Why Oath Reminds Me More of Stellaris Than Risk

Some personal background first. I am a gamer who loves to play strategy games (no matter what medium it is in) and have thousands of hours combined in this category. To add context, I particularly like to play those that are a bit hardcore (doesn't mean I don't like simpler strategy games like the classic board game Risk) where I can manage a decent number of resources and mechanisms to move around the game world. A great example here is the video game Stellaris from Paradox Interactive, where players take control of an interstellar civilization on the galactic stage to do what is called "4X" (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), and the game provides a huge number of resources and mechanisms for the player to mess around with. For many players, Stellaris is already quite complicated and hard to get along with, which made me feel like I was part of the "hardcore" gamer community. Then I played the board game Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile.

Christ, it was complicated, and it did not feel like a normal board game kind of complicated - it felt much closer to the kind of complexity I usually associate with strategy video games like Stellaris. And after thinking about it more, I think the reason is pretty simple: a traditional strategy board game such as Risk tends to give the player a board of information to read, while Oath gives the player a world to uncover.

In Risk, the game is very legible from the start. You look at the board, you understand the territories, you understand the pros and cons related to the states, you understand the borders and routes, and even if the game still has uncertainty through dice rolls and player choices, you still have a general clear picture of what I would call a “god view” of the world – you can see what is there, you can make a plan, and you can set a general goal at the beginning and then try to work toward it overtime. Even if other players get in the way, the game is still fundamentally asking you to solve a visible "puzzle".

But in Oath, I did not feel that kind of vibe, especially at the beginning of the game. In fact, during my first playthrough, I was basically in information overload mode, where I kept asking myself: who am I? where am I? what should I do? The rules were complex, there were too many icons and identifiers to keep track of, and the game world was so abstract that I had a hard time grasping what was what in a narrative sense. For a while, I was basically forced to play the game as if it were a math game just about moving favors and secrets around without really feeling the world behind them. Denizen and Vision cards are only revealed when someone searches for them. Sites are only fully encountered when players reach them. The world is not presented as a complete and readable battlefield from turn one. Instead, players are constantly discovering what kind of world they are in while already being forced to act inside it. That makes strategy in Oath feel much less like following a clean plan and much more like constant adjustment. And that is where it starts reminding me of Stellaris.

In Stellaris, you are not just dropped into a fully known map and asked to conquer it. A huge part of the experience is that the galaxy reveals itself over time. You explore, survey, discover, adapt, and revise your priorities as new things emerge. Sometimes you think your path is clear until a new faction appears, or a new system becomes important, or a political situation changes your whole direction. The pleasure of the game comes from interacting with a world that never fully sits still. Oath gives me a surprisingly similar feeling, just on a tabletop scale. Not because it is as large as Stellaris, obviously, but because it creates the same sense that strategy is not generally fixed at the start - there aren't some typical patterns or good choices you can deploy from the get-go, but it rather has to be built while the world is unfolding.

Though I still do not think Oath is perfect as a strategy game. Even after a few complete playthroughs, I still felt that its physical world was a bit too abstract for me compared to something like Risk. The lands sometimes seemed less important than the denizens and political relationships moving across them. I also felt that the game can end a little too quickly, especially when some relics or denizen combinations become too strong. In those moments, I wanted a bit more time for plans, secret agendas, and larger reversals to fully develop.

Still, I do think Oath is one of the most interesting board games I have played in a while. Not because it is simply “deep” or “complicated,” but because it is reaching for a kind of strategic experience that I usually only expect from digital strategy games. It does not just give me a board to solve. It gives me a world that is only partially clear, then asks me to feel my way through it, adjust to it, and slowly understand how power actually works inside it. And I think that is exactly why Oath has stayed in my head more than I expected.