Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood

Somebody local was clearing out a late relative’s game shelf a while back and this was in the pile, standee version, thank god, not the miniatures pledge, because I don’t think my back seat could’ve handled that box. I know this one has a reputation as a Kickstarter fever dream, three years of hype before a single copy shipped, and I went in expecting the game underneath to disappoint the way a lot of long-hyped things do once you actually pull them out of the box.

It doesn’t, mostly. The combat has real teeth, dice pool building through the campaign, boss fights that force you to actually plan instead of just swinging. The narrative side is where it surprised me, genuinely well written chapter content that doesn’t feel like padding between fights, more substance to it than I expected from something built around miniatures marketing.

Where it falls apart a little is storage, and I say this as someone who thinks about storage more than most people. The box’s own recommended teardown leaves a gap you can’t quite close if you’ve got everything sleeved, and there’s a real chit-and-token sprawl once you’re a few chapters deep, way more baggies than the box wants to admit to. One thing I will say for the standee version specifically, the chits are a decent thickness, don’t feel like they’ll go soft or delaminate after a season of handling, better than a lot of the token-heavy games I’ve priced out for resale.

Setup and teardown eat real time even with the built-in organizer trying its best. If you’re the kind of person who wants a game ready to go in five minutes, this isn’t it. But if you’ve got a group willing to commit to a long campaign the way you’d commit to restoring something, slow, a little frustrating in the middle, worth it at the end, it earns the time.