Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #oathboardgame
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...26. I told Cole I wasn't feeling it. It just didn't have any humor in it anymore. I started just sifting through old files for inspiration.
27. I came to this old doodle. This was the humor I was missing. I took this image and I made a color pallet to make sure I could make it work with the suit colors I had established. I wasn't ABOUT to change the suit colors! 
28. Here's the pallet that all of Oath is illustrated with. To explain how in-the-weeds I was, this file is literally still called OATH_COLORS_MAYBE.jpg
Feeling a lot of appreciation for the hard work of others today. I spent the majority of my time this week in logistical/PM tangles. When I came back to my desk to tie up some emails in the late afternoon today, there was just a stack of amazing work waiting for me to review.
Longer shout outs will be forthcoming, but the work of @PatiHyun on the rulebook layout, @BickNachmann on the relic graphic design, AgentElrond on the TTS module, @joshuayearsley on editorial and @d20plusmodifier on illustration are all immensely humbling and I'm deeply thankful.
There are additional thanks owed to the wider team at @LederGames and to the development team (esp Josh and Nick) but that will come later. No matter how long I'm at this job, I still can't believe I get to work with you all each and every day. #oathboardgame
A couple days ago I helped my parents clean out part of their garage and stumbled into what is likely the earliest #oathboardgame prototype in existence.
I think this is from the summer of 06 or 07, right as I was starting my undergraduate degree.
I remember working off of some earlier notes that I had drawn up in high school. The basic idea was a game that would be played across 3 or 4 sittings called sagas and would feature assets that were linked between player tableaux and fixed positions on a map.
A couple weeks back I wrote a long thread about including a timeline as the endpaper in #Oathboardgame 's little journal. Today, @d20plusmodifier send me the art, and it is wonderful.
The idea here is that players can use these walls in any manner they'd like. They can write a list of kings and queens or a timeline or something else entirely. We also included a dial (the statue's eye) that let's you track which cards you've introduced to the game's world deck.
If you want to read more about the design process behind this, you can find a full thread here.
Just finished the last #GenConOnline game of Oath. It was a pretty wild Darkest Secret game. If anyone wants to continue the world, the seed is below. There's lots of negotiation cards in this one! #oathboardgame
03010000050BGencon2020A000100520341131E35DC07CECCE40612FFDB143034FF0DFFFFFF0AFFFFFF1AFFFFFF2DFFFFFF355B475F17D3D529237004A333181119D48875D60A0E06379610580F56D26B1FAEB81C3101712224070321262CB0781A1508252D1B28180B16140932270D2B201D022A2FBD2E5C130500613E57900C03E3E1DF
(Also there's a bit of a relic bug in the TTS at the moment. That should be fixed pretty soon.)
Here's a funny #oathboardgame conundrum that has almost nothing to do with game design, but I'm finding pretty fun to work though. It has to do with the design for the game's little journal.
The basic idea is simple. It'll be a smallish chapbook, with a nice embossed cover and a page dedicated to each play that allows players to record information each game. Much will be unstructured but there will be places where less ambitious players can make a quick record.
When you print books like this, it's a lot cheaper to have all of the pages be the same, which is fine because that's all this book needs to do. HOWEVER, I really wanted to use the end-papers for something special.
Yesterday I had a few folks ask me about the changes coming to the combat system in #oathboardgame. I don't have time this week to write a longer article, but I think I can manage a twitter thread.
I should say at the start at this change is the sum of a 4 or 5 week investigation and several weeks of heavy design work that I began while performing the game's final mechanical review.
Basically, as we mapped out the last stage of our production schedule, I had a few weeks free up, and I wanted to use that time well. After reviewing the whole design, I felt a little dissatisfied with the game's combat engine and felt like I could do better.
The design for Oath is very nearly done, and we've started conducting our usability studies. If you have any interest in helping us understand how people digest this game's rules, we'd love to have you along:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
A few additional points. We're espeically interested in the participation of folks from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in tabletop gaming. We will provide compensation for your time and will offer resources that might be needed to facilitate testing.
We are only looking for people who have not played or read the rules to Oath in it's earlier forms. Outside of that, no prior experience is necessary outside of an interest in the game.
I've spent the better part of this afternoon editing rules, working on a couple new design features, and doing some stress tests on #oathboardgame's bot. The snow is falling thickly here in Saint Paul, and it's productive, quiet day.
And behind me there's the giddy fact that this unusual project has already found over 8,000 supporters and raised nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
There will be time later I hope to give proper credit where credit is due for this amazing campaign, but I just wanted to express my thanks to all of those backers who looked at this project and thought it was the kind of thing that should exist.
I've been getting a lot of questions about #oathboardgame's player count. I don't have time to type up a full diary on the subject, so here's a quick thread that should answer most of the questions out there.
First, it bears mentioning this core truth about player count: the number of players in the game changes the game. Certain counts accentuate certain system tensions.
For that reason I think it's generally helpful to think not in terms of which count is best as which count will be best for the sorts of things that you care about as a player.
In preparation for the next designer diary for #oathboardgame I've been playing a lot of @unormal 's brilliant Caves of Qud. Lately I've been espeically taken by the game's beautiful writing and world-building (done by @inurashii and others). They put most AAA games to shame.
The diary entry (either next week or the week after) will be mostly about working on game systems that are both modular and expressive, but I wanted to just take a moment to thank the @cavesofqud team for making something of staggering beauty.
Most evenings, after the kids are in bed, I get together to play competitive games with a bunch of siblings and old friends. Caves of Qud has turned these Discord hangs into something between free-form storytelling jams and a poetry reading. I love it. Kudos to you all.
Just finished building the #PAXUnplugged demo kit for #oathboardgame . This seemed like as good a time as any to rip back my player boards and look at the iteration of the past couple months.
At some point I want to write a long piece about iteration generally, but I'm a little short on time today so I thought I'd just share this picture a couple thoughts.
First, the boards obviously become simpler over time. Oath once had 8 actions, now it has 5.
Want to find out about my current project, Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile? Head over to the game's splash page and sign up for the company's newsletter here: ledergames.com/oath/. Beyond that, just keep an eye on my twitter (and that of @LederGames) (1/x)
Kyle (@d20plusmodifier) and I are trying to stay organized by tagging things with #oathboardgame . I've got a bunch of threads already, and I'll be writing some longer form pieces too. The game is still very much in development, but I'm excited to finally be able to share more.
Here's a quick overview. The game is built for 1 to 5 players. It's a pseudo-legacy game where each game alters the course of future games (don't worry, nothing gets destroyed!). The game is very interactive. It takes a few thematic notes from Pax-style games.
Over the years I've found that my general process for building games has gotten a little faster and more efficient with each game. But, last week I had a big breakthrough with how I use InDesign's Data Merge and I wanted to share what I've found. (1/x) #oathboardgame
I like going into the weeds with my general design process, but I usually don't talk too much about the back end of my graphics and data mostly because it's technical and because smarter people than I do it much better. But, what the hell, let's get into it.
So the game I'm working on now has a lot of cards. Lots. Like two or three times as many as Pamir. What's more, all of those cards are unique and can do lots of different things. Normally, I'd rely on a data merge with a lot of frames and linked images like this one for Pamir:
I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's somewhat recent novel New York 2140. It's buzzing in my head at the moment and resonating with some design work I've been doing this week for a project that I've been provisionally calling "Saga." 1/x
The book is quite old fashioned, espeically for KSR. It's almost like a 19th century novel, filled with coincidences and dozens of characters who all seem bump into each other constantly. If you squint a little, you'll feel like you're reading Balzac on Paris or Dickens on London
Let me tell you though, the novel is brilliant and an absolute tonic to our own vexed political moment. All science fiction ultimately says more about the period in which it was written than the one it describes, and New York 2140 doesn't pull any punches. It's wonderful.
