Oath

It's something that actually carries through to all my games.

I think this is, uh, uh, this is such a, like a ridiculous thing to say maybe, but it's like it's the most under-commented element of my design work that like Oath is a massive, sprawling game with like three different pieces.

[laughs]

Or four.

Uh, for my own design practice, I could not imagine designing a game and not being able to do the graphic design.

Like, they are, uh, my design notes are in art boards around the prototypes of my game.

In fact, it's, it's a huge problem with Oath, because all of my original design notes for Oath are, like, in these insane Illustrator documents.

[laughs]

They can also be awkward to store, particularly when they don't fit into the game box.

Mind you, more and more games include the mats inside the box itself, like Oath and Molly House, for example.

So overall, I can understand why neoprene is so attractive, but I also wonder whether making a game feel more luxurious is enough reason to use it.

[upbeat music] Neoprene is a synthetic rubber, more precisely polychloroprene, so its story begins with industrial chemical manufacturing.

To me, it's like going through and reading all the Trivial Pursuit cards ahead of time.

My friends and I, we're playing a monthly game of a game called Oath, which is by one of my favorite game designers, Cole Wehrle, and Oath is just an amazing game that kind of has a memory.

You keep parts of the board intact based on who won the last game, and they become the ruler who's defending in the next game.

But there's so many different cards and so many different suits, and you take out randomly a few of the cards and put in randomly a few of the cards that you haven't been using into the deck each round, and we make it a point of not looking at what we're doing so that we're always shocked by the powers of the cards.

Now, how many other projects have you got on the go since

then? So Oath, the solo mode for that Oath Clockwork is currently being printed.

It's going to be here soon.

So I talked to Cole about that this weekend, actually.

Because I also think that...

Making games, you don't make it to exist in a vacuum, right? You're trying to talk to somebody just in an unconventional way.

And so I'm very curious about, now that I have a game out in the world that David and I have got Queen of Spies out, Night Witches will be soon, the Oath stuff is gonna be soon.

It'll be interesting to, I guess, communicate with people in a different way.