In the years since, Root’s success helped us move offices twice and allowed Leder Games to triple its staff, creating one of the most remarkable teams in the tabletop industry. Facing a similar success, any other company would have mandated a steady supply of tchotchkes and derivative expansions. However, Patrick had the confidence to let us set our sights on farther horizons. He offered every team member room to explore their ideas and supported each and every one of my own projects. The success of those games was a testament to the strength of the studio as a whole. 

At the same time, these games offered a challenge for the creative direction of the company and for Patrick’s original vision for Leder Games. Over the past few months we’ve pursued several possible paths forward and have arrived at something deeply fair-minded and almost singular in the history of the tabletop industry. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Patrick and his team would find a way to innovate even at a moment like this.

In the coming weeks Kyle and I will be forming an entirely new company called Buried Giant Studios with my brother Drew, Ted Caya, and some of our longstanding collaborators. Leder Games has agreed to sell us ownership of both Oath and Arcs, and we look forward to supporting both titles while also developing new games. In the short term, we will be handling the fulfillment of Oath: New Foundations and will be working on a new expansion to Arcs. We will have much more to say about those plans soon.

Root will remain at Leder Games. In addition, if additional illustration is needed, Kyle will be able to support the game. I’m happy to take a look at whatever new factions the team might cook up, though the world of Root has no shortage of talented designers and interesting ideas. 

It has been a great pleasure to serve as the Creative Director at Leder Games and to help this team make some remarkable games. Over the years, I have been consistently amazed by their attention to detail, their professionalism, and their abiding kindness. It has been an honor to work with everyone here and to play my part in helping these games come to life. 

Both Kyle and I wish the remaining team at Leder Games the best of luck. It has been an incredible privilege to be part of its story over the past eight years and we cannot wait to see what they do next.

Take's designer, Ted, has decided to move on from the studio and onto his next grand adventure. He will be bringing Take with him. Due to this, we are canceling this crowdfunding campaign. We wish him the very best!

As for the future of Take, that is squarely in the designer’s hands. We enjoyed our play tests in the studio, and will certainly celebrate if/when Ted takes that next step toward production.

We are grateful for the enthusiasm you’ve all shown for Take. Nearly 8700 followers is nothing to sneeze at! We look forward to returning to Kickstarter in the future with another amazing project. Stay tuned!

Lilypad Diaspora

The Diaspora is done. The only changes in the past months is that Provoke is slightly simpler and a few frog cards have been refined. No news is good news here!

Knaves of the Deepwood

At this point, the Knaves are 99%+ done—tweaks only at this point. Let’s talk about their big changes.

After the previous PNP release, fans roared, “Don’t take away our three Captains!” And I heard you loud and clear. I’ve brought back the three Captains, but you only use one of those Captains per turn. Here’s the twist: you choose which Captain you’ll use at the end of your turn, and you keep it secret until the start of your next turn. This way, opponents will want to predict where you’ll be acting, and you can play mind games with them. The original impetus for removing the extra Captains was that the Knaves had too much ability to police any part of the map at any given time based on their immediate needs.

However, when one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Specifically: The item bag is gone. I don’t think you’ll miss it much. Bag building is fundamentally a means to an end—a game like Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fun social activity not so much because of the bag building, but because of the push-your-luck bag pulling. Everyone else gets to cheer when you bust. There was never really a comparable mechanism to complement the Knaves’ bag building, and attempts to make one felt overwrought.

Removing the bag has made way for a much more interesting item mechanism. In setup, each Captain adds two items to your Stash—six items in total. When you use items, you exhaust them, and the only time you refresh items is when you reveal a Captain. You don’t get to refresh just any items, though—only the ones shown on the Captain card. So if you reveal the Thief, you’re only refreshing your boots and teas.

This has two major consequences. First, it lets us drop the number of basic actions your Captain can take per turn. You only get one now, rather than three. The rest are actions from your three items. This makes your Captain choices matter much more to how the faction feels. Second, it adds texture to your choice of Captain from turn to turn—if you really, really need to get more warriors on the board, either you need to have tea refreshed already or you need to choose the Captain that lets you refresh tea. This gives some helpful cues in your decision space and makes it readable enough that enemies can try to predict your actions.

There are plenty more small tweaks to the faction, but I’ll let you explore those yourselves. Enjoy!

Twilight Council

The Bats have always been the problem child of this expansion, but I’m happy to say that they’re feeling stable and very fun now. Between now and the end of development, I only expect a few more tweaks. Let’s talk a little bit about how I got here and what’s different.

As of the last Print and Play, the essential problem with the Bats was this: it was two factions into one, and one of the factions wasn’t any good. I remember a playtest a while back with Cole, where I was explaining this rule and that rule, justifying each one’s presence, and I just started to feel embarrassed. After the explanation, Cole just said, “Jesus Christ, Josh,” and that’s all he had to say. So I began to aggressively cut, ripping out the half of the faction that was adding little and costing so much in rules. I’m pleased to say that the Twilight Council is now the least wordy faction in Homeland.

Immediately, you’ll notice that the warrior auction system on their player board is gone. This was a huge edifice of rules that ultimately didn’t add much. Why? Root already has a warrior auction system. Except it’s on the map, and it’s called “rule.” If we’re using rule, then “disrupting” assemblies just means battling, and so on. Worse, the assemblies didn’t do much to support the Bat’s core concept. They would convene, have meetings and debates and such, all to just push some warriors around the map and sometimes remove them. It felt like a tool in service of another tool, rather than in service of a goal. It was a gimmick.

With the auction system stripped away, this laid bare that the Bats still lacked an extremely solid goal that aligned with their conceit. But now they have just that: they want to govern clearings. Basically, you govern clearings when you place an assembly in it and, by ruling it, empower your assembly, flipping it to its Empowered side.

Governance is how they score—they want to govern clearings with enemy buildings and tokens. Likewise, they don’t have crafting pieces of their own: they craft using enemy crafting pieces. This means their scoring is intimately entangled with their enemies’ map presence. Finally, if they manage to fully empty their assemblies of enemy warriors, they can Rejoice, spending matching cards to score points.

On the flip side, enemies are severely limited in governed clearings: they can’t battle, can’t use crafting pieces, and place or otherwise manipulate pieces—so they cannot recruit warriors, flip plots, or revolt, for example—unless they’re moving or defending in battle. They can get around this if they rule the clearing, showing that they have the military might to defy the Council’s governance, or if they spend a matching card, showing that the Woodland supports them.

The Bats still have access to the key tool from the old warrior auction system: their ability to Banish, forcing enemies to move their warriors. This still happens at assemblies, is triggered with cards, and gets more effective based on your warriors—in other words, it retains many of the core dynamics. But now it’s so much simpler: it’s just a battle, but you don’t take rolled hits, and the hits you deal force moves rather than removing pieces. Easy.

You’ll find that the hoped-for dynamics of the Bats are all there. They make everyone at the table look at the game differently, emphasizing ceasefires, faction synergy and coexistence, but also parasitism and piggy-backing. They pull the Woodland into an uneasy peace, using (mostly) non-violent methods, but still antagonize their opponents and provide interesting choices for all. I’m excited to see what you think of them! There are still some changes to come, but at this point they’re coming in for the landing.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and enjoy!

To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!

Because of the unpredictability of the current environment, Leder Games will not be making any decisions regarding a course of action at this time. What we can promise, however, is that we are not going to charge any additional funds to backers of our currently outstanding crowdfunding campaigns: Oath: New Foundations or Root: The Homeland Expansion. Again and again you have trusted us in the early stages of projects, and we do not take our end of the bargain lightly. Because of the support of all of you, Leder fans, we have the incredible fortune to be in a position with varied options for the coming times, whatever they hold.

At the same time, we want to be sure to extend understanding to our industry peers, especially small creators for whom this situation may be completely devastating to their operations. 

The impact on the publishers you know and love will vary widely depending on many aspects of production including: print quantities, production decisions, and where they are in their manufacturing timeline. Whatever Leder Games decides to do in the future may not work for another publisher. There is not going to be a perfect or even ideal solution for everyone.

We are, as always, grateful to our fans, customers, retail and distribution partners, and all those that are part of the wide network of people who make our games a reality. We hope to continue our work for many years to come.

The next day I headed back to Saint Paul. As I typed away on my laptop during my flight home, I found that his talk had given me the terms I needed to formalize my approach to Oath’s development. Over the past month, I had recognized something was wrong in the design. Intuitively, I had started pushing the design towards a simpler design, but I hadn’t quite articulated why I was doing it beyond the usual development buzzwords of “cleanup” and “streamlining.” I had also pushed against this design in an effort to protect the design expressive range. Jon’s talk had helped me realized that I wasn’t protecting the game’s expressive range, I was protecting its granularity and that granularity was not something that should be protected for its own sake.

One of the most granular elements of the game was the curse and trait system. In its most complex articulation, the system could support all sorts of character positions. Initially the traits were just one-off powers. Then, earlier this year, we moved to a unified trait system where a player’s traits were also yoked to the game’s foundations. For instance, if you could achieve 3 nomad influence, you would become Well-Connected. Then, additionally, if you achieved some other goal, such as getting the Darkest Secret by the end of the game, you could alter a linked rule in the game.

This meant that you could maintain traits without adjusting the matching foundations. Perhaps you were a brutal warlord who wanted to change the rules of the game. Well, if you can’t change those rules, you can still be a frustrated brutal warlord. This level of detail seemed really neat, but in practice players often just asked why they should bother changing the foundation if they already had the special power. I tried to argue that many of the powers were designed to harmonize better with the changed rule than the default rule, but the players shrugged at this. A power is a power. They didn’t have the strategic bandwidth to evaluate how a rules change might improve their chances in the next game, especially since the changes were often so marginal. Often, they viewed the big foundation alterations in the game as semi-unintended consequences to their actions. And, I think they were right to do this! Though there are some exceptions (like abolishing the Chancellor), it was okay for them to stay focused on the near-term. The system needed to explain why the world was the way it was—it didn’t need to make the players into masterminds. Causation was more important than agency.

With this in mind, I combined the maintenance conditions and foundation shifting conditions into one condition: a manifest condition. If you met the condition at the end of the game, the trait would be active. If you didn’t meet it, it would stay inactive. Inactive traits wouldn’t be lost, but you could only have so many at the start of each game. This preserved the feeling of lineage collapse without any extra rules and let me keep the possibility of a frustrated warlord. It’s amazing how often in Oath players feel their position expressed in a facedown card. If that was true for a denizen (I’m looking at you Bandit Chief!), it would certainly be true for a trait as well.

In retrospect, it was clear that this had been a place where the design had moved towards chunky design and away from granularity. Now, armed with those terms, I looked through other parts of the design. I’ve written a lot about how New Foundation's essential design strategy is to increase the game’s ability to remember. But, just because it could remember more didn’t mean the players were bothering to use that information to tell more fully realized stories.

The shadows and curses were a good example of this. Initially the shadows were a place where players could corrupt the sites with special effects that would be linked to a site in a semi-permanent way. However it always felt a little unhooked from the rest of the game’s design, so players had few opportunities to organically interact with them. I build all sorts of rewards (and penalties) into different articulations of the shadows, but players mostly just avoided them. Then, later on I generalized the site-memory rules to include locked cards and the new edifice system. This gave those locked site-only denizens many of the same properties as shadows, but with the benefit of also being denizens .Shadows started to feel obsolete. When I cut them from the design, their absence was hardly noticed.

This also happened when I moved to the curse system. One of the last reasons Shadows were in the game was to offer curses. Curses were a central element of the New Foundations project and I hoped they would offer players a way to “borrow” from future game positions. It took a long time to get the right balance of benefit to penalty, but, even when they were well calibrated, they lacked the kind of thematic and narrative heft they needed. After cutting shadows, I decided to drop curses as well. Once again, their absence was hardly felt. In retrospect this was obvious. The game already had curses, after a fashion. No player-debt system I could conceive would be as compelling as cards like A Small Favor or Vow of Silence.

I now turned my attention to what is probably the most central aspect of New Foundations: the revised Chronicle Phase. This element of the expansion had been quite stable for months. Generally, players seemed to enjoy it and it was certainly interesting. But, as my development goals clarified, the Chronicle Tasks began to feel like a loose fitting shirt. They were clever, but they were no longer fully in sync with the rest of the design.

For a long time, the player with the People’s Favor handled the introduction of new cards from the archive and the dispossession of other cards through a “Judgment” system. Based on the strength of the People’s Favor at the end of the game, that player would perform a number of trials. In each, two cards would get pulled from the game’s discards. One would be revealed. The player could then either protect that card—making it a potential starting adviser for next game—or dispossess it. Their decision would influence their choice of starting adviser next game and impact the cards that were introduced to the game. If you protected, the unrevealed card would become dispossessed and a new card, matching the one you protected, would be added to the archive. If they chose to dispossess the face up card, both would go to the dispossessed pile and two cards of the “opposite” suit would be added. The opposite suits were determined thematically (Order and Discord, etc).

This was a really neat system! It made the amount of turnover in the deck variable, from 1 to potentially 10 cards being introduced each game. It also gave players a lot of control over what could be added and showcased it all in a very visible phase where players could react in real-time to decisions about the composition of the deck. Players liked it. I was happy with it. And, for the past 4 months or so, it remained stable.

However, as the design matured in other areas, this system started to stick out. While experienced players enjoyed it, it was a little hard to teach. And, even once players got the hang of it, it still took awhile to resolve. There were bigger problems as well. The Chronicle Phase happens at the end of a game of Oath. That means players are already going to be tired and looking for a break. The phase needs to be propulsive. It could never match the excitement of an end-game situation, but it could try to at least look forward to the next game. At its best, the trial system had players swapping stories about the game they had just played. This is usually a good thing, but, if it starts happening while the game is still going on, it can slow the game’s forward momentum to a crawl.

With this in mind, I looked to apply some of the lessons I had learned elsewhere in the design. The only game-state requirement for this phase was that it needed to remove about 6 cards from the game. Okay, easy. The neatest part of the trial system was that the player who had the People’s Favor could defend cards they liked or banish cards they hated. I boiled all of this down to a simple system. They would draw 7 cards from the shared discard. They would choose one card to protect—this card would count as their starting adviser for the next game. The rest would be dispossessed. This also gave the player special knowledge of which cards were exiting the game and the minor thrill of knowing that they had been responsible for dooming those cards.

Critically, these choices were made after the player with the Darkest Secret had determined the next game's Oath. This meant that they could go into their choice to protect a card knowing in advance what the Oath would be next game. In essence, their chronicle task gave them a benefit for the next game. (I should mention too that there are foundations that adjust this, and give players additional controls over what gets discarded and what they might protect.)

With all of those responsibilities, I moved the task of introducing new cards to the game from the Archive to the player with the Darkest Secret. Now free from the constraints of building an ultra-granular design, I followed the same basic framework as base Oath, but with fewer restrictions. This player would pick any three different suits and introduce 3 cards of the first, 2 of the second, and 1 of the third. They could pick one card to keep and the rest would be added to the world deck. It was easy, and it had impact.

Finally, I revised the relic pack-up system to respond more cleanly to the game that was just played. I had put in rules that allowed site’s to remember relics shortly after the crowdfunding campaign. However, in practice it wasn’t working. Generally what happened was the only relics that got stuck to sites were those that players didn’t want and didn’t use. You can’t remember something that you never experienced, so it didn’t really matter that the sites could remember them. To address this, I reworked the relic restocking system to draw on cards held by players. If a dramatic game revolved around the bandit crown, that relic could now face two fates. If held by the winner it might end up in the reliquary. If held by anyone else it would get shuffled together and then reseeded at the sites in the game. In short, the relics would get linked to their corner of the map.

The map also now benefited from a more fixed geography. Once you’ve set up your chronicle for the first time, players would never need to shuffle their sites. During packup, the sites would be returned to the atlas box in a fixed order, allowing each copy of Oath to have an almost unique geography. Think of the sites as forming a line, a little like a side-scroller. The part of the empire would get remembered and then the governing player could choose to scroll their world forward or back at the start of the game. Looking for that lost Bandit Crown—you need to head east, to the ancient ruins of past empires!

Collectively, these changes have created a much deeper chronicle experience that I think lives up to and, in some respects, exceeds the promise of the project. We still have at least a few months of work ahead of us in the office. There are a lot of cards that need tuning and editorial work that will require the usual care to get through. But, I think this is what the game is going to look like.

Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.

Over the past two months, I’ve been guiding New Foundations through a very difficult phase of development. While many parts of the game are finishing basically on schedule, certain specific elements were not working. And, the harder I worked on them the further from completion they seemed to get. I believe my essential problem was that I had failed to adjust my own design and development sensibility to match the demands of the project. Techniques that had proved extremely useful in Arcs and Molly House simply weren’t well suited to Oath.

At the same time, these many long weeks in the wilderness were critical to the design. By letting the design balloon, I learned critical things that showed me what should be cut. I can’t imagine I could have gotten the design to where it is without this period of expansion and ambition. So many otherwise promising designs suffer from premature development. If you’re a designer just starting out, know that often it’s best to shoot very high and then start fresh than to preemptively clip your wings for fear of a development liability. The key thing, at least for me, is to never get too precious with one articulation of your ideas. The core promise and ambition of a game is always more valuable than whatever you happen to have on your table. Never be afraid to start over.

I’ve wanted to write that last paragraph for weeks now, but it didn’t feel earned. I was caught deep in the tumble of iteration and I wanted to make sure I had something to show for all of that rough-and-tumble work. The same things that I wanted to write about were proving most elusive. I didn’t want to write anything before I understood why I was having so much trouble with the design. I think I have those answers now.

---

One of my major goals with New Foundations was to make each and every empire feel unique. With only six edifices in the base game, strong empires were usually defined by the same sort of powers. It’s true of course that the selection of denizens in the game could go a long way in providing texture, I still felt like something was missing. If players didn’t put in the work to interact with the denizen powers, one big group of denizens could feel like any other.

To address this problem, I went down a long, long design journey. At the center of this journey were the govern tiles. The idea is that a stable empire would slowly generate a pool of tiles that they would carry over from game to game. If the denizens couldn’t give the empire a distinct character, maybe these tiles could? Additionally, by keeping the same pool of tiles from one game to the next, I hoped to give empires a greater sense of continuity.

But, Oath is already a complex game. At this level of complexity, the expressiveness of a design becomes a zero-sum game. If you add neat features to one part of the game, it’s going to pull attention from other (maybe neater!) parts of the design. So, as I went through various iterations, I did my best to make these tiles as simple as possible. By the time we got to the Kickstarter, I had a system that was working and was fairly simple. I suspected it would get simpler as we continued through development, and, indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

Eventually we had just six unique govern actions, one for each of the six suits. The empire still had character, but there were still too many rules in play. I had cut about everything I could, but it wasn’t enough. So, I looked for ways to deepen the implications of the govern tiles. In other words, I was trying to hide the complexity.

At one point during development, govern tiles gained an important property—when used at the start of the game, setup the Chancellor would assign them to cards to use their linked govern actions. This would also alter a that card’s suit. There were all kinds of neat implications here, and players could give the same old cards new resonances. But, if these implications were neat, they didn’t really guide the players or help them tell better stories. So, I put in an additional implication. At the start of the game, players needed to stock the initial favor banks, so it wasn’t too much extra work to have those favor banks reflect the cards in play. That way the placement of govern tiles would also inform the character of the game.

Without realizing it at the time, my design goals had started to shift. Now, rather than preserving and highlighting imperial differences, I found myself interested in the question of building an expressive core system that could organically create many different types of setup situations. With this in mind, I looked back at the 6 govern actions and thought about grafting them on top of the other setup phases. Maybe the six different favor banks could be linked to the essential elements of a game’s setup. Base Oath features a slightly asymmetric setup—that is, the Chancellor has their reliquary and gets an extra favor—maybe I could use this new system to explain why that was and give players the power to alter it.

The result was a revised setup system called Imperial Character. After govern tiles were placed, favor would be “sowed” on the various cards of the game. Then that favor would go to the banks along with whatever other starting favor started there.

Then, during the rest of setup, players would resolve each favor bank in order and the size of each bank would determine the setup features. If, for instance, the order bank was high, then the empire would have additional warbands. A high hearth bank might mean extra favor for the Chancellor? High discord might translate to extra exile warbands. It was neat!

The game was essentially treating the initial favor distribution like a set of attributes in a role-playing game. I could also add favor to the game or pull favor out, which meant that folks could find themselves steering a “low stat” empire through troubled times. Some of these attributes would benefit all of the players and others would just benefit the empire. This balance was critical. I wanted certain setups to favor the empire and others to favor the exiles. After a few weeks of testing, I had boiled these attributes down to a chart and cleaned up the setup procedure.

Though I had boiled things down as much as I could, it was still a place where the design had gained weight rather than lost it. At the time, I justified it by pointing to what we had purchased: the static elements of Oath’s setup had now been made dynamic. What’s more, they would respond to the world the players were creating. It gave consequence to the Chancellor’s governing. The system was responsive and expressive. I was pleased with myself and thought that just a little more experience and playtesting would allow folks to recognize all of the good work that the system was doing for the game.

So we started testing. At this point, about a year into the project (I started working on this project towards the end of January last year), a lot of the content was shaping up really nicely. We had a pile of new card powers, relics, edifices, and the like. We also had some new system-level adjustments that were, to all appearances, doing their job. And yet, despite the relative maturity of the project, I kept finding myself not engaging with the game’s world as much as I had engaged with the original Oath project. This was mirrored in my players as well. There was plenty to do, but players routinely reported not knowing what to care about or aim for in the game.

This was a very damning observation. The expansion was built on increasing player engagement, and yet, it was failing on its very first test. This was so upsetting that I initially disregarded these feelings. How could playtesters not care about the consequences of their actions?! There were so many new systems and the game had become so much more responsive than base Oath. And yet, I had players consistently suggesting new systems and ideas that would help them feel like they had an impact on the world. It seemed a variant of the classic developer’s nightmare: players find the game too complex, but would like you to add just one more thing to fix it.”

At this point, I decided to step back for a bit and think about how players engage with Oath. The goal of this whole project was to get players to more deeply engage with the game—to give players tools that would allow them to care about and care for the world they were creating together. I went to the white board and started sketching out the “layers” of engagement of players in an Oath chronicle.

The bottom layer was the game itself. How do you win? This layer was fine in base Oath and was fine in the expansion. Nothing I had done with New Foundations had compromised it. Though players now had other things to do rather than just win, there was still enough tension in the design. (I’ll write a bit about this more in the next diary).

The second layer was the immediate future. What did you do that would shape your next game? This was a place where base Oath was weakest. The new govern, edifice, shadow, curse, and setup system were designed to address this layer.

The third layer was the longer future of Oath. This was a place where things like the deck construction of the base game had supported a lot of weight. In New Foundations, there were lots of systems that engaged with this layer and they seemed to be working really well.

The final layer was the meta layer. How could players talk about the game when they weren’t playing it. This layer always more-or-less takes care of itself and is bounded only by the creativity of the players. Still, I had introduced a few new elements to the expansion to help players have more to talk about.

Writing this all out, it was very clear that the second layer was the most troublesome. The game didn’t need more rules or more multi-game incentive structures. It needed direct player feedback on that short-term horizon. And each of the systems at this layer was causing issues. In fact, during this same period, I had actually started to remove some of these systems from the design since they simply were not doing anything worthwhile.

The essential issue was that all of the work I did to improve system expressiveness had actually backfired. I had built a very responsive system, but it was simply too granular to provide the kinds of immediate feedback that board games excel and communicating. I needed a design that was as chunky as it was expressive.

So, over the course of about three weeks, I started going through the design and looked for places where the design was trying to protect the subtly of its systems. The first thing to go were the shadows and the curses. The more interesting shadow effects could be handled by the new edifice system and the curses were never as interesting as the base game’s vows. I was able to make some trait card adjustments to capture those dynamics.

But these cuts weren’t enough. Here I was spurred on by a new set of playtesters, both in office and on our discord, who were recent arrivals to New Foundations and almost immediately recognized the nature of the problem. As is typically the case, it took quite a bit of debates in our discord chat to clarify the problems, but it was well worth it. They helped me realize how much I was focusing my efforts protecting some clever and expressive systems rather than designing for impact.

Now, with a better sense of the problem, I turned my eye to the two parts of the game that had become almost sacrosanct: setup and the chronicle.

The setup system went first. What started as this:

Became this:

Here are the highlights. Favor banks still get to mirror the world, but they no longer inform the rest of setup and players don’t have to waste time counting and re-counting them. The govern tiles are now dead simple: the chancellor can discard them or assign them on cards they rule. If assigned to a card, they alter the suit. This has all of those usual expressive consequences (changing the bank, mixing up powers, etc), but the Chancellor doesn’t have to worry about them in the short term, because their other choice has immediate impact.

After all of the govern tiles are placed, the Chancellor draws 1 edifice for each tile that matches its card’s printed suit. There are 36 edifice cards, 6 of each suit. These can be kept in the box during the game, but, at setup, the chancellor will draw from them. Then, they will be assigned to imperial players. Each imperial player can have up to two (the remaining edifices are discarded). Edifices are always site-based cards with a lock. Let’s take a look at a couple:

As you can see, these cards let me fold in some of the expressiveness of the previous setup system but in a way that was fundamentally more chunky. This also provided me a place to put a lot more character into the game that could be linked to specific sites.

The previous adjustments to the site system had enabled things like locked cards to remain stuck to their site. So, I could use edifices to “link” persistent effects to a site that could stay there for the whole duration of the chronicle.

These adjustments dove-tailed perfectly with some of the continued development of the world’s geography and some of my feelings about the role of shadows in the game. The core theory of agency in Oath is that the players are the drivers of change. Where does evil come from in Oath? It comes from the players. No event or corruption system I could imagine would be as responsive to the game state as the decisions players made when they played it.

The new setup system had nearly all of the advantages of the most complex previous system but without mucking up the works with newly introduced granularity. Oath expressiveness itself in its denizens. If I wanted players to care about the game, I needed them to be able to speak to each other using the language they already had.

Next time, I’ll talk about what happened when I took that same realization to the chronicle phase, the traits, and the foundation system. Alongside that, we'll be releasing the next major playtesting kit.

Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.

But, it didn’t fix the whole problem. Consider what happened next. After picking your rules change and gaining your scion power, the player with the Darkest Secret would get to determine the next set of foundations that might be altered in a future game. I was thinking, in particular, of the way one generation seems to establish the sense of possibility that will be felt by the next generation. But, for a player at that moment, after a long game of Oath and looking at a dizzying range of system alterations, the choice tended to be random.

Around this time we were sorting through some other elements of the game on the testing discord a playtester noticed a conceptual overlap. The scion powers were basically traits and vice-versa. Why were these things different? Could the systems be unified? It was a great insight and a great instance of how when, in design, you notice two things doing the same thing either mechanically or thematically, that some kind of unification is usually called for.

I loved how evocative this was. If my exile came from a wealthy family, then their ability to shape the foundation of the game should be linked to their lineage in some way. We are, in so many ways, the products of our upbringing and education. It determines how we see the world and informs our politics more than anything else. It would make sense that the traits could be seen as ideological anchors.

So, spurred by this line of thinking, I looked at the traits alongside the foundations. I drew up a little table of all of the possible rule changes in the game (there’s around 26). Then, I gathered all all of my trait powers and scion powers. With those lists at hand, I played matchmaker over a long weekend and soon found myself with a newly imagined set of trait cards.

Consider the breaking of the scepter, as show in the previous image. With the unification of traits and foundation cards, we were able to link that element of play to a pair of trait cards.

This also has a nice effect of organically regulating the flow of change in the game. Previously, one foundation changed each game, like clockwork. With the new system, players were free to enact any foundation in their area. That means that if the same player won the Darkest Secret (and therefore the Chronicle Task of enacting a foundation), they likely would not be able to change the game dramatically, as they had already “flipped” the switches on their families traits and families generally gain traits slowly. However, if a rival family with a long and developed lineage took the reigns, the game might be in for a tumultuous period. Lineages can also be quite hard to maintain, so a tug-of-war between these two players would likely result in some shedding of trait cards which meant the game would naturally settle into a new status quo. But, rather than this kind of conflict becoming muddy, it would produce a unique game-state where the very rules of the game reflected generations of contention.

This was really the heart of New Foundations. There player actions had to have consequences that could not only be felt on the scale of the game, but also on the chronicle itself. Next week, I’ll talk a bit about the Govern phase, and how a few simple adjustments helped us create a lot more imperial identity both before, during, and after a game was played.

Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.

This design diary will be pretty short and sweet, but if you would like a lot more discussion about how the project has progressed, as well as a full walkthrough of the factions as they stand, please check out this video on Design in Progress, a Youtube channel by Jacob Knipper (better known as Endgamer), who is a Root fan, playtester, and co-creator of the Dawn and Dusk fan deck.

In a couple days, Jacob will also post an interview with me about my history in the games industry, how I got involved with Leder Games, rules writing, how Leder Games has grown and morphed over time, and much more, so keep an eye out for that too.

Lilypad Diaspora

The Diaspora has continued apace and is basically done. Since winter break, only a few frog cards and a number here or there have changed. I expect to make a couple more design tweaks on the same scale, and of course they need a bunch of art, especially for the frog cards. I’m very proud of them. That’s really all there is to say! Please enjoy.

Knaves of the Deepwood

With the Knaves, you will notice a pretty big difference immediately—they only have one Captain now. By and large, I made this change because one piece of feedback kept coming in again and again: the Knaves were fun to play as, but not fun to play against. A big reason behind this was their three-Captain structure—they had the ability to project force across too much of the map, they were too flexible in their action structure, and they didn’t care much when their Captains got hit. Going down to one Captain solves this problem and opens up the faction to more interesting dynamics with their building, the den. You’ll see that their dens can take actions, representing their network of lackeys doing their bidding.

This also plays into the second major change: the faction is more streamlined. From the beginning, I set out to make this faction straightforward to play. However, every faction tends to go through a period of increasing complexity as I experiment with various systems, seeing what works and doesn’t, then I transition to making big cuts, reconceptualizing what works in ways that fit together much more smoothly. In the second print-and-play, the Knaves hit peak complexity and have been getting simpler ever since. More streamlining is to come!

Finally, you’ll find that the print-and-play has a ton of Captains with new abilities! As the Knaves continued to develop, it became clear that most of the Vagabonds’ original abilities, even if reworked, wouldn’t highlight the interesting parts of the Knaves, so I’ve rewritten them to be unique. A couple Captain abilities are still similar to their Vagabond versions, but I expect them to develop into new, unique ones over the next couple months.

Twilight Council

As I alluded to in my previous design diary, the Council needed to go back to the drawing board. And I’m happy to say, they’ve become much better for it.

Their conceit remains the same: they are a group of Woodland elders and notables who run assemblies in order to resist the war and create some semblance of popular governance in the midst of civil war. However, the faction now drives toward this goal in a totally new way. Instead of the assembly happening through a card game, which many testers have lovingly referred to as “bat poker,” the assembly now uses an auction system. Broadly, based on your map position, you can send your warriors out from your supply as Influence on the assemblies, and you can spend cards to resolve their Orders against your enemies, turning the tide of the war.

This transition does make me a bit sad—after all, the old system promised to enrich some dusty corners of the design, like the crafting costs on cards. However, balancing this system across the goals and abilities of every Root faction proved to be extremely difficult without creating a huge edifice of rules. Even worse, most of the strategizing leading up to an assembly happened secretly as the players curated their hands for bat poker. It didn’t provide the hooks for a shared story, which is the worst thing you can say about a Root faction.

The fundamentals of this auction system have stayed stable for about three weeks now, and I’m confident this is the way to reach the finish line. That said, many specifics are evolving day over day, and much work remains to be done. But no longer is this faction floundering; it’s flying. If you want to hear more—and I mean a lot more—about this process, please check out the Design in Progress video I mentioned earlier.

Finishing Up

That’s it for the factions. Otherwise, development is basically done for the Squires and Disciples deck, Hirelings, and Landmarks. Now that the factions have solidified, we’ve begun serious playtesting on the new maps. Look out for the maps and Landmarks in the final print-and-play!

If you want even more Root stuff, Cole Wehrle and I recently participated in a video discussion on Homo Ludens about the historical inspirations behind Root’s factions. Though I’m biased, I thought it was a fascinating conversation. Please check it out!

To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!

New Foundations has no such problem. When I started seriously working on this project, about a year ago, my main aim was to figure out what it would mean to expand Oath and, to my mind, what it would take to get Oath to better live up to its original promises. Over the past year, it’s been a real pleasure to just push on that aim without worrying too much about how one adjustment might make a specific card or component in the original game not work. Anything that needs updated or reprinted can be. I don’t have to fret about the implications a design choice might have for a line of a half dozen expansions. There’s just Oath and New Foundations.

This is just to say, as I mentioned in in the December Kickstarter update, that this this is a deeply experimental project. We tried to emphasize this on the Kickstarter page itself, and it’s worth restating here: we simply have never made an expansion like this before. Most of our expansions are purely additive and therefore conservative in terms of their design sensibility. If you’re building a second floor on a building, you don’t want to mess up the first floor too badly in the process. That sensibility describes very little of my design philosophy for this game.

Though this expansion offers a huge amount of new material, it is not merely an expansion of core design. Instead, it is a dramatic reimagining of the game. I began the development process by looking closely at incomplete drafts for Oath and essentially rewound the design to where it was about six months before its completion, and then, armed with the lessons of Arcs and a few more years of experience generally, we essentially finished the game a second time. In this effort, I’ve tried my best to realize the game’s highest ambitions. Does that count as a second edition? A 1.5? Super Oath? Call it whatever you want. For me, it is what it says on the tin: a New Foundation for Oath.

Over the past year, we’ve been very busy on this game. Kickstarter backers will likely have read some of our updates over the past several months, and I’ve tried to bring folks into the design’s ups and downs. But, I realized the other day that I hadn’t written much on BGG about our progress. This didn’t sit right with me. A Kickstarter update can only do so much and a lot of what I might say about the design is better suited to BGG. Heck, my personal design journal for the Oath expansion is, so far, about half as long as that of Arcs and we’re only a year in!

I aim to set this right. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be spotlighting some of the work we’ve done since the crowdfunding campaign and try to tell the story of what New Foundations has become. I don’t know how many of these essays it’s going to take, but I imagine I’ve got at least four or five ahead of me to do any justice to the work we’ve done on the design.

Before that, however, I want to talk a bit about the game’s schedule. Since the crowdfunding campaign, we’ve completed three “passes” over the game. The first, extending to the early fall, allowed us to survey the broadest reaches of the game’s possible design space. We had time for all sorts of weird design experiments. Some worked (like reimagining the sites, relics, and edifices of the base game) and others fell flat on their face (like an altered action system). Then, in the fall, I picked the elements that felt most in keeping with the spirit of the game and pursued those more seriously. We spent a lot of time building and rebuilding our physical kits. We brought the game to our public playtesting nights here in Saint Paul, and we started mapping out the work it would take the finish the game. This second wave resulted in the version we showed at Pax Unplugged and the Christmas Kit which we published in December. This second wave produced a version of the game that was broadly realizing my hopes for the expansion, but still left considerable room for improvement.

This brings us to the third wave. Though the design was complete, there were some elements of the game that were a little frustrating. One of the biggest of these were the foundation cards. The idea of the foundation “switchboard” where rules could be turned on-and-off had proven itself. However, maintaining a deck of switches in their proper state was a hassle. I also wasn’t happy with where the People’s Favor and Darkest Secret had settled and there were a couple odds and ends in other parts of the design which were proving stubborn. Should the card Sacred Ground be classed as an edifice? What exactly separated an edifice from a locked site-only denizen anyway? Was the new relic recovery system capturing the spirit of adventure or just rewarding players for cautious play and late-game spending sprees.

At another studio, these questions would be classed as “Development Questions” in the sense that they could probably be answered through the play-testing process and content-level adjustments. However, I had the sneaking suspicion that they would be better addressed with a few little alterations at the level of the game’s design. So, I spent December and January on a third design pass. During this pass, we looked closely at the structure of the game and trying to see what we could knock loose before we put up the drywall. Boy I’m glad we did. Over the past two months we have cleaned up quite a bit of the design.

With the competition of this pass, we’ve entered the final segment of studio production. Over the next few months, we’ll be taking the game through the paces, balancing the new content, making the various foundations as dramatic and interesting as they can be, and honing the game’s physical elements and rulebooks. Don’t get me wrong; this will be a lot of work! But, I love the nitty-gritty of game development, rules-writing, and general usability. I am confident that we’ll have this project wrapped up before summer and broadly keep to our original Kickstarter schedule.

The clockwork expansion, headed by Liz and Ricky, is proceeding at about a six week delay from the rest of the design. This delay is by design. It allows the expansion content to stabilize before the solo team begins to adapt the new material. I suspect the all of the clockwork expansions interactions with New Foundations will be ready for testing within a month.

That’s where things stand now. There’s a lot of work to be done, but the team is energized and, frankly, pretty delighted to play the 100 or so games of Oath that will be required to properly finish this thing. And, while we’re deep long and quiet work of game-finishing, I figured it would be a good time to start a new series of development diaries that talk a bit about the progress of the design over the past few months.

I'll start posting those diaries next week, where we'll cover how New Foundations alters relics, their recovery, and how the game's world generates them.

Find all of Cole's Design and Development Diaries for Oath: New Foundations, and more, on Board Game Geek.

Twilight Council

Let’s get the hard one out of the way: The Twilight Council has always been the problem child of this expansion, and it remains so. The version I’m releasing today is a snapshot of my thinking, but to be clear: they still have quite far to go. They are in a messy place, but I am curious to see the public response!

Over time, we’ve experimented with many iterations on the idea of “Assemblies let factions use cards in order to remove warriors.” This has turned out to be very, very hard to pull off. Let’s talk a bit about the challenges involved in doing this!

The first roadblock is that convening must feel distinct from battling while introducing enough noise to be exciting for the players involved. For battles, this was the dice. For convening, we’ve moved away from the dice, instead letting the source of surprise come from the players’ actions themselves. Cards are now played facedown—you don’t know what people have played until you’re done convening. By and large, this works as a source of surprise. Good so far!

The second roadblock is tougher: Root factions care about cards very differently from each other. The Eyrie, for example, is always card-starved, so naturally they will have less to work with. These asymmetries are not always a disadvantage—embracing asymmetry is a huge point of Root, after all! But in this case it is: you simply cannot disturb players’ hands too much, or else faction dynamics collapse and people feel cheated or unable to counterplay the Bats.

To address this, I’ve implemented the ability for players to disrupt assemblies, drawing arms to battle in response to perceived unfairness. There’s a lot of precedent for violence at medieval assemblies, so thematically I’m happy. However, this has ballooned the size of the convening procedure. In our internal testing, convening has proven to be fun and interesting for those involved, but it tends to happen too often, ballooning the Bats’ turn length and making each assembly feel less impactful than it should. Also, for the players not involved, it tends to drag.

The final roadblock is differentiation from other factions. As the Knaves of the Deepwood have continued to develop, I have found that many potential mechanisms for the Bats have fit much better into the Knaves than they ever fit into the Bats. Naturally, this leaves fewer tools to work with—the factions should feel different, after all! Because the Knaves pull warriors directly off the map as Hostages, the Bats will likely need to move away from this as a conceit and transition to a design where they interfere with factions’ abilities to recruit warriors in the first place or their ability to use warriors in battle.

Because of these issues, it’s about time for me to go back to the drawing board once we get back from break in the new year. Rest assured, we don’t release anything that we don’t believe in. I’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work in Root’s design space over these months of development, and I will continue to share with you how this faction is progressing!

Now, on to brighter news.

Lilypad Diaspora

The Diaspora is in a fantastic place! They are likely close to done at this point, perhaps between one and three iterations. I say “likely” because game development is funny; you can think you’re almost done and then you get hit with a huge problem that demands a rework.

When we released the first print-and-play, a big problem immediately presented itself: scoring scaling. Especially on maps that started with fewer pieces, they would routinely explode out of control, placing enclaves all around the map. Unless the table ground them down in the mid game, they could ride this expansion to a win, but if the table responded well, their scoring potential cratered out in the mid-to-late game. Generally, this kind of scoring curve isn’t ideal for a Root faction—it drastically warps the table’s attention toward the quickly scaling faction. This on its own is not necessarily an issue, but if it’s happening every time, then it makes the game feel stale quickly.

The other big problem was fiddliness, the worst offender being the Frog tokens, now called enclaves. It’s fiddly enough for a piece to have two states—face up and face down—let alone having three states like they did at the time: Peaceful, Militant but not covering its suit, and Militant and covering. This made it extremely difficult for players to track the tokens’ states; we often saw players knocking tokens around and then not remembering whether they were covering the suit or not. Now, when they’re Militant they always immediately cover the clearing suit. As a bonus, you no longer have to track whether they’re Peaceful or Militant on your board.

To enable the instant replacement of clearing suit, we needed to ensure that factions who care a lot about clearing suit had an out: enemies on their own turn can now engage in Peace Talks with the Diaspora to turn a Militant enclave back to Peaceful, at the cost of a card. This doesn’t require consent like the old Reconcile, and neither does the new Reconcile—basically, if it’s your turn, you have some limited or costed ability to flip Militants to Peacefuls.

On the topic of the frog suit—let’s talk about frog cards! I’m happy to say that frog cards now show up in the deck itself rather than being in a deck of their own, and they can now be used by the Diaspora as well as by enemy factions. This is important to me from a thematic angle, since these cards represent the different cliques, movements, and groups within the faction. It would be silly if the internal politics were accessible only by enemies, making the Diaspora’s people feel like the pawns of their enemies rather than a double-edged sword.

It became clear that forcing frog cards to show up in players’ hands through natural draw was the right way to go, but I still needed a way to give players access to the specific frog cards that they cared about. The main way I addressed this was with the Pond. Whenever a frog card is discarded, it goes to the Pond, and whenever a player flips a Militant enclave back to Peaceful, the enclave’s ruler gets to draw a card, either from the deck or the top card of the Pond! This greatly reduces the time it takes to engage with them—no more searching through the deck or, as it worked in a version between the first PNP version and now, having to thumb through the main deck until you found a frog card.

Recently, I’ve been working on ensuring that the Diaspora has the ability to play more peacefully in the early game. While the Diaspora is designed in order to play more peacefully or more militantly depending on the matchup, we found that playing extremely Militant early on, then gradually transitioning to Peaceful became a dominant strategy. I disliked this, both for thematic reasons and just because it’s boring. I think I’ve addressed this problem in the most recent version, but only time will tell!

Knaves of the Deepwood

The Knaves are coming along well! They are not as close to being done as the Frogs, but I am very happy with their progress.

The Knaves had three big issues starting with their first PNP release, beyond being overpowered: First, they were fun to play but not much fun to play against, largely because it was hard to police them in a satisfying way. (Sound familiar?) Second, their turn structure led to significant analysis paralysis and was hard for other players to track. Finally, they had a lot of easy-to-forget rules.

Their policing issues mostly came down to this: they accumulated warriors more like a Militant faction than an Insurgent faction. And while they couldn’t put their Captains in the same clearings, they could still build scary stacks of warriors on their Hostage-holding Captains that were a pain to get through. This happened because they didn’t really need to defend both their Captains and their hideouts: they just didn’t care that much about losing their hideouts, since they were easy to get back on the map and losing them didn’t have much of a penalty. So they felt simultaneously too “easy come, easy go” and too hard to attack in the places they cared about. We’ve addressed this mostly by balancing out how much the Knaves care about their Captains versus their hideouts, making their warrior generation more costly, but also making Captains themselves a little more slippery, letting them retreat automatically to hideouts when they would be removed. This means they can operate with smaller forces and still feel impactful.

To address analysis paralysis, I’ve cut down the limit of items that each Captain can hold but also loosened when they can use them. Originally, my impulse on items was to restrict their use to only before or after the Captain acted, thinking that this would reduce the number of possible action combinations and sequences. However, what we found in testing was players would try to plan around this restriction, thinking about how their Captain’s location on the map would influence their item use order on the following turn, adding more analysis than the restriction removed. I also removed their ability to draw more items from their bag during their main action step, leaving this as a passive draw later in their turn. This means you never have to track which items you can and cannot use on the current turn, and it removes the need to change your plan for your current turn based on items you just drew.

The easy-to-forget rules were mostly details that were cute but needed to be cut altogether. For example, we tried various methods to allow enemies to negotiate for Hostages on their own turn, but even when it was rationally a good deal for them to do so, it always just felt…bad. You’d pay a card to get some warriors back. Fine so far. But giving points to the Knaves as well? That’s a bridge too far. Likewise, the rules for Hostages dying during battles were thematic, but far too unpredictable and difficult to factor into the attacker’s math. There wasn’t really a way to hedge your outcomes or mitigate your luck in an effective way.

To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!

The Three Captains

Their Actions

In terms of action structure, the Knaves of the Deepwood ask you one question for each of your three Captains: “Do I prepare, or do I strike?” Preparing lets your Captain place warriors and get items. Striking lets you move, battle, and use the Captain’s items. A typical turn will have you preparing with one or two Captains and striking with one or two of them.

This choice gives the faction a neat rhythm, a looming tension that builds as the Captains prepare, and then released when they strike. And the action structure makes the Knaves much less complex than the Vagabond. Really, they’re one of the easiest factions to learn—if not the easiest, period. In fact, you’ve already learned most of their rules; here’s their current player board:

Items and Hostages

The Road Ahead

The Knaves are a younger faction than the Lilypad Diaspora and Twilight Council and there are still a bunch of questions to be answered—such as the timing of item use and setup, the specifics of ransoming hostages, and torch functionality (Scoundrel, anyone?). They will probably also get some kind of token or building. But they’re already shaping up beautifully, and I’m excited to see how you like them!

Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. To find out more, click here.

Find all of Josh's Root: The Homeland Expansion Design Diaries on BoardGameGeek!

Marsh Map

While I was at Gen Con, I was a bit surprised that many people approached me and mentioned that they would love to have a map that fit games of 5+ players more comfortably. Certainly convention audiences skew toward more-invested players, but it was intriguing! The more that we thought through what map concepts would bear fruit, the more we recognized how nice having a larger map would be. Turns out that our very own Patrick Leder was tinkering with this idea already in his Swamp map. And given the new factions’ animals, frogs and bats, adding this map made total thematic sense. Behold some of Kyle’s beautiful willow trees!

The conceit of the Marsh map is simple: it's bigger—it has 15 clearings currently. However, this increase in clearings brings up a major concern: it needs to work with pre-existing products. Most importantly, we can’t leave people with the deluxe clearing markers hanging. To address this, we are experimenting with using landmarks. Basically, we’re imagining a set of three chunky wooden landmark pieces, one of each suit. These clearing suits would never change, such as by the Lilypad Diaspora. And they would likely have a secondary effect such as adding a building slot, to give the map some gathering points so that it doesn’t feel unfocused. Because they’re landmarks, you would be able to use them on other maps to modify them to your tastes as well!

The Marsh map can also shrink down. This is simple if you’re going down to 12 clearings, same as any other map, since you can just let players choose a cluster of clearings to remove from the map during setup and add a rule for how to move through them. We’re hoping to let you shrink the map down even further, to 9 clearings, but this does raise some concerns! Certain factions are limited in their token and building placement by suit, such as the Lizard Cult, others such as the Woodland Alliance have limits of one token and building per suit. The Lilypad Diaspora even has both a limit by suit and one per clearing. Will some or all of these factions break under the pressure of reducing the clearing count? Another route may be making the map simply feel smaller by closing off building slots or adding placement restrictions or warrior caps to certain clearings—flooded clearings, anyone?

Gorge Map

Thankfully, there are many fewer questions swirling around the second map, the Gorge map, originally designed by Sam Smith, the Lord of the Board. For a long time, we’ve been admirers of Sam’s map. It truly felt like something we would design, and it provided new and interesting strategic geographies to play with. Here’s the map as he designed it:

I love this map as a new take on Autumn map conventions that focuses conflict into the natural chokepoints in the gorge itself, giving it a very different feel. It also introduces no new rules, so it’s easy to learn. That said, the map was designed before the Marauder Expansion came out, which means that some of the forest shapes need to change in order to support the Keepers in Iron. This map will go through a full testing and development regime, and will of course be illustrated by Kyle.

As far as experiments go, I would like to take a page from the Marsh map and see whether there are opportunities for a modular setup where the bridges and/or ladders can be moved, but otherwise I wouldn’t expect any sea change here. Sam has clearly done his homework, and it shows. I'd like to preserve its qualities without adding a bunch of special rules that bog it down during play.

As you might tell, we’re still in the early stages of thinking through these questions. In particular, we don’t know yet whether shrinking the Marsh map is feasible without impacting balance too much! This will require much more playtesting to pin down, but it’s a major focus and we have many, many months to do it right.

Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. To find out more, click here.

Find all of Josh's Root: The Homeland Expansion Design Diaries on BoardGameGeek!

Sickened by the enduring conflict, the Twilight Council hosts assemblies to end the war, bringing together all the Woodland from the lowliest mouse-in-a-sack to the mightiest hawk with a royal claim. The assemblies emphasize political connections over pure numbers of warriors, pushing the factions away from bloody battle and toward heated debate. As the Council progresses in their mission, they can declare edicts to change how the assemblies work, manipulating their enemies’ incentives and actions.

The Twilight Council is almost a bizarro Woodland Alliance. The Alliance wants to mobilize sympathizers through outrage, which means that the Alliance actually wants to act in ways that will generate that outrage they seek. The more atrocities, the more backlash against the oppressors—they want to sharpen the effects of the war in order to end it. The Council, on the other hand, wants to provide a framework for the Woodland to cool down the war. Though the Council faction is represented by bats, the Council as a movement as a whole includes all the Woodfolk.

The Council adds a new action to the game for everyone: assembling. This is a new way to remove warriors that deemphasizes warrior counts and emphasizes hand management. It uses the battle dice but feels very different! The assembly also adds a new way to draw cards, conceding, letting players draft their hands more effectively. I’ll describe this all in more detail throughout the diary. 

In my diary on the Lilypad Diaspora, I mentioned that the core conceit of the faction clicked into place quickly and stayed solid. This was anything but the case for the Twilight Council! What their assemblies do and how they work have gone through many more major changes than the Diaspora—as of this diary, it’s on version #19.

Because this faction went through so many more major changes than the Diaspora did, I’m going to write this diary in more of a narrative way, flying from version to version and explaining how the design changed over time. So, back in time we go!

Version 1: Laws

Originally, the Bats would pass Laws, which were basically restrictions on what players could do in clearings. An example of one might be “Players cannot battle in fox clearings.” Then the Bats would attempt to enforce these Laws by getting more assemblies down and ruling clearings. If they could successfully enforce these Laws, they scored points.

This early version also used a round-robin voting system where any of the players could play cards in as Votes to influence which suit the Law affected. Because cards are a bulky currency, I let players redraw cards.

This version had tons of issues: The Laws were difficult to remember, because Root players are not used to checking the area around the board except for Dominance cards. The scoring did not scale well with player count, since it became easier for enemies to break Laws inadvertently if there were more players in the game. The Laws were difficult to strategize with—it was extremely hard to predict how a “no battle in fox clearings” Law would play out, for example, especially in the early game, so there was little incentive to participate in the assemblies except for the opportunity to ditch cards and redraw.

Version 2: Laws as Tokens

Overall, this cut was all about grounding the assembly process in specific clearings, for usability’s sake, so I turned the Laws into tokens. This did make it much easier to interpret where Laws were, but it greatly restricted how much of the map the Laws affected at a time. It just didn’t matter often enough.

I also recognized that the old round-robin system of voting could break the game flow, so I experimented with a head-to-head voting system where the player with the most pieces in the clearing could override the Law and choose a new one. This had more of an immediate tactical impact than the previous, vague system, but it introduced a poisonous dynamic. Players would simply want the Law passed that they could most immediately break, which means that their game impact was even further minimized. Clearly this wouldn’t work.

Versions 3–5: Carrots, Not Sticks

The elephant-sized problem of the previous version was that players simply would not want to engage with the laws. They were all limitations, and except in specific cases people would just want them off the map as quickly as possible. In this version, the Laws become Edicts—tools that players could use to harm each other. This immediately felt much better! …

…When it mattered. The faction just did not spread out quickly enough, since only one Edict was placed per turn and only one or two were resolved per turn. So, I expanded the assemblies so that they all got resolved, along with the option to Defer in order to skip assemblies that seemed too risky. I also abandoned some experiments with open hands that sped up assemblies but made them boring. 

Versions 6–10: Warriors, Crafting Icons, Incentives

This period of design happened in the weeks before Gen Con and at Gen Con itself, where I was able to run a series of two-turn demos in our room with interested players. Largely, the changes here focused on three areas.

First, it became clear that both cards and points were both poor ways to use the assemblies. One card is a lot; one point is a lot. A single card pull or point swap is serious business—more than one, and the game’s structure starts to warp around the assemblies in an unhealthy way, cannibalizing the rest of the game. And even worse, in many cases, the assemblies would wash out their effects—Player A would steal a point from Player B, only for the reverse to happen a moment later. It was boring. The only outcome where effects did not wash out was warriors; there was nothing in the assemblies placing warriors back on the map. So I cut the card and point steals.

Second, cards as votes proved too restrictive. Generally, the question of “Do I put in a card as a vote?” boiled down to “If it’s not a bird card, then yes. If it’s a bird card, maybe no.” There needed to be more differentiation between cards—a reason to want to keep one card over another. In one playtest, Cole mentioned the idea of using crafting suits as the currency instead of the card suit, which was a great idea! The number of crafting icons measures the size or influence of the group you’re trying to get to come to your side, so it’s a natural fit for the assembly. (If you’re confused and want to read more on thematic considerations in the Craft action, you can read my post about it here!)

Finally, I knew the Bats’ scoring system wouldn’t produce the themes I wanted to see. At this point, the Bats would score simply based on their number of assemblies or the number of assemblies they ruled. This didn’t express the most important thing: were assemblies happening and doing their job? At various points in this period, assemblies would score points when run or score points based on how many warriors they pulled off the map, in various ways.

Versions 11–16: A Major Rebuild

The demos and tests at Gen Con were useful but ultimately frustrating for me. At this point, the Frogs were clearly resonating with people more strongly than the Bats. The Bats were still fiddly and too complicated, and they did not have a strong thematic hook. The best I could do was say “they can remove warriors permanently.”

So I knew I needed to go back to basics. They needed to remove warriors with assemblies, which needed to involve cards somehow, and likely their crafting suits. Those were my assumptions; everything else I considered subject to change, and change I did. The faction ended up much, much leaner and more flexible all at once.

The critical change in this version is to the assembly process: instead of an intricate, multi-round assembly where everyone got a seat at the table and lots of cards were placed out on the table, I reconceptualized it as a battle replacement. This makes sense—if its function is removing warriors, then it slots naturally into the flow of play when battles would happen. This also had the great knock-on effect that players could run assemblies on their turn. With this added flexibility, I could increase how much assemblies suppressed the war—now, if players battled at all in clearings with assemblies, they were heavily penalized.

Version 17–19: Coming Up to Speed

The rebuild paid many dividends, but I began running into considerable issues with the faction’s puzzle and its identity. It was obvious what the Bats needed to do on their turn. In one playtest, Nick Brachmann, a fellow developer at Leder Games, mentioned that the Council’s puzzle was just too easy to math out, since they could snipe warriors at a known cost. The faction did not ask the player to engage in much strategic thinking or tradeoffs, and the assemblies themselves just did not feel very much like assemblies. To try to address this, I experimented with various systems, including the Loyalist system shown below, but they all proved too much of a table space hog and not particularly interesting.

But after some soul-searching, I realized that some of my design goals for the assembly were holding me back. Specifically, I had hoped to avoid designing an assembly system that felt like battling, which to me meant that I couldn’t use dice. But at this point I had exhausted every conceivable diceless system, so what would the harm be in breaking that rule and experimenting with the dice? Turns out, this was exactly the right decision.

I’m reminded of my design work on the Keepers in Iron. On its face, the use of a card-slotting system like the Eyrie gives some people the impression that they must feel like the Eyrie, but this is completely wrong. Likewise, the assembly system uses the dice from the battle system, but it feels very different due to some critical tweaks.

• The fact that it isn’t a battle means you can get around abilities like the Alliance’s Guerilla Warfare and the Lizard Cult’s Acolytes.
• The concede option and reroll order give much more control to defenders than in battle.
• The lack of hit limit based on warrior count makes it feasible, and even preferable sometimes, to approach a large force of warriors with just one or two.

Finally, moving to a system with more uncertainty let me hone in on the most straightforward, thematic scoring system that the faction has seen so far: they simply score a point for each assembly that resolved during the Council’s turn and survived it.

Where We’re At

And we’re up to the present! Here’s the player board as it stands:

This version has been testing extremely well—people are enjoying it, and after running through the assembly once or twice the whole process clicks. After much struggling, the core conceit works! The next step for the Council is iterating their Edict cards. Here are a few of them:

Basically, near the end of the Council’s turn, they can declare a single Edict as long as they have enough Active Assemblies and revealed cards of the right suit. These are the youngest part of the design. Basically, they are designed to give the Council the ability to change how assemblies work, along with some once-in-a-while action flexibility, letting do things they otherwise couldn’t, like moving and battling. Their costing is all out of whack, and it remains to be seen how things like revealed bird cards play into fulfilling their suit costs.

One thorny issue of note: The Council is particularly weak right now against extremely belligerent factions like the Lord of the Hundreds, so the Council will likely receive some countermeasures in their Edicts—maybe something like drawing cards that others discard from their Woodland Pacifism ability, maybe a more direct downside for battling assemblies like making them give no victory points when removed, or something else.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Come back to hear about the new maps—the Gorge Map and the Swamp (or Marsh) Map. See you then!

Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. If you would like to sign up to be reminded, click here.

Find all of Josh's Root: The Homeland Expansion Design Diaries on BoardGameGeek!

The central mechanic of the Diaspora is that it adds a new suit to the game: a new deck of Frog cards and a Frog token to add this suit to clearings. Frog tokens are double-sided, with Peaceful and Militant sides, and the faction scores points based on Peaceful Frog tokens. While a token is Peaceful, its clearing is double-suited; for example, a clearing could be both Frog and Fox suited. On the flip side, Militant Frog tokens are the only way that the Diaspora can get warriors, but they also can prompt Reprisals, replacing their clearing’s suit with Frog alone.

Throughout its concepting and design, these pillars have stayed solid, and when I first showed off the Diaspora to the public at Gen Con, I knew the faction was on the right track. People understood its concept right away, and their eyes lit up.* It was a huge breath of fresh air after working on the faction internally for many months!

* As an aside: At Gen Con, Matt Lees from Shut Up and Sit Down came by, looked at the placeholder Militant Frog tokens, and said, “Graphic design is my passion, and you simply cannot change this token art.” Please enjoy their majestic art, which to the disappointment of all has since changed:

Goals

Stories

The Tokens

As I described in my first design diary, the Diaspora is not a monolith, but a fractious, multifaceted faction, and its constituents have many different ideas about the Diaspora’s history and how the faction should (or shouldn’t!) reintegrate into the Woodland. Largely, this is represented by their Militant and Peaceful Frog tokens.

While the tokens have stuck around from the beginning, the mechanics for placing, flipping, and scoring them have changed quite a bit. Let’s walk through a few of those old ways!

Early on, the Diaspora had a Stance track, which represented their current peacefulness or militancy. If their Stance was on its Peaceful side, they could place tokens Peaceful, and vice versa. The Frog cards represented different personalities within the faction—a warmonger or a peacemaker, for example—and both the Diaspora and other factions could use these cards to change the Stance. The Stance would drift toward neutral on each Diaspora turn, and the Stance could get stuck on Peaceful or Militant for a while if the track tipped all the way in one direction or another.

Ultimately, I threw out the Stance track because it was too porous to other players but too manageable for the Diaspora itself. Once another player had access to a Frog card that changed the Stance a lot, they could completely shift the Diaspora’s strategy with a single card play. For the Diaspora, they could carefully tune their plays of Frog cards in order to wash out their effects and keep their Stance right where they wanted it, removing any puzzle involving working around the Militant or Peaceful parts of their faction.

In the Gen Con version, the faction also faced Woodland Intolerance, where a die roll each turn flipped Peaceful tokens to Militant. I liked this mechanic because it demonstrated some antagonism between the Woodland itself and the Diaspora. However, the Reprisals mechanic already demonstrates this, through covering clearing suits and discarding cards, representing loss of support.

For placement, their scaling speed was the main concern. Let them scale too quickly, and it either means they score too quickly or it warps the game for other players, incentivizing too much killing of defenseless Frog tokens over other goals. Restrict placement only to rule, and you can over-emphasize their military game. (I want to ensure the possibility of peaceful spreading!) I’ve opted for a mixed strategy where you can either rule, guaranteeing your safety through force, or you can spend a card, using your Woodland contacts to ensure peaceful integration.

As far as scoring goes, I’ve worked through tons of ways of assessing the Peaceful tokens: simple scaling based on number of Peaceful tokens, points when placing but losing points from too many Militant tokens, points based on the clearing suit with the most Peaceful tokens, and so on. Certain methods scaled their scoring too quickly, some too slow. Others provided too many opportunities for soft lockouts where people couldn’t possibly dig themselves out of their scoring hole. Right now, I’m pretty happy with their Lizard-like scoring style, where they can spend one card each of fox, mouse, and rabbit suits (or substituting a bird as a wild), and score 1 point for each Peaceful Frog token in matching clearings. This not only adds map texture and gets the scaling right, but also adds the most thematic resonance. Integration is a relationship with multiple parties: the Diaspora itself and the foxes, rabbits, mice, and birds of the Woodland!

The Deck

The Diaspora’s Frog deck is where a lot of the interactive thematics come through. Right now, players gain access to cards from the Frog deck by reconciling with the Frogs, giving a card to the Diaspora in exchange for a Frog card and flipping a Militant Frog token to Peaceful.

It’s important to show how the Diaspora’s enemies might leverage their relations with the Diaspora for their own ends: using the Diaspora’s people for labor, engaging in peace talks (“We reconciled before. I’m not a threat. Why should you keep warriors here?”), or even declaring yourself to be the lord-host or protector of the Diaspora through its Dominance card. (Though to prove your position as protector, this may require some suppression of the Diaspora’s own warriors in the process, for their own good…)

The deck works pretty well right now, but it’s also probably the weakest part of the design, since the most common piece of Diaspora feedback right now is “Please let the Diaspora use Frog cards.” This is understandable, but there are various obstacles: Each card would need to be useful for both the Diaspora and enemies in non-broken ways, or else players would need to be able to pick and choose the cards they draw in some way. The Diaspora would also need a way to draw Frog cards without distracting too much from other suits, and they would have to actually care about the Frog suit. Right now, they care about card suits for placing and scoring Peaceful Frog tokens; the Frog suit is useless for placing tokens, and it would be too powerful to let them score all Peaceful Frog tokens by spending a Frog card.

The ideal route is unclear right now, but this is a workable question that has various solutions! There’s plenty of time for working out these issues in the months of development to come. I hope you enjoyed this look inside the Diaspora. Please come back for my next designer diary about the Twilight Council: the Bats!

Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. If you would like to sign up to be reminded, click here.

Find all of Josh's Root: The Homeland Expansion Design Diaries on BoardGameGeek!

Thinking about these themes reminded me of my favorite grand-strategy video games, such as Stellaris, Crusader Kings, and Victoria by Paradox Interactive. I love how these games show that a single faction is actually composed of many factions, whether it’s the relationship between liege lords and vassals in Crusader Kings, interest groups in Victoria, or internal factions in Stellaris. No group is a monolith, but rather a pastiche of people who have different priorities and opinions. The Lilypad Diaspora shows this through its split between peacefulness and militancy, and the Twilight Council shows this through its ever-evolving assemblies.

But it’s not enough for the Homeland factions to be pastiches of internal groups; those internal groups should respond to the influence of everyone at the table. Essentially, any player should be able to fight proxy wars through the Homeland factions. For the Council, the assemblies are open to all comers, who can convince enemy warriors to lay down their arms…or else. For the Diaspora, anyone can provoke the Diaspora to become more militant by battling them, and can promote peacefulness by reconciling with them, swapping their own cards for cards from the Diaspora’s personal Frog deck. You might antagonize a Homeland faction in one part of the map and reconcile with them in another.

These factions work at the roots of Root. (Sorry.) They add a new suit, morph the map, and give everyone a whole new way to use their cards. They’re also a love letter to the Riverfolk Expansion. The Riverfolk factions are so wacky and I adore how they focus on player politics. However, over the years, we’ve found that newer players to Root can struggle to fully engage with them, especially the Lizard Cult. Because of this, I’ve structured the Homeland factions’ politics to ensure they are more accessible to everyone.

This expansion also includes two new maps—the Gorge Map, based on the excellent map of the same name by Sam Smith, Lord of the Board, and the Swamp Map, based on a map by our very own Patrick Leder! I’ll have plenty more to say about these maps in my fourth design diary.

That’s all for today, but you’ll hear from me plenty more. I’ll post a new design diary every Tuesday until the crowdfunding campaign begins. Next week, I’ll talk through the Lilypad Diaspora.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey! Thanks for reading.

Root: The Homeland Expansion
The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. If you would like to sign up to be reminded, click here.

Lilypad Diaspora
Scattered long ago and suppressed ever since, the Lilypad Diaspora now returns to their Woodland home. While they hope to reintegrate peacefully, peace is rare in the midst of civil war. As they train their warriors, they must ensure that their desire for safety does not tip into outright aggression. With weapons at the ready, a simple misunderstanding between the Diaspora and the Woodland can flare into vicious reprisals, hardening the Diaspora’s militancy and spreading resentment against their cause.

Twilight Council
Sickened by the enduring conflict, the Twilight Council hosts assemblies to end the war, bringing together all the Woodland from the lowliest mouse-in-a-sack to the mightiest hawk with a royal claim. The assemblies emphasize political connections over pure numbers of warriors, pushing the factions away from bloody battle and toward heated debate. As the Council progresses in their mission, they can declare edicts to change how the assemblies work, manipulating their enemies’ incentives and actions.

Find the original Design Diary on BoardGameGeek! Subscribe to the page and check back weekly for more Design Diaries and updates as we get closer to the campaign launch on October 22, 2024.

An image of four “Shadow Sites” created for the Queen of Shadows mode, complete with Shadow Relics and Shadow Altars.

As part of the current Kickstarter campaign for New Foundations and Clockwork Adversaries, Ricky and I are releasing a sample deck called the “Servant.” This deck is a reworked version of our original QoS deck, and is meant to fit into a normal game of Oath. The Servant you can meet now is an early sketch, and she will continue to evolve along with the rest of the Oath expansion project, but you should be able to get a sense of what we want an automated opponent to feel like. As she stands, the Servant is quick and straightforward to manage, while also putting up a good fight (we’re still working on that part). Ultimately we want her to be responsive without too much overhead, which is why she is fashioned as an overlay that can be placed over either a Chancellor or Exile player board. In addition to the usual actions a player can take in Oath, the Servant is equipped with Reap, Moon, and Star actions to give her a bit of extra zing as well as the potential to develop different playstyles and personalities within the same basic system.

Read more about Oath: New Foundations on Board Game Geek!
Find out about the Oath: New Foundations Kickstarter campaign here.

At Essen in 2022 and UKGE in 2023, I kept bumping into fans who wanted to tell me about their chronicles. Here I had traveled halfway across the world, mostly to promote Root and John Company, and the thing that seemed most pressing was an experimental campaign game I had released during the pandemic. They loved telling me about how the game really opened up after the 10th play, or how they used the Tribunal to mint new game currency or warp the core rules of the game in some other fundamental way. I got stories of epic dynasties that had fallen to ash and glorious reversals. It was heartening. Still, it might only have been some quirk of European game market. Then the same thing happened at Gen Con and at Pax Unplugged. It was clear the game had found an audience, and, when I told these stories to the operations team here at Leder Games, they showed me the steady sales data of a game finding its place in the market.

As Arcs wound down, I decided to take another swing at an Oath expansion. This time, rather than start with some high-concept premise that I dreamed up, I wanted to meet the game’s fans halfway. What were the sorts of things they loved about the game? Where did the design frustrate them? And where, I wondered, could I still surprise them with something they wouldn’t have thought was possible.

I want to take a quick break here to say that this line of thinking—one that includes the audience so directly—represents a critical evolution in my own thinking. When I first started designing games over a decade ago, I treated them a lot like academic monographs or pieces of intensely personal art. There’s a lot of value in this approach, but I think it’s also valuable to understand a game not just as something that is made, but something that is played. A game fundamentally exists at the intersection of a designer (and creative team) and its players. This means we should often treat our audience as a collaborator. This is one reason why I’m especially interested in games that reward replayability and study. It’s also why, personally speaking, I tend not to care for games that feel like polemics. I want games that are filled with arguments and ideas for players to explore over many plays. There’s probably no better example of this than in the development of the first edition of Pax Pamir into the second. The second edition is significantly more repayable while also being more clear-eyed about its arguments. Many of those changes were adjustments that came from just watching the game get played. I imagine this must be what it feels like to adjust a song after taking it on tour. Of course, it’s possible to over-correct. One of my biggest complaints with many modern game designs is the degree to which they too aggressively try to please every audience member all of the time. As in all creative endeavors, I think the key is knowing who to listen to and when.

When I first proposed Oath, I remember telling Patrick that I had no idea who the game was for. I had a sense of what I wanted to make, but I didn’t know if such a game would ever find an audience. Now, a few years later, I know who those folks are. And so, at the end of this month, we’re going to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the development of an expansion for the game.

We’re not doing this because we think Oath is incomplete or needs fixed. Instead, we want to use the crowdfunding campaign to celebrate the community the game has found and ring in the next phase of its life. We want to offer a space to share what we are working on, and include as many folks in the process of making the game as possible. To this end, we’ve got a lot of things planned. Like our other campaigns, I’ll be firing off designer diaries in the weeks leading up to the campaign and afterwards. We’ll be slowly rolling out preview kits for in progress ideas and sharing our designs as we make progress on them. We’re also going to be trying out some new things, from actual-plays with new partners to producing an in-house documentary about how games are made in the studio. As with all of our campaigns, the shape of what’s to come is going to depend on you all.

I should say that, unlike our other campaigns, we won’t be relying on a ton of external preview/reviews for the new Oath materials. This is partly because of the nature of the expansion. When it comes to a new game, we try our best to build something as playable as possible before the crowdfunding campaign begins so that we can prove to everyone that the new game is robust and that folks can trust us with the development. But, these sorts of previews always make us a little queasy. It’s sorta like being asked to be graded on a paper that is half-done. While this queasiness is necessary for launching a new flagship title (like Arcs) they are always less necessary for expansions, which mostly rely on the bonafides of the core game. Furthermore, some expansions are easier to talk about than others. For instance, when it comes to a Root expansion, it’s pretty easy to talk about how the new faction works. This creates a pretty clean block of “content” which a reviewer can easily evaluate. What we have planned for Oath does not lend itself to that style of review. The changes are more pervasive and subtle. It’s the kind of thing that, once folded in, a player would never want to sort out, and, in a few years time, they might not even remember which parts of the game were added with the expansion at all.

But, we don’t want anyone backing this game without knowing what they are getting. So, over the next several weeks, I’ll be talking about the new aspects of the game we are exploring, some the of the challenges we are encountering, and, where possible, describing how the new systems work in progress. In addition, over the course of the Kickstarter campaign, we’ll be dropping little preview kits so that anyone who’s interested in the game can try out the new stuff.

Next week, we'll kick things off by talking about some of the fundamental challenges of the project. The sorts of things Oath is good and remembering, and the things it tends to forget.

And, if you’d like to follow along with the Kickstarter, you can find it here.

This first version of the Swindler had a lot goin on. They essentially had 3 things to “sell”:

The first was Weapon Caches and Pearls. Whenever the Swindler would end a Sail they could place 1 of either in an adjacent space. Whenever an enemy entered a space with one they’d automatically pick it up. Pearls would net them 2 gold and Weapons Caches would have them roll a new d6 and assign it to Cannons. In either case the Swindler gained 1 fame or 1 gold.

The second was Secret Passage. The Swindler had 5 dice and after seeing everyones roll would assign one to Secret Passage. This treated your Flagship and other pieces as a Tailwind of that value for enemies. If they used it you’d gain 1 Fame.

They also were Persuasive and a Huckster. Being Persuasive allowed them to recruit crew while adjacent to Islands AND to ignore any recruit cost. Being a Huckster, crew on your ship had no abilities but you were essentially a floating Market allowing enemies to recruit from your Flagship, gaining Fame and increasing the Region die. If nobody was buying you could always Strong Arm them, forcing a crew on to their ship and gaining gold or Fame.

Additionally they had Resorts they wanted to build, by cashing out gold they could build Resorts for a small burst of Fame.

I worked on this version for a few months, but the most notable development came when I decided to make the Weapon Cache and Pearl scoring scale with region value. If a Pearl was picked up in a 2 value Region the Swindler gained 2 Fame.



Now the gameplay loop looked kinda like…

Sail and drop resource > Gain small amount of gold > Use gold to make hotels and increase region value > Drop more resources in higher value regions

I honestly was so excited about this development initially, it created hot spots on the map where players did or didn't want to be and all the point scaling was player driven. But it still wasn’t fun or satisfying to play. Where the problem lied was in the Swindler's actual incentives and the initial thematic goal.

I had finished another unsatisfying game and realized the problem.
The Swindler's whole goal was about taking a useful thing and giving it to the person who it's least useful for. I wasn’t getting one over on enemies, convincing them to buy something they don't want. I was just giving a bad gift and being rewarded. You want Pearls? I'll place weapons nearby. Cool crew I found? Better not give it to someone who it's too helpful for. You get the picture.

At that point I decided to shelve the Swindler, they had grown into a very rules heavy faction with an unsatisfying gameplay loop for them and for others. It was time to start fresh!

Looking back I think one of the biggest weaknesses of the Swindler was its lack of grounding in the core Ahoy mechanics. I've found the strongest factions seem to have a strong focus on one or all of these: map navigation, the market, and the region values. Triangulating those was the trick.

And my months of thinking about it paid off because the current version of the Coral Cap Pirates came together very quickly! I had decided on themed ships as the main mechanic and I was off to the races.

 

You’ll start the game as a loan Flagship with 6 possible Frigates to build (one of each suit) and your goal is to find Captains to Enlist. While your flagship is at an Island with matching Crew you may pay the recruit cost as normal but instead Enlist. Take the matching Frigate card, cover up the Crews ability, roll up the region and place the Frigate on the map, they are now the Captain of that boat!

Each Frigate is uniquely equipped with an ability to score Fame that will also increase the Region value so you have to plan carefully how often and where you use them.

Additionally a Captain is nothing without his crew! Each Frigate has 3 jobs that they’ll gain bonus fame for filling at game end; however, you only gain Fame for filling a Job if all Jobs to its left are also filled. What this creates is an incredibly satisfying logistics puzzle using Parade, allowing you to command multiple ships. But be careful, Frigates lose fame for every damage at game end.

Should you fill the 4 point job even though you have no other jobs filled or instead get a new captain? Can you reach an island without taking too much damage and also score your After Parading ability? These are the types of questions the Coral Cap gets to mull over and with the unpredictability of the market and map construction it never shakes out the same.

I really can’t believe that there wasn't a proper “just pirates” faction before but I’m so glad there is. With just the right amount of swashbuckling and humor they’ve grown to be one of my favorite factions to show people.

Check out the Ahoy: New Horizon campaign on BackerKit for more info!

From a thematic standpoint I had been interested in exploring a Sea Monster faction and fortunately these things went hand in hand! A monster that grew and was so massive and dangerous that it would block sections of the map was my starting point and this was my first cut.

This was mainly a lot of small adjustments, changing Dive to be less punishing when used, adding battle incentives for large Fangs, an ability to cycle evolution cards and some shuffling of rewards. This version embodies the carefree monster the most of any, it's a powerful force that views every other piece as means to grow larger and stronger. While the smuggler is a slippery hard to pin down individual, the Leviathan is an ever present force that you simply can’t avoid. If you want a little bit more chaos and violence in your games of Ahoy the Leviathan is a wonderful addition!

Check out the Ahoy: New Horizon campaign on BackerKit for more info!

This addition gave a layer of planning for you and the opponent and is also what solidified them as Turtles, if you’re gonna be launching yourself across the sea you better be tough!

The Shellfire Rebellion had emerged, and the first cut of their player board is actually shockingly similar to the current development version rules wise.





I wanted the Flagship to feel important but like it couldn’t do the job alone, unlike the Mollusks. Building Launchers will let you cover more islands but that means continually supplying them with Comrades. Initially restocking the Launchers was too difficult and since it was already harder to get Comrades on islands this felt debilitating.

I didn't want to make the Flagship faster as that has too many knock-on effects so I instead increased its range of capabilities. Many of the Shellfire actions allow them to do things in the surrounding 8 spaces, rather than just the adjacent 4. This solved a lot of the small positional woes, things were just a bit easier to access.

The Shellfire Rebellion also uses a deck of 12 plan cards like their Mollusk friends but has gone through some version changes. Card powers are one of my favorite things to work on so I was excited to create a whole new plan deck. The Mollusk deck required very few changes from Greg’s original so it was uncharted territory.

I quickly found the deck I created was way too combo-y. Played in certain strings, cards were 2-3 times more effective. What this resulted in was long unbroken sequences of 4-5 cards being played with essentially no regard for the players die pool, gold or Flagship position. Like I mentioned in my previous diary, we want players to PLAY Ahoy and that means engaging with the map, enemies, dice, crew, etc. This new deck did that without having the same combo problem of the previous deck, cards are more independently good allowing the player new strategies rather than being the strategies themselves.





Both the Blackfish Brigade and the Shellfire Rebellion really lean into the map construction and spatial elements of Ahoy which I find are some of its biggest strengths. The mental image of turtle pirates getting catapulted across the ocean is just the cherry on top.

Check out the Ahoy: New Horizon campaign on BackerKit for more info!

Similar to Vast, roles in Ahoy have very specific outputs that other factions depend on existing in order to give themselves an identity. What does a Bluefin Squadron do if there are no Comrades around? The answer is nothing, the only reason their existence is even exciting is BECAUSE Comrades exist. A real Batman/Joker situation.

All that is to say when designing an alternate to the Bluefin Squadron there was really one important thing, Patrols. The faction would need to put out Patrols in a unique way that was also interesting gameplay. Thematically I knew I wanted to do whales and I wanted them to feel fast and aggressive.

In my first cut of the Blackfish Brigade I attempted to put the focus on movement. I wanted a faction who roamed the water more than the original and whose flagship was more powerful but limited.

Sail allowed players to move up to 3 and remove a Comrade but you couldn't turn.

They were able to place Patrols with Expand, maneuver them with Whale Song and remove Comrades with Hunt.

It had a lot of potential but the incentives for players were all out of whack. Since Patrols are the most critical piece for the military faction by locking it behind any type of die slot it was immediately the most important action, essentially mandatory even. This quickly led to problems where players have no reason to use dice for other things, using every part of their actions and gold to make sure you get your 2 Expand actions.

Additionally the straight line limitations on the Flagship weren't making it feel powerful. Even with the capacity to occasionally remove comrades the sheer value of position in Ahoy is so high that the lack of flexibility with Flagship had it feeling just cumbersome.

So for the next version I knew that the gaining of Patrols needed to be more free. I don't want players wasting their few actions sitting still and spawning Patrols, I want them playing Ahoy! Which means sailing, exploring and fighting, so the playerboard needed to encourage that.


This version introduced 2 big things, the passive rewards for placing dice and the first version of the whale pod!

This version of the whale pod was a square punch board piece that would be placed on the edge of the region tiles. Any Patrols gained were placed on the punch board and moving the whale pod would move it one space along the outer edge and place a Patrol.

There was a lot that was promising about this version, primarily it solved the hyper focus on any single action that gains/places Patrols. As promising as it was, I was worried by the whale pod. It was functional but had a lot of limits, one was just map size. Early game the pod was able to reach most places by scooting around the edges but by mid/late game sometimes even 12 moves wasn’t enough to get it near a reasonable position. Then also was the rules side, there were just too many new rules and questions being spawned about all the implications of this edge piece.

After one of our office games someone suggested splitting the whale pod into two pieces, one going around the region die to indicate position and a card for storing the gained patrols. It solved all those previous problems and even added some new layers like deciding what quadrant of the pod to assign Patrols to.

The final piece of the puzzle was Surge, previous versions put the comrade removal primarily on the Patrols scaling with how many were in a region. This caused the Flagship to lose much of its character and left it not being seen as a threat, really just a radio tower. By changing the means of Comrade removal back to the Flagship all players now cared significantly about the position of the Flagship again. It also made for a wonderful little triangulation puzzle between your Flagship, Pod and Patrols.

With some small adjustments to the die restrictions and rewards I arrived at the version you see today.

(a small rules note you must use the left tailwind slot before the right)

The Blackfish Brigade has been a blast to design and I'm incredibly happy with the current shape they are in. I think they offer a shockingly thinky but equally aggressive style of play to their Bluefin counterparts.

Check out the Ahoy: New Horizon campaign on BackerKit for more info!

- Josh Yearsley

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Today I plan to speedrun you through all of the development — that I can remember — that eventually turned Hyperspace Smuggler into Ahoy. So buckle up, we have a lot to cover!

Development is a weird nebulous process and no project is the same but I’ve gradually developed some common practices when reviewing a design in development. My first goal is to identify the most important and likely unchanging parts of the game. I pick those few things and dismantle everything else in the design. For Ahoy there were two key things: first, the dynamic of smugglers increasing the value of regions for the other players and, second, the modular map.

The first dynamic is just soooo juicy. When the game was first pitched to us, it was the thing that grabbed our attention. The other one, the map, is just fun! Exploring the unknown and getting lucky finding the perfect island or running into a tile with no gold and sandbars brings such consistent joy to every play of Ahoy. The map did eventually see some small changes, islands lost their names, sandbars were added, strong currents were pushed around but the basics remained unchanged. As Greg already mentioned, one of my favorite aspects is the variety of shapes people will generate when playing. Be it vast contiguous ocean or narrow paths riddled with wreckage and gold, every map contains some unique character.

Something I was initially less confident about was the game's scoring. It seemed like each player had different problems.

With the smugglers I saw two main problems with point projection and choice. By projection, I mean that it was too easy for players to determine in the final round if the Smuggler was capable of winning. At the time the only points Smugglers gained was through delivering goods, they’d have a color they needed to be delivered to and a base value of points, additionally they would gain extra points if delivered to a specifically named island or one controlled by a specific faction. These cards exist in a face up row called the Market and at the time looked something like this:

The problem I found was that as the game progressed and the map solidified and distances became more known, there wasn't enough uncertainty about how difficult a specific delivery was and therefore there was no uncertainty about how much you could score. Ahoy is a pretty quick game only lasting 4-5 rounds, so it's critical that each round feels meaningful.

The second aspect about choice was a connected issue. At first glance the original design appeared to have plenty of interesting choices. Players pick up goods and can consider where they wanna deliver it, maybe the named island is very far away or with the above card they can consider if increasing a revolution region is worth those extra points. In practice this simply wasn't the case, again Ahoy is a quick game and doing the shortest delivery was almost always better than trying for a more difficult or further one.

My first attempt to fix this was with cards I called “Titles”. They were essentially public objectives that upon completing you’d gain a special power. For example, you could gain 3 crew members to become “The Party Boat” from then on you'd gain points every time you gained crew. The idea was to give players side objectives that they could then milk for additional points. Now for the smuggler it wasn't just about doing deliveries but how many titles can I gain for the most points. This almost worked. It was doing some things I really liked. For instance, players were more encouraged to do things outside their direct role and larger choices about where your points would come from had been made. Perfect! Right? No. The titles which had been created for smugglers were mainly getting claimed by the Bluefin and Mollusks. The problem was that the smugglers had to actively score their points and the game didn't have the spare actions for the smuggler to do the things required to claim these titles. While the Bluefin and Mollusks who passively score each round could regularly afford to spare some of their actions if it meant more points. So “Titles” went in the bin.

What they highlighted so clearly though was how whatever additional scoring I wanted to give them needed to exist within the action structure as it stood. I need to introduce a new choice or form of planning. From that the reward chart was born!

Now I’ve already talked plenty about the Smugglers so I’ll keep it shorter here. The Smugglers are all about optimizing, finding the best/cheapest way to get something done. With the ability to carry only two deliverables at a time players must maintain an active delivery loop. The reward system supplied a lot of grease here, now as a reward for combat players can claim a reward on their chart. This creates these complicated schemes of running into a patrol, winning the combat, taking a reward that lets you move further so you can deliver a good to take a reward to take a crew…and so on. The Negotiate action was added as a means to manipulate the market and Mollusk comrades, be careful though, recruit too many crew and you may find less options for delivery than you’d like!

One of the final things was polishing the market deck. Taking a note from Oath I wanted to make sure each card was interesting, maybe funny and provided new means of play. Only 2-3 are better versions of actions already in the game, the focus was on creating new opportunities. While the deck is much smaller than Oaths you’ll still find the game shift dramatically based on what Crew are recruited. We also did work to provide suit identity when dividing up the powers. Compasses typically provide movement related crew white Sword’s provide one around combat and so on. The uniqueness of the powers combined with the suit identity gives some nice grounding to the world. While I’d love to spoil all my favorite crew I feel like I have to leave something for y'all to discover on the open water. May you have fair wind and following seas!

- Nick Brachmann

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Untitled Pirate Game on the table

But the other key design principle is what really survives into the design: building the map as you go by laying tiles. I was really inspired by Betrayal at House on the Hill in this. It was (and still is!) one of my favorite games to play, in large part because of the central action of the game: Move your piece off the edge and add a tile. This leaves a tangible record of the game for you to enjoy between turns, and once the game ends. Board games, for me, are largely about a sense of exploring space, and while I appreciate economic, euro-type games where the players explore a system, an abstracted “decision space,” games that I really vibe with are games where that exploration maps itself directly onto the table space.

So, while it doesn’t make a ton of thematic sense that the factions in Ahoy are “exploring the seas” (wouldn’t the Bluefin Squadron already know where the islands are?) it taps into a gameplay element that was really important to me when I was designing. I like to handwave the narrative by saying that of course the seas have always existed in the configuration represented by the tiles, and the players are new recruits / smugglers, mapping the region for themselves for the first time. But it doesn’t really matter—just like in Betrayal, the simple act of moving a piece to the edge and then placing a new tile drives this game on a visceral level.

Of course, placing new tiles means that the board grows, and in my second or third playtest of Untitled Pirate Game, that became a problem. My friend Wes, thrilled with exploration, drove his ship to the edge of the table, and spent the entire rest of the game coming back to the central island to deliver his cargo. “Your pirate game needs hyperspace,” I remember him saying to me, and so, after a few playtests, I re-themed the game.

Hyperspace Smuggler used the conventions of sci-fi to narrativize long-distance fast travel. But since space games are a dime a dozen, I brainstormed with my local game design group (shout out to the Philly Game Makers Guild!) for a few alternate settings to mention in my pitch meetings with publishers. Weird West came up, with mystical gold mines as the hyperspace stand-in, as did high-fantasy wizards riding around on dragons or ships, Earthsea-style. Magic or magitech was always the solution. But that’s not what Nick & co. landed on with Ahoy, and I love the solution that the “Tailwinds” action provides.

SSV Corwith Cramer, taking advantage of some tailwinds

Rather than saying “Your ship magically moves waaaay across the board in an impossible amount of time,” as the aforementioned narratives do, Tailwinds says “to your opponents, you appear to have moved waaaay across the board in an impossible amount of time.” This replicates a dynamic central to high-seas stories like Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin novels. Without radar or radio communication, age-of-sail ships had to guess at one another’s locations based on their knowledge of time and place of launch, winds, currents, and other conditions. This provides dramatic fuel for an enemy ship to suddenly appear on the horizon, which is exactly what Tailwinds (to my mind) represents.

Nick and the Leder Games team provided numerous insightful edits and re-workings like this, but I’ll leave it to Nick to describe those. I will conclude this section by describing a few more big changes that defined the life of this game as it evolved from Untitled Pirate Game to Hyperspace Smuggler to Ahoy.

The first big change was the introduction of asymmetry. Hyperspace Smuggler began life as a straightforward, symmetric pick-up-and-deliver game. Everyone was a smuggler. The game featured a tile you could discover that would bring a “space pirates” pawn on to the board, and control of this non-player antagonist would pass from player to player. In one two-player test, my friend Ken and I discussed how the space pirates were the most exciting part of the two-player game. “What if somebody just played the space pirates full-time?” I remember him asking.

Rather than a fully asymmetric game, Hyperspace Smuggler now featured one to three smugglers and one space pirate, which was quickly re-themed to the Evil Space Government. I showed this lightly asymmetric game to Jon Gilmour at Unpub 9, just outside of Baltimore, MD and his feedback was simple: “Amp up the asymmetry and show it to Leder Games.” That feedback drove development. I concepted a few ways to do the asymmetry. My first thought was to have all non-government players serve as drifters and space outlaws: smugglers, bounty-hunters, rogue agents, etc. But the existence of an Empire incites Rebellion, and so my four asymmetric roles were Government, Revolution, Smuggler, and Bounty Hunter.

I honed this version of the game in preparation for pitching at PAX Unplugged 2019, including at a local Unpub Mini, where the final, most crucial change was proposed. Unpub All-Star playtesters Jared and Kristi played Hyperspace Smuggler’s 30th numbered iteration, which was (I thought) in final tuning before I ordered some prototypes to give the publishers at PAX. But during the game, they made an important observation: “To the Smugglers, the board is really interesting and varied, but to the Government and Revolution, it’s pretty flat.” Control of each sector (now island) was worth the same amount. We brainstormed for a bit, and I proposed having delivery of cargo impact the value of a sector, stacking poker chips on the tile to indicate its value, but they were hard to parse in a stack. Jared grabbed some spare dice and set them on the tiles, and we played again. This final change, made just a few months before my final pitch, really tipped Hyperspace Smuggler into the game that would become Ahoy. The simple addition of texture to the map just rocketed the interactivity of the game off the charts. That Unpub Mini was my last big playtesting event, so I spent most of the nights between then and PAX Unplugged solo-testing the new game, playing three or four factions on my own in order to balance the point-scoring potential of the factions in this new environment. After tuning the factions, I finally purchased three prototypes to bring to PAX Unplugged. Each one featured a reasonable 12 (not 100!) tiles.


II. See the watery part of the world

I pitched Hyperspace Smuggler to Cole at a table in the PAX Unplugged free play area. “We almost certainly won’t keep the theme,” I remember him saying “but if you’re OK with that, I’d like to take this prototype and play it with the Leder team this weekend.”

A late-stage prototype of Hyperspace Smuggler.

I was of course thrilled. It was only the second copy of Hyperspace Smuggler that I’d ever handed over to a publisher. While I had no idea at the time that the game would become a pirate game, that setting was the game’s original instantiation (as I detail above). Tall ships and sailing have been and continue to be an important touchstone for me. I loved the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie when it came out (though I bailed on the series after the terrible second movie, and, for the record, fuck Johnny Depp). Pirates mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, as an older teen about to enter college, they meant playful anti-authoritarianism and wanderlust, and they evoked a sense of freedom and wonder about the world.

Instead of taking a semester abroad during my college years, I spent a semester at the Mystic Seaport Museum with the Williams-Mystic Program. I took classes, sang shanties, worked in the museum, learned to blacksmith, and spent two weeks aboard a sail-training vessel (the SSV Corwith Cramer) on the east coast of the US. My college-age shipmates and I learned to sail a tall ship, even bringing her to safe anchorage and standing watch on deck through a tropical storm!

Greg at the wheel of the SSV Corwith Cramer

I spent the better part of the next summer sailing on a museum ship, the Fifie herring drifter Reaper, on the east coast of Scotland. I was a 20-something amidst a crew of Scottish retirees, sailing our century-old fishing vessel between what amounted to coastal county fairs, welcoming tourists aboard and teaching them about fishing and sailing.

I haven’t sailed since then, but I cherish those memories, and I’m so glad to reconnect with my oceangoing self via Ahoy’s new setting. Pirates and the sea continue to be important signifiers for me. I’m midway through my first viewing of Black Sails (late to the party, I know), and my partner and I devoured Our Flag Means Death when it came out. These stories present an important site for imagination, particularly a queer, anti-authoritarian political imagination.

Ahoy, too, has a political perspective, albeit one that is less obvious than those of Black Sails or Our Flag Means Death. In Hyperspace Smuggler, I was modeling my two central factions on Star Wars: The oppressive, fascistic Empire and the scrappy, solidaristic Rebellion. But the factions work in the magical-oceanic setting of Ahoy as well. The Mollusk Union cannot hope to match the Bluefin Squadron’s military might. The Union’s power, however, resides in its people — its Comrades (a name that Nick wrote into the game; in Hyperspace Smuggler, they were “Influence,” which is way too vague). Comrades enact Plans, replicating an important dynamic of real-world anti-fascist and anti-imperial organizing: overmatched on the field of battle, revolutionaries need to inspire, maintain, and rely upon networks of Comrades to undermine and surprise the oppressor.

I’m looking forward reading Nick’s thoughts on the development of Ahoy next week, and I'm thrilled that you’ll be getting this game into your hands soon-ish. Whether you’re playing the Mollusk Union or just living in this particular moment in the world, I hope you can find your Comrades, make your plans, and overthrow oppression wherever you find it. Fair winds & solidarity forever!

- Greg Loring-Albright

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