The thing about those details is that none of them matter alongside the story we crafted over multiple plays. Five generations, I told myself; five will be enough to observe the game's mythos in transition. Yet as soon as our fifth play was wrapped, we played again, and then again. Oath had become a minor obsession. Everyone needed to see where it would lead. We weren't following a prewritten narrative, two thousand numbered paragraphs in a spiral-bound playbook. We were following our narrative. The story we wrote across centuries.
After a military catastrophe unmade the invincible armies of the local bully, our culture's exhausted warlords were brought to heel by a dynasty. A broken dynasty based on lies and mistakes, but such a thing wouldn't be the strangest occurrence in history. Generations later the dynasty had grown fat with the plumpness of assumed rule, and imploded into a ruin of its former self, literally inhabiting the ash-blown husk of a demolished city. At least we had a representative government. Which we endowed with a voice by dividing into bitter factions, refusing to cut a deal with anybody, and squabbling over scraps until hardly anything remained. From that time of strife the church arose, broader and stronger, its laws delivered via esoteric mysteries and closely-guarded secrets. When we reestablished the republic — only after another dynasty's interregnum, after another savage period of warlords cutting a path across the steppes — there was no reason to declare it the end of history. But it seemed right. I sorted the cards back into their original piles. Gone were the radical new powers we'd folded into our plays. Gone were the clans and their respective pecking orders. All that remained was the history.
I've played hundreds of games about history. Oath may be the first game I've played about historiography. Just as Rome was a kingdom before it was a republic, and then an empire before it became an instrument of religion, the culture we raised could be traced from root to branch, the sum total of many small decisions. Military campaigns, a blade in the dark, shrewd merchants, frontier explorers, collusions, divisions, the choice of one companion over another — all mattered as often as they were lost to time.
Moreover, Oath answers the questions left hanging by other civilization games. Who are you? Where are the internal challenges to your power? Rather than shepherding a culture from BC to Far Future CE, each play resembles a single pivotal turn in a larger epic. These are the watersheds, the revolutions, the moments when power was seized and crises were faced and buried. And when we played, our history was written by our own hands. Wehrle might call it a hate letter to civilization games and legacy games. But that's only half the story. Oath is also a love letter.
And through it, I can't wait to experience another chance at writing some history.
