Oathmark review: Part 3 – playing the game

This article is the third in a three part look at the new Oathmark table-top miniature wargame from Osprey Publishing. The first article took a look at the Oathmark book, the second discussed the rule system and this article will discuss how the system plays on the table-top and whether the rules give you a good experience.

Even the most well written and organized set of rules has to hit the table at some point. In order to see how it plays I put together some armies and played two games using the campaign system (here and here).

Originally, I intended to just play some standard games but the campaign system is such an integral part of the rules and of army building that it seemed that it would be a disservice to not use them. That said, you can certainly have fun either designing your own scenarios and picking your owns.

Playing a turn

Each turn is Oathmark has only two phases. You roll for initiative and then you take turn activating units. There are no sub-phases. There are no interruptions. Play flows smoothly. The unit being activated is the ‘active unit’ and anything else is an ‘inactive unit’ and the rules routinely reference those states.

Activation is very easy and there are very few things that change how you activate. The most obvious ones are the presence of a Commander or a unit losing its Officer. Those are difficult to miss. Most units will successfully activate but the system leaves room for even your best troops to have a critical failure at the worst moment.

While it isn’t unique to Oathmark, the use of an alternating activation system means that there is a constant tension between picking units to attack and trying to thwart your opponent. There is a back and forth in the game and you and your opponent are trying to plan and react through the entirety of the turn. Why more mass-combat games don’t do this is bewildering.

There are only a few things your units can do when they activate, or when they fail to activate, but most importantly your units and army can still do things even when you fail an activation roll. This is critical as it means that you can pull units out of the way or reposition them even if they can’t attack.

Fighting a combat

Oathmark has a novel approach to combat and at first it seems as if it can’t adequately give you the feel of a ‘rank and flank’ game but it does quite well. You get benefits, and negatives, to combat and morale based on the number of ranks you have and large blocks of troops can grind down their opponents. At the same time, better quality troops can often rip into those cheap hordes and turn a battle.

The D10 system that Oathmark uses can sometimes generate unexpected results but it doesn’t do this often enough that it makes it seem ‘swingy’. It gives you a good story though. Sometimes your Elf Linebreakers whiff and get broken by some lucky Goblins. Sometimes. What it does allow is for high quality units to generate additional hits if they roll well. Your better units can use their abilities to reduce a target number to the point where they can get two hits with each successful roll.

There are a few modifiers for melee, shooting and morale but they are easy to remember and very consistent. I almost never had to check with the QRS I printed when I was playing. Calculating target numbers for combats was also easy even though I had to juggle both unit’s stats. The entire system just got out of the way and let you play.

Building a Kingdom

Now it seems odd that you would build a Kingdom to play a game but there are a few benefits to this. First, it helps define the troops that you can add to your force and limits you from just taking whatever you want. As I mentioned in the intro, you don’t need to do this and it doesn’t detract from the game experience. It does help you build a narrative around your games though. Where are you fighting? Why? What are the repercussions of winning or losing? There is quite a lot in the campaign system that you can build stories around. Heck, I even built a map of the Elven Kingdom that the Dwarves and Goblins were attacking.

And best of all, the entire system is simple and clean. The wording that defines the structure of your Kingdom is a little difficult to grasp the first time but it is easy enough to figure out. I built two Kingdoms (one for each side in the games) and added terrain to them to define the troops I had access to within minutes of reading through it.

The campaign system also doesn’t slow you down or hinder your games. You never lose access to troops and with a few exception (monsters mostly) it doesn’t limit how many of a unit you can have. You are effected by the loss of territory but not hamstrung by it.

Rolling dice and hitting things

With the exception of Epic: Armageddon, I can’t really remember rules or unit stats very well. Part of the problem is that I flit around from game to game like a butterfly on a warm summer day. I don’t usually play enough to build up the memory of the game rules and unit stats.

So it was a pleasant surprise that I picked up the game, the modifiers and the stats in Oathmark so quickly. I did have to check my unit stats from time to time to make sure that a unit only had Charge(1) or Shielding(1) but that was really due to me keeping my army lists in a spreadsheet on my tablet. The rules got out of the way and let me play a game and enjoy it.

While Oathmark is a ‘rank and flank’ game it wasn’t easy to get flank charges in even with the flexibility of the movement rules. Neither of the games I played turned into a series of alternating flank charges. When I did manage to get a flank charge (or a flank shot with the artillery) it was impactful and I felt as if I had accomplished something.

Determining if you got a flank charge is the one area where the rules needed to be more precise. I extrapolated a bit from the example in the rulebook but it would be nice for there to be a clarification.

I did make some mistakes with the rules when I was playing but those were mostly a result of a) getting excited and b) expecting the rules to be written in a more prescriptive manner. Quite a few rulebooks spend time explaining the rules and then telling you what you can’t do with them. Oathmark doesn’t do that. The rules are simple enough that it isn’t necessary but it is difficult to get yourself out of that mindset.

Yes. But was it fun?

None of the critiques or positive comments that you can make about a ruleset are as important as how much fun the game is. Part of the reason why I haven’t played a ‘rank and flank’ game in some time is that I don’t find them to be a lot of fun. The rules are typically very finicky or they are aimed at a particular type of gaming experience.

Oathmark is a ‘rank and flank’ game for people who never liked Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It gives you the feel and experience of ranks of troops slamming into each other without having to take out a protractor and ruler to determine charge distances. You have ranks of troops but there is a limit to them. And you get the effect of ranks of models without having to roll all of the dice.

I enjoyed my two games quite a bit. Even though they were solo affairs. I felt like I was manoeuvring troops and bringing ranks of troops into combat and I played the game without having to reference the rules. Damn fun. And a unique experience since my experience of these types of games hasn’t been positive.

Prior to Oathmark the only mass-combat game I enjoyed was War of the Rings from GW. It was a fun system but the army lists were wildly unbalanced. I was, except for one game, undefeated while playing it which speaks to its lack of balance and perhaps why I liked it so much.

Oathmark seems to have avoided balance problems by making the different units fairly similar across each army list but adding abilities, or restricting troops, to create a varied experience. Almost all Goblins get a charge bonus. If you want mounted troops in your Dwarven force you need to recruits some Humans or Goblins. If you want cheap filler troops to guard your flanks in an Elf army you need to look elsewhere.

One could argue that this makes the armies less distinct and this is true but it also means that you aren’t going to run into a situation where someone has tooled up their mounted Elven Prince to the point where they are invulnerable.

I also liked that there were upper limits on the size of units and that I could mix and match fantasy races to fill out an army. I could start playing without having to assemble a large number of models and I could field effective units without having to buy 50 miniatures for one unit.

Conclusion

Oathmark really checks a large number of boxes when it comes to a fantasy game. It is simple, well-written, fun and balanced. It avoids many of the traps of mass-combat games by removing all the situations where you need complex rules or complex decision-making processes to play. It gives you the sense of moving ranks of troops across a field without loading you down in special rules and exceptions. It has magic but spellcasters aren’t overpowered or casting spells that require you to reread the spell descriptions every time you cast them,

It solves a large number of problems with mass-combat systems that I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to which, I think, speaks to the effort that the author made to streamline the game while not scrimping on the experience of playing it.