Campaign Quest : Oathmark is Great on Paper, Dull on the Table

Testing tabletop systems to find the perfect engine for a long term narrative war.

I picked up Oathmark: Battles of the Lost Age a few years ago as an alternative to Warhammer Fantasy. It has a ton of positive reviews on the interweb and seemed like a great option for someone wanting to get into rank and flank gaming while providing enough options to build a fantasy kingdom without the usual restrictions.

For those unaware, one of the main selling points of Oathmark is the option to build your own army made up of different races. You can create a human kingdom with goblins living right alongside them or whatever you want to do. Unfortunately you are limited to only a couple of regular fantasy races but you can swap in your own race of choice into the existing ones and play away. In this game my wife was playing with her Nurgle army and we used the human profiles for them. 

Anyway, jump forward about two years, and I finally got around to playing it. I had just recently finished building an Undead army and was looking for a simpler game than The Old World to introduce the wife to rank and flank gaming, so Oathmark seemed like a good choice. Content creators like Peachy had also just made a few videos about how to play and were singing its praises, so there were some well produced videos out there for me to learn the rules from.

Unfortunately, what looks good on YouTube does not always translate to fun at the kitchen table.

The Book Flipping Tax

Now, one of the downsides to Oathmark straight away is that there is no official online platform for army building apart from an editable PDF. There is a fan made builder on GitHub which works pretty well, but it is obviously nowhere near as good as One Page Rules (OPR) Army Forge, which gives you a clear explanation of rules and keywords right on your roster sheet.

Oathmark does not do this. This means you will still need to have physical rulebooks with you while playing to look up spells and special abilities. Because I was playing Undead, I had to purchase an add on book for them, meaning I needed two separate books open just to access all my rules.

It was a bit of a pain in the arse. Now I generally prefer using books or printed pages for the game but for some reason it felt like a lot while playing Oathmark. It's kind of marketed as a simpler alternative to Warhammer requiring less faffing about but I found to play the game I had the army roster printed out, two books and a reference sheet. When I play Warhammer I have my army roster and rules either on an app or printed out. It's surprisingly a lot less fucking around. I also found having to constantly flick between two books to access basic spells broke the immersion of the game and became really annoying after a very short time.

Great for Tolkien, Bad for Chaos

While I was initially really excited about the whole "building your own kingdom" concept, the appeal dwindled fast when I sat down with my wife and we tried to fit her Nurgle Daemons and Chaos Warriors into the available army lists.

We figured that either Humans or Orcs would be the best available templates to proxy her models, but doing so really highlighted the lack of flavor for more exotic armies. Going through the spell options, nothing really felt like a good thematic choice, and there just were not many options available. It kind of sucked the excitement out of the whole process. Other games have far better options for asymmetric factions, and I was already questioning the point of choosing Oathmark over its competitors. People regularly criticise One Page Rules for its lack of flavour in armies but I found that OPR has way more options that feel more like the way you'd imagine the different armies to play compared to Oathmark.

The Gameplay: More Math Than Dice

When we finally got around to playing, the core mechanics were relatively easy to teach my wife (who notoriously refuses to read any rules before a game). There was a bit of novelty around using 10 sided dice instead of the usual d6s, but only rolling 5 dice (sometimes 6 if you have a commander) feels incredibly underwhelming when you are used to rolling a million dice in games like Warhammer.

The modifiers were a bit cumbersome as well. Almost every single time we wanted to do something, we had to consult tables. Granted, coming near the end of the game I was starting to rely on the tables less and less, but we still had to consult with each other during every single combat encounter just to figure out what our strength, modifiers, and targets were.

All in all, these things contributed to making the game feel like we were spending more time looking at tables and doing math instead of rolling dice. There are simply too many unintuitive modifiers.

Mechanically Pointless Systems

Oathmark uses an activation system where you need to roll a discipline check before you activate a unit. If you fail, you basically can only move and not attack. On paper, this seemed like it would be fun and add a bit of narrative randomness to the fog of war.

In reality? It felt like it added nothing but unnecessary dice rolls that rarely, if ever, had an impact on the game. I do not think we had many rolls fail because the target numbers were so low. If we ever did return to this game, we would definitely just ignore this system entirely. Games like Dragon Rampant do activation failures way better, with consequences that actually impact the state of the game.

Then there is the hero problem. I am a big fan of having heroes in games because I love the hobby and kitbashing aspect of it. My undead army is full of kitbashed characters, but heroes in Oathmark are designed to strictly function as part of infantry units.

I made the mistake of having my main boss man run around as a single unit without thoroughly looking over his stats. It turned out to be awful. He had exactly one health and got absolutely deleted in his very first combat by a group of Plaguebearers. I am not a competitive player by any means, but that kind of pissed me off. It makes no sense that standard infantry are functionally more powerful than standalone hero units.

To make matters worse, the wife’s army was made up of a lot of elites. We were both surprised by how hard they were to hit in combat and how unkillable they were due to high health stats. I do not particularly care about perfect balance, but this was probably the most one sided wargame I have ever played. The Undead lads did not stand a chance.

The Verdict: Bored by Round 4

It is not all negative. There are some cool concepts here, like the cascading panic system, and like I said earlier, the rules are relatively easy to pick up. But the game is kind of shit for porting over existing Warhammer armies. It might be fairly good if you wanted to create a basic, historical leaning fantasy army ala Lord of the Rings, although if you wanted to play a good LOTR game, I imagine you would just play the far superior Middle earth Strategy Battle Game.

We built 2,000 point armies and decided on just playing a basic game of kicking the shit out of each other to help us learn the rules, opposed to a scenario with objectives. I was expecting the game to be relatively quick compared to The Old World, and it was,but it was also a lot more dull.

We spent a fair amount of time comparing tables and flipping through books looking for spells and modifiers, and the unnecessary activation rolls just dragged out the play time. We got so bored we gave up after the 4th round. I think 6 or 7 rounds were recommended, but we were almost two hours in at this stage and were losing interest with every turn.

All in all, it was a pretty disappointing experience. It was not the amazing introduction to rank and flank I thought it would be for my wife. Fortunately, she was not put off by the genre enough to quit the quest.

Now saying all that, Oathmark is not a bad game, it's just not something that we enjoyed on the day. It's got loads of fans for a reason. The Kingdom building aspect is cool but I think it's done a bit better in Hobgoblin, which despite being a very indie game has an amazing online army builder which Oathmark is severely lacking. 

In fairness to the game, it's a fair few years old now and other games have come along since and improved on some of the concepts which were probably kind of novel when it came out. There's a 2nd edition being released in August and I'm looking forward to see what changes have been made. Before I played with the better half it would have been a day one purchase but now I think I'll be holding off as unless there's some massive changes I think I played my last game of Oathmark.

What's Next?

Since playing Oathmark, we have already moved on and played OPR Regiments, and we had a far better time. The army building was way easier, the game took far less time, and it felt incredibly intuitive.

I am going to write up a post about that soon, but I think I will wait until we play a few more games as I have a campaign planned for it which I think will be a lot of fun. After that, it will finally be time to start introducing the wife to the deep end: The Old World.

Stay tuned.