Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood review

My group has been playing Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood for a few weeks now and I’ve been intending to write down some of my thoughts about it.

The group has played a lot of Spirit Island and all the way through Frosthaven, which are our baseline games for comparison against. I don’t want to get bogged down in background, though, so I’m going to jump in.

First impressions:

The action point system seems very flexible which is nice. However moving one hex for one action point feels bad. I’ve been playing as the Huntress, which can change between melee and ranged, which makes me really find the movement distasteful and makes me want to stay ranged all the time—especially because I have so many options for 2-AP attacks, moving always feels like a waste.

The battleflow system is really cool, and I appreciate how it supports different playstyles. For example, I usually cycle through my cooldown 3 cards in the first round, whereas one of my friends treats them as effectively single-use.

The characters aren’t as differentiated as I had hoped, and the new abilities we get on leveling up have mostly been disappointing. In particular, it doesn’t feel like we are getting more powerful actions, or even actions with more niche applications. we have done 6 combats now and I have not yet seen one where I felt like I could effectively strategize my cards based on the special rules.

The in game economy is weird. Item cost being equal to the chapter means MASSIVE inflation in the first few chapters, which feels bad especially since the items are mostly the same chapter to chapter.

On the other hand, I like having to destroy one of your used items each chapter. It forces some amount of variation in play.

The ability to switch between dice and cards for combat is interesting, and I personally like the probability management, but most of my group doesn’t. Also the number of tokens we have had so far and the two-blanks-miss rule means we don’t actually change how many dice/cards we use in attacks by that much—It’s almost always 4, with occasional draws of 3 or 5. As Huntress I have attacks that can’t miss, which then limit me to 4 dice. I might prefer to have 3 blanks miss with more blank dice, or higher defense values. Maybe later on we will more often have access to 3+ redraw tokens at a time which would make larger, higher stakes draws more appealing.

Not having character stats for out-of-combat rolls feels a bit bad, though adding the party traits for rerolls helps.

The way shields work makes them very bad for story combat rounds, which is weird flavor.

Combats have had civilians to evacuate almost every time—this is good for being strategically dynamic, but a pain in the ass for board setup.

The “break” rule for enemies giving them actions ends up being the large majority of enemy actions so far. For our game, we’ve rarely if ever seen more that two regular enemy turns, and usually there are 4-5 breaks drawn. Since the breaks also involve changing enemy phases, this makes it a bit hard to plan around the known next actions most of the time. This also means defensive options and planning are very important, since enemies attack as many times as any individual player. This also has the weird consequence of making it so dealing a lot of damage doesn’t feel that good—often it actually feels bad, because you’re immediately rewarded with being attacked, possibly twice in a row.

Also, the break dynamic means it’s really strong to get various parts down to low health then kill the boss by breaking 3 sections at once with AoE. This potentially avoids about 1/3 of the boss’s turns for the whole scenario! I don’t think this is a bad dynamic overall, but 2 actions is so much of the fight that it feels like a pretty extreme incentive that might be toned down a bit.

The CYOA sections aren’t using the best formatting, so the person reading the options can often see the results of a decision before it’s made, which is a bit of a let down. Using the app might improve that.

The enemy AI is pretty badly written. We’ve seen up to 3 separate rules for what an enemy’s target is, with unclear precedence, and which parts of enemy actions are even targeted is also sometimes unclear. While we can play around this to some extent it’s not always easy to see what the intent is, and that leaves lots of room for us to feel uncertain about whether we’re playing the game correctly. This is frustrating, because I like the action economy here better than Frosthaven—the break attacks make the fight more dynamic, interactive, and dangerous, without just adding complexity and board management. I also appreciate that it keeps more randomness than we saw in Middara, for example, which made most enemies feel like their turns were all the same (as well as player turns being equally same-y).

Finally, the wound/curative system is pretty unappealing to interact with, since we have only gotten two wounds so far and adding single curative cards is extremely unexciting—while doubling curative effectiveness with a party trait comes at the expense of very powerful and fun abilities like rerolls on non-combat checks.

Overall there are a lot of new ideas in here, the monster body parts being the closest to ideas I’ve worked on in my own board game design, but there are a lot of missing elements that make me suspect we won’t finish this campaign (and probably won’t even get as far into it as we did with Middara).