Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries, Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.
Into the Woods
Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a scenario boss. The choices you make in the exploration phase may have ramifications for your battle, providing you with some initial boosts or potentially putting you in a disadvantage. Every chapter’s boss is unique, shrouded in the mystery of either a sealed envelope or mystery box, depending on whether you have the optional monster miniatures or simply the base game. I won’t go into details on anything other than the starting enemy, featured on the box and itself being effectively part of the first-scenario tutorial mission.
While I expected that the primary focus of the game was the combat, given the unique quality of the combat and bosses, I was surprised to find myself looking forward to the narrative. There is a companion app, featuring fantastic voice acting by Game of Thrones alum James Cosmo and a system that remembers your choices, but digitally-averse gamers shouldn’t despair: it’s not necessary for gameplay. It just works better in my opinion. The gravitas provided by Cosmo’s deep gravelly voice matches the vibe of the game. While I’m usually a speed-reader when it comes to storybooks, I found myself kicking back and enjoying the expert narration like an interactive audio book. I won’t get much into the storyline for sake of massive spoilers, but suffice to say it’s an enthralling tale set in a distinct fantasy world with a well-developed lore.
We Need a Hero
You play as a group of fighters called Oathsworn, who, true to their title, have sworn an oath to the king and country to defend the lands from all perceived threats. The party is sent to investigate some mysterious goings-on in a local town. That’s all I’ll say for now, because the plot has plenty of twists and turns that I refuse to spoil for you. Suffice to say that it kept me interested. Each exploration phase comes with its own time track. Your actions generally take time off the clock, sometimes triggering events that could either be directly story-related or just a one-off side encounter. The events generally provide you with a choice of decisions to make in the given situation, with varied effects that can include providing you with extra combat tokens, (more on those later) or even trigger a mini-round of combat, with lasting implications for your impending boss battle. (This is where the companion app shines, keeping you from having to dive into that giant story book to read the exact passages that may be triggered.)
The time track has more importance than just the story, though. Doing less actions can often provide you with an extra combat reward, though at the expense of both the story and any potential benefits awarded by your party choices throughout. Taking too long can even cause your party to enter combat a step behind an enemy ambush. As you might expect, your enemies getting the jump on you and taking an extra combat round before you manage to get your weapons out is extremely dangerous.
The Royal Rumble
The 2nd and most likely lengthier phase of the game is the combat. Oathsworn has a unique combat system that is fairly complex. Enemies and terrain are laid on on a separate hex-grid battle board, each in a specifically designated location drawn on in the scenario encounter book. There are also specific spots where your characters can start, usually a grouping of spaces on the edge of the board. The two-sided board will be used for every encounter, though the physical layout and necessary terrain will change throughout.
Enemies generally have a multifaceted health pool, represented by various six-sided dice, representing parts of the body. You might have a separate die for the head, the tail, left and right sides, etc. This is important for a few reasons. Key to the system is that positioning matters. If the enemy attacks with a tail attack, it only hits people behind it. Additionally, if you’ve already lopped off that tail in a previous turn, the tail-specific attack will be weaker. Enemy AI is driven by a deck of cards, divided into three separate phases. As you whittle down your opponent’s health, like any caged animal, it hits back harder. Whenever you take out one of the locations by dropping the specific die value to zero, called “breaking,” the current attack card is immediately resolved and another drawn. After breaking a location, the scenario-specific enemy encounter card will tell you when to switch to the next attack phase. Enemy actions generally get more involved as the phases go along, but with every location you break, your odds of getting that weaker attack increase because more locations have been eliminated.
Players control their heroes via cards from an asymmetric combat deck, exhausting action points according to the cost of the card. There is no formal turn structure; heroes take as many actions as they care to, in any order. Actions are limited by the individually available amount of energy, called Animus, represented by golden gems. Animus is spent both for movement or to play actions on cards. The amount of animus available varies based on the player stats. Once players either run out of animus, or choose to jointly pass, after which the enemies then activate. There will always be four heroes in play, regardless of the number of players. Fortunately, Oathsworn makes it easy to manage multiple characters, as each hero can be played as a ‘companion,’ which involves using a single card with prescribed actions instead of choosing from a full deck and using the interesting battle flow system.
Go With The Flow
Speaking of the battle flow, let’s dive into the heart of the cards. In addition to the animus cost listed for playing them, cards are assigned a set battle number from 0-3. Usually the higher the number, the more powerful the card. Cards are played to a particular side of the player board depending on that value. The twist is that the only way to get back those higher numbered cards is to play a matching numbered card to the designated spot, pushing any existing cards in that spot down the rotation. Only cards in the zero space will go back into your hand at the start of the next round. Thus you’re probably not going to be able to do your best attacks all the time.
In addition to the unique battle-flow system, Oathsworn takes an interesting approach to combat resolution. There are four different color dice of ascending strength, starting with white and progressing to yellow, red, and black. The higher the rank, the larger the number on the die.
Players’ equipped armor and weapons can provide them with a set amount and color of dice. However, you can add in as many of the weaker white dice as you want, with the caveat that any time you roll two or more blanks, regardless of color, the entire attack misses and no damage is done. Rolling more dice means you can do more damage, but are also more likely to miss, but choosing how many to roll is a fun push-your-luck addition. Additionally every die has a face indicating a “critical” attack. Getting a crit allows you to roll an additional die, adding that value to the current hit total. Misses on crits don’t count towards your 2-miss limit, and it’s possible to do double and even triple crits. The mechanic commonly known as “exploding dice,” means that every die rolled has a chance to hit big.
However, if you are dice-averse or simply want less randomness and more strategy, combat can alternatively be resolved by similarly stratified decks of cards with matching values. Just like the dice, you can decide before flipping how many or few white cards to add to your attack. Unlike the dice, since the deck of cards is limited, you’ll know what you have and haven’t seen yet since the last reshuffle, providing players with an additional level of strategy. For instance, if you’ve already drawn a few blanks, you know that the white crit card may be hiding somewhere in the remaining deck, perhaps incentivizing you to draw some extra white cards to try to get that big hit. Beware, though, because the two-blank miss rule applies to cards the same way.
Enemies also have their own set of colored decks and dice, but fortunately they don’t usually get to capitalize on the critical hits. Whether you use cards or dice for your heroes or the enemies is up to the players. The rules do recommend that you at least use cards for the enemy attacks, but you can do either, depending on how much randomness you want in your game.
The Battle Continues
Oathsworn handles damage in a fairly simple way: total number of hits divided by the total defense value rounded down is how much damage is done. Enemy’s defense value is listed on their encounter card, while the hero’s defense value is determined by a base stat plus any bonuses provided by equipped armor.
At this point it’s worth talking about the aforementioned battle tokens, generally obtained through narrative choices in the exploration phase. There are five different types of tokens, each with its own specific benefit when spent.
+2 Animus: adds two animus gems to your available pool, allowing for more actions
Redraw/Reroll: allows you to redraw or reroll one card or die per token spent
Battleflow: allows you to bump all the cards in a single battleflow location down a spot as if you had just played a matching level card.
Defense: boosts your defense value for one incoming enemy attack
Empowered x3: This is the most interesting and often most useful token. An empowered x3 token allows you to upgrade a die three times, changing the color to a more powerful die. You can do any combination of upgrading. You could take three white dice and bump them all up to yellow ones. Alternatively, you could triple down on a single die, perhaps taking a single measly white die and turn it into a powerful black die.
There are a lot more combat rules that I won’t go into, including line-of-sight, movement restrictions, AI targeting, etc. It can seem pretty complex at first, but after a few turns it starts to click and is a lot more streamlined than it could be for a game of this magnitude. (Looking at you, Gloomhaven).
Final Thoughts
Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood is a pretty massive game, both in scale and scope. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the hero decks, individual character asymmetry, post-combat rewards and upgrades, item and equipment cards, both common and unique. The world of Oathsworn is simply too big to fit into a single review. While it “only” has around 20 chapters, the fact that each chapter consists of both an adventure and a combat phase means that you’ll be sinking plenty of hours into the campaign, if you’re lucky enough to have the time to complete it.
Pros:
The story is incredibly well-written, expertly narrated in the companion app, with plenty of twists and turns throughout. Although each chapter ultimately leads to a specifically designated boss, the choices made in the exploration phase feel important. Your decisions matter, particularly because it’s not always clear in the moment what the right choice is. Or if there is even a right choice. With complicated themes and morally gray situations, you’ll find yourself agonizing over difficult decisions, often questioning your past choices and wondering what could have been.
The combat is interesting and challenging. Both the positioning and dice vs cards elements add in another level of overall strategy and turn-to-turn tactics. Each character feels unique; upgrading and equipping new weapons and armor makes you feel powerful. The production value is off-the-charts, particularly for a debut publisher. I can appreciate that neither the expertly sculpted minis nor the incredibly well-done companion app with voice acting is necessary to play the game, although I don’t think I would ever choose not to incorporate them.
Cons:
Even at the lowest difficulty rating, Oathsworn can still be quite challenging. Heroes have very limited health and can die easily from a bad card draw or dice roll. The damage calculation metric, while simple, can be disappointing. For instance, you might pull off an incredible chain of unlikely critical hits, but only do one damage if an enemy has a particularly high defense. Doing so little damage with what seemed like such a great turn frequently felt deflating. While I really enjoyed the battle-flow system, combat just didn’t feel rewarding. I often found myself midway through the combat just wishing to skip fighting altogether and get back to the engaging story.
That said, Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood is still an incredible experience, providing depth in both the gameplay and the story. The world-building is fantastic, each chapter boss feels unique, and I had a great time going through the first half of the campaign. It works well for any player count due to the streamlined companion option. I played it solo, initially with only one character and three companions, eventually graduating to two characters without too much of a mental overload. If you’re into campaign games with a heavy dose of boss battling and engaging narrative, this one is a no-brainer, provided you’re willing to shell out the cash for a fairly expensive game, understandably so for how much is included. The combat ultimately didn’t stick the landing with me, which probably keeps it from hitting top marks. Overall, it’s a high recommendation from Meeple Mountain’s resident “epic” gamer.
Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood details
- Designer: Jamie Jolly
- Artists: Dongbiao Lu, Dongjun Lu, Francesca Baerald, Sean Jackson, Vladimir Buchyk
- Publishers: Hobby World, Rawstone, Shadowborne Games
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 30 - 90 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Points, Card Play Conflict Resolution, Cooperative Game, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Dice Rolling, Hand Management, Hexagon Grid, Legacy Game, Modular Board, Pattern Recognition, Push Your Luck, Role Playing, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Storytelling, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.94563 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.5.
- More articles about Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood.
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