hopefully be sharing the rules for New Foundations in layout as well as some more of Kyle’s new art.

A New Storage Option

After months of work, we are excited to offer a brand-new storage solution for Oath. This box has everything players need to keep their chronicles tidy, including room for New Foundations, both sets of deluxe components, additional denizens, and the solo, and cooperative modes. The box also features custom trays to easily organize the game, a robust new Atlas box for preserving the game’s many sites, and a set of lovely lineage boxes for each player color. 

The box costs $50 and you can add it to your pledge here. 

This is a first for us at Leder Games, and so I want to take some time to talk about how it came about. 

One of the highest development priorities for New Foundations has been to do more in-person testing than digital testing. Oath had been largely developed during the pandemic and the digital testing we used to build it had left its mark on many elements of the final game. I’m tremendously proud of that game, but I knew that if I ever revisited it, I wanted to make sure everything was exhaustively vetted in-person. This may seem like a small thing, but I can assure you that maintaining several ongoing Oath chronicles is a lot harder with physical kits!

As part of this process, we’ve spent a lot of time packing and unpacking the Oath box and thinking about what an ideal storage solution might look like for New Foundations. Our original plan was to offer some kind of hybrid solution that allowed players to use their existing Oath box alongside some storage features that we would build into New Foundations, but we found that this method produced too many compromises. We could get it to work, but it was obvious that building something new from the ground up would produce a significantly better experience.

This created a business problem. We tend to overload our Kickstarters—that is, backers get exceptionally good deals on our games as a thank you for their support. This deal usually improves over the course of the game’s development. So, for instance, a backer paid only $40 for Blighted Reach rather than its full retail price of $100. I’d love to say that we had planned on giving you all such a good bargain, but the reality is that the game grew over the course of development in ways we didn’t anticipate and we were happy to pay for it.

With New Foundations, things are a little different. The expansion already pushed the bounds of commercial viability when we first drew up the business plan. There is just a ton of design content and art in this thing. Going into this project, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to ask for the project to double or triple in scope in the middle of development. And, when Trump started this trade war nonsense, I knew that we would have even less flexibility on that count. Thankfully, New Foundations has stayed within the parameters of its (ambitious) outline.

When we started designing the storage solution, we worked hard to keep it within the game’s budget. However, the further we got into things, the more we realized that it was possible to build a really wonderful storage solution, like the one we did for Blighted Reach, but it was going to cost a lot of money. Rather than offer you all a poor solution that fits within the budget of the original game, we’ve decided to create a new deluxe storage solution. 

There were two immediate advantages. First, it frees New Foundations from the budgetary burden of offering a fancy storage solution. That means we can add more content to New Foundations and put in a few quality of life improvements (wait till you see the new banners next month!). Secondly, it allows us to build a storage product from the ground up and price it appropriately. Instead of trying to fit the product into an imperfect form-factor, we can just do what works best for the game.

I want to stress that this product is not required. Especially if you don’t sleeve, you can fit New Foundations into your base Oath box. However, if you sleeve, have all of the deluxe components, and/or the solo expansion, you will probably need to split your Oath game over both the base and New Foundations boxes. There are lots of ways to do this, and we’ll try to write up a guide to different ways of storing the game. Nothing about New Foundations demands that you need a bespoke storage solution.

However, if you want to store your copy of Oath in a way that allows for very fast set up, tear down, and have room for everything and more, the storage box we are working on is really special. The box is the size of the Blighted Reach box and includes a base plastic tray that will hold all of the cards in the game with plenty of room for growth. It also keeps the mat and other boxes organized.

Each player color gets their own custom lineage box, which holds their pieces as well as any traits they might have. In addition, the sites of the game are now stored in a magnetic Atlas box. This allows the game to hold its geography very easily and is a lot more robust than the world box of the original game.

The storage box costs $50 and is now in the pledge manager. You can add it to your pledge here.

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected]. 

Spring Cleaning
11 months ago – Wed, Apr 02, 2025 at 11:57:21 AM

Dear Backers,

Today we’re releasing a new kit for Oath: New Foundations. This kit includes 60 new denizens, 36 edifices (some of these were regular denizens previously), dramatically improved chronicle phases, setup phases, and the full set of 40 traits and their 20 linked foundations. In addition, Liz and Ricky have completed work on the solo-mode’s integration with New Foundations, so you can explore all of this new content with an automated opponent. In short, it’s been a busy six weeks!

To help you navigate through all of the new content, I’ve written a long development diary and posted it over on Board Game Geek. You can find the first part here. The second part is here.

If you’d like to see everything on TTS, you can find it here.

If you’d like to just read the new Returning to Oath rulebook–which will serve as the expansion’s Learn to Play, you can find the current draft here. If you want to attempt to build a kit physically, you can use files here. 

Over the past couple of months, our overriding impulse has been to clean up the design. We’ve done everything we can to make the new design  impactful, while keeping the rules as simple as possible. Of course, we’ve had to cut many things we loved, but that is the nature of creative work. I think you are all going to find quite a bit to like about this version. 

During the coming month, we’re going to be continually providing content adjustments to the game. I’ll do my best to keep the Steam Workshop mod for the TTS up-to-date with the latest adjustments and will be using the changelog there to record any significant developments. In terms of schedule, we expect to finish the content development of the game within the next six weeks. Towards the end of April, Kyle will be moving back on to Oath and taking care of the outstanding illustration while we move the files through their final layout and editorial passes. We still hope to be submitting print files to the factory by June. 

On the production side, we've started submitting hard components for sampling and have even gotten back our first pieces! We're still tweaking the colors, but they came out really well. We will be lightening the color of the brown pieces just a a bit, but otherwise, we're very happy with them. Next month we should have a few other production details to share and maybe even some more pictures.

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected].

An Early Valentines Kit Update
about 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 09:44:15 AM

Dear Backers,

Today we’re releasing another big kit update. Our Christmas kit reflected the status of the design as of Pax Unplugged. This kit reflects the past two months of work. It will probably be the last major kit we release before we finish the project. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be moving my efforts to rules writing and making sure the various foundations, denizens, and relics are all properly tuned. 

We are at the stage where I think every promise of the expansion is being fulfilled or exceeded, and I am quite satisfied with the shape this project has taken. While there is a lot of work that remains, it is mostly just a matter of time. My guess is that our next phase of development, editorial, and usability review will take between three and four months to complete. Then, it will take us an additional month to get the files through the pre-press process. We hope to have this project fully in production at the factory by June, and the campaign remains broadly on schedule. I should mention that it's likely that Root will be shipping before this as it's a smaller project and both are at the same factory. Both projects have been progressing along very similar timelines. That said, hopefully you will all have it in your hands by the end of this year or early next year. 

The Kit Update

If you’ve been following along with our kit updates, you’ll notice the following adjustments in this kit.

• Govern System Improvements. New and better govern actions, implications, and growth.
• Foundation Cleanup. Foundation cards have been combined with trait cards.
• Curse Adjustments. Curse offers are more flexible. But, lineages now collapse when overburdened by curses. Chronicle collapsing rules don't appear to be needed anymore, but we'll see!
• A Bunch of things about Relics. We’ve doubled the number of relics in the game, reworked a bunch of them, and adjusted how they are recovered.
• Shadows. No longer take up slots at sites, but do block a site’s enchantment.
• Banner Adjustments. People’s Favor and Darkest Secret has both undergone significant balancing and simplification. They no longer require an aid board of their own.
• Bandit Spawning. Bandits now spawn equal to the site’s printed capacity, not its relics.

You can find a learn-to-play style rulebook here.

Otherwise, everything you need can be found here for print files.

And here for our TTS kit.

If you’d like to read a lot more about the changes in the design since our last update, I wrote a long post over on BGG here.

What's Next

Next month, we’ll be releasing a big update to the solo bot that includes interactions with the New Foundations systems. Then, in April, I hope to share the updated rulebooks (the law, the new foundations learn to play, and the updated and expanded playbook).

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected].