Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.
Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile is perhaps the first board game to make the description “generic fantasy” a glowing compliment.
The latest release from darling strategy designer Cole Wehrle – best known for his asymmetric masterpiece Root, in which players control animal factions scrapping over a woodland – Oath is a highly ambitious board game that attempts to chart the rise and fall of empires, their rulers and those attempting to seize power from them over countless generations.
While the game presents itself on the surface as a deeply strategic game of commanding armies and maintaining a tight grip of regions – and make no mistake, that’s all in here – it’s at heart a hugely accomplished storytelling machine, primed to allow players the space to weave their own tales of victory and defeat, alliance and rivalry, ascension and inevitable fall.