Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile Board Game Review

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By all accounts, Leder Games makes fantastic board game experiences. The other thing I’ve heard about Leder Games is that you get out of their games as much as you are willing to put in, and Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is the perfect example of this! Oath requires a certain group of people to play to make it as exciting as possible, and I had the pleasure of playing with good and bad players. Regardless, though, the investment of time and energy was well worth the payout as Oath is one of my favourite games I’ve played in 2024. And yes, I know I’m late to the party.

We won’t be talking about components or art in this review. For that, please read our components overview article now! (Oath – Components Overview and Impressions – GamesReviews.com)

Oath is a bit of a hard game to write about. I’ve sat here and wrote draft after draft of this review, and I never seem to catch the essence of the game. Oath is not the only confusing (in a good way!) game from Leder Games, but it’s definitely the hardest to explain. In the shallowest of terms, you win by completing your objective. For the chancellor, that could be supremacy over the land, controlling a bit of everything long enough to fulfill win conditions and be crowned…well the Chancellor. The thing is, other players are also attempting to complete things, and what those things are, well, you probably don’t know.

Version 1.0.0

And so complicated relationships begin to form, and Oath quickly dissolves into a complex game of relationships and politics. And this is exactly where I think Leder Games wants you to get to. To be clear, Oath does have strict turn orders and sequences and players will be using their available actions to do a variety of different things, many of which are influenced by the game’s many-many cards. Players will spend money, search for items, move around the board, muster troops, fight, defend, and so much more, all in an effort to complete Oaths or Visions and win. 

When