Oath: New Foundations

Dev Update and a New Storage Solution
over 1 year 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
over 1 year 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
over 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]. 

A Christmas Kit
over 1 year ago – Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 02:55:21 PM

Dear Backers,

I hope this finds you well. Here in Saint Paul, we’ve had our first major snowfall of the season. I spent most of my morning digging out our car and clearing our sidewalks so that the university students could safely make their way to campus (most of the foot traffic around my house comes from folks trying to save on parking). This took about two hours, but was fun in its own way. Under normal circumstances, I might have decided to just take a day off to play in the snow, but this update was important, and I wanted to make sure we got it to you as soon as we could.

Almost exactly a year ago, I was helping upload the final files for the Arcs: Blighted Reach campaign. Thankfully, things are a little less frantic around here today. The success of Arcs has helped us add a few new members to our team, Megan (our second graphic designer), Matt (who helps with events, community management, and who is shooting our video project), and Liz (who, of course, is helming solo development). All three of these folks have been instrumental in giving the studio what might be its most productive year. 

As a small sign of this, consider what backers of the Root campaign already know. A couple days ago Josh released a massive print-and-play update, covering basically every corner of the new project. For the first time in the studio’s history, we’ve been able to keep two projects in full studio-production for an extended period of time, while supporting previous titles (this includes keeping them in stock with reprints) and exploring future titles.

With that context, I’m happy to announce that we are releasing our first post-campaign kit for Oath. This kit includes not only major revisions to the lineage, empire, foundation, and solo kits you might have seen during the campaign, but also new relics, denizens, and the overhauled site system. 

You can find everything you need here.

PDF files for the rest of the solo material will be posted at this Dropbox link tomorrow (Dec 20).

You can find the TTS kit here.

This TTS kit is the same kit we use for playtesting. That means it should not be considered stable if you plan on doing a long campaign with it. Instead. Once you use it, make sure you turn on caching until you are done with your campaign. 

As I’ve mentioned many times in these updates and during the campaign, the Oath project was designed to follow our traditional way of running crowdfunding campaigns. That is, we ran the campaign early in the project’s life and trusted the crowdfunding process and our team to build something really remarkable. The Oath and Root projects actually began at the exact same time. In the months after finishing Arcs, both Josh and I began working on them in parallel. As creative director, it brings me a lot of satisfaction to see their post-campaign kits being released during the same week. I am incredibly proud of both teams.

I want to add one more thing about the Oath kit. Because of the nature of this expansion, instead of just giving you all a rulebook in the Law-style, I have also written a much more conversational rulebook that covers all of the new systems and provides some commentary on the status of the design. If you want to learn more about the design and what we’ll be working on in the first part of the new year, I highly recommend reading at least the first page. 

If you don't have time or inclination to dig into the new files, the short version is this: Oath is in a really good place, and I’m convinced that we’re building something really remarkable. While it might be classed merely as an expansion, I think it is as ambitious and far-reaching as any title I’ve ever worked on. Nearly every system is now working and we have the vast majority of the new content designed. Over the next few months we will be polishing those systems as we work hard to make the final product as beautiful and playable as possible. But even now I think you'll get a sense of just how big this thing is. 

Want to find out what the heck this is? You'll have to check out the new kit!

Questions or Other Support Help?

Please email us at [email protected] for any questions or assistance. Please do not use the Kickstarter messaging system to contact us. The Studio will be closed for the end of the year! If you have questions or need adjustments to your pledge, we will be addressing those emails after our return on January 2, 2025. We appreciate your patience, and hope you have a great rest of 2024!

Oath's Evolving Sites
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 11:13:26 AM

Dear Backers,

Last month, we did a quick survey of some of the new systems we’ve been working on and assessed the game’s overall progress. Broadly speaking, everything is still going on schedule. We plan on starting the next phase of testing within a few days. Over the next few months, we’ll be slowly widening this circle of testers, first to the Woodland Warriors, then to the general public. 

This is to say that if you want to follow along closely, your best bet is to keep an eye on the Oath channels over on the Woodland Warriors discord. We will also be posting an update here when we are ready to make a public call for playtesters.

Towards the end of last update, I mentioned that we were working on some potentially big changes to the game’s site system. In particular, we wanted to see if we could make Oath’s deck of sites as responsive as the rest of the game’s chronicle elements. New Foundations has made the game’s chronicle elements so much more dynamic, that certain things, like the sites, had begun to “stick out.” While Oath’s sites are certainly evocative, they are also totally static. Speaking purely in terms of the game’s philosophy and argumentation, they collectively represent the biggest gap between the game’s ambition and what it offers. Why should land be exempted from wear and tear of centuries?

When I started exploring site-overlays earlier this year, it occurred to me that it might be possible to reverse-engineer all of Oath’s sites and build a new, adaptive site system. We wanted them to be every bit as evocative as the original site deck, but with the added ability to grow and change with the game’s chronicle. As I said in the last update, if players ran into the Drowned City, I wanted it to be possible that they also knew what had caused its drowning—and, perhaps, for them to have the ability to restore it to its former glory. Such changes wouldn’t be easy. Generally only 1 or 2 sites would be changed each game, but, over the course of many games, the world could begin to feel like a very different place.

This new approach is supported by two groups of rules: an expanded site taxonomy and what we might call the shadow system. Let’s talk about the site taxonomy first.

When we set out to rework the sites, we started with a simple premise: sites were too complicated. Nearly every one of Oath’s sites has a unique effect along with an icon that often requires even experienced players to reach for their Site Reference to decode it. In revising the sites, I took the approach of atomizing these elements. I grouped all of the effects that a site could have into a few classes, with the idea that they could be mixed and matched to create a dizzying array of combinations with comparatively few rules. 

The most important class is a site’s fundamental geography. For instance, a coast promised connectivity to other coasts. Narrow passes created bottlenecks. Rocky terrain made movement more difficult whereas dense terrain made searching more difficult. These “big realities” would be the primary thing showcased on each site card and would be captured by one of the six site icons.

All images in this update are using prototype graphics–we’re still a long way from final art for the new sites and their UI.

There was still room for customization and texture here. Sites had varying capacities and relic costs. As a starting place, I gave each type of geography 3 or so variants. For instance, the Narrow Pass now can be understood as a low capacity bottleneck. This could contrast to the new Fertile Valley which, though still a bottleneck, boasted a much higher site capacity. (Yes, this means that can be more than one "narrow pass" style card in the game which means the rules have to be tweaked a bit so they don't cause any issues). 

For the next class, I looked at the various site effects in the game and grouped them into two categories. The first were boons or enchantments. I imagined these effects were the result of empire tiles. They could establish libraries (allowing for the collection of secrets at the start of your turn, if you are the only player there!) or build economic infrastructure (similar to libraries but for the accumulation of favor). They could also establish homelands for the different suits—one of my favorite site effects from the original game. These elements would use another icon/illustration to communicate their meaning that would sit on the right side of the card.  

Finally, sites could be corrupted. This class could apply disadvantages to a site, making it more dangerous, difficult to navigate, and/or removing capacity (though sometimes adding relics as well). Corruption had the added effect of measuring a chronicle’s overall health. If too many sites fall into corruption, different sorts of events could be triggered leading to more dramatic shifts in the chronicle. This is something we’re still exploring internally, but I’ll be writing more about it in a later update.

One of the challenges of the new land system is getting the art overlays to work harmoniously. As you can see, some of our early efforts are more successful than others, but I’m confident Kyle and Megan can get them to look really wonderful. 

Sites would hold this information by using transparent card overlays tucked into a sleeve. We’re still working on the exact details, but the current plan is to have two decks of transparent cards—one for enhancements and one for corruptions as well as special sleeves for each site that can hold up to three cards (one of each type). That way, if a site becomes enchanted or corrupted in one game, it will hold its enchantment, even if it gets discarded and shuffled back into the site deck. We’ve got a few options here, and I’m not entirely positive which physical strategy will work best yet, but it is likely to be along those general lines. Critically, these enchantments and corruptions are only added and removed during the start of a game or the chronicle phase, so fiddling with card sleeves won’t interrupt the flow of gameplay.

So, that’s the first thing. The second thing is something called the “shadow system” which is, admittedly, a pretty silly name for a whole constellation of systems that handle how sites become corrupted. Here’s how it works: when empires govern, they sometimes place shadow tokens. This usually happens when they attempt to reform or attempt to extend themselves too far.

Shadow tokens can be defeated by players during the course of play, but they don’t otherwise generate any problems. However, at the end of the game, any uncorrupted site with a shadow token becomes corrupted.

Shadow tokens also guard already corrupted sites. During setup, all corrupted sites receive a shadow token. However, if a corrupted site has its shadow token removed by the end of the game, then the site will become free of corruption. Depending on the shadow token, this can be quite an expensive venture! To remove a shadow token, you’ll have to attempt an ordeal against it. Ordeals are another new game element that was part of the revamped combat system–basically we’ve made the combat system a lot more modular and then adapted it to other game currencies. This update has already gone on pretty long, so I’ll save the longer description of ordeals for another time.

I hope this all gives you a sense of our progress. The site revamp has been one of the most difficult parts of the project so far, and it’s really starting to pay dividends both in terms of the game’s narrative and strategic range. It’s also something that was wholly beyond the scope of the original Kickstarter and has been a wonderful reminder why I love making games at Leder Games and why I adore our backers. The success of this campaign has meant that we’ve been able to explore some really interesting new territory, and I cannot wait to show you some of the other things we’re cooking up.

Questions or Other Support Help?

Please email us at [email protected] for any questions or assistance. Please do not use the Kickstarter messaging system to contact us.