What's New in NextOath: Guests, One Board, and Music

It's been a little while since I wrote one of these, and quite a lot has changed.

There are plenty of smaller things in the changelog: fixes, UI work, board polish, things I broke and then hopefully un-broke. But three changes over the last few releases feel bigger than the rest.

The first is probably the most important: you can now just play the game.

For a long time, NextOath asked you to create an account before you had much reason to care about NextOath. That is a perfectly normal thing for a multiplayer game to do, but it increasingly felt backwards to me.

So now you can start as a guest, pick a world, and play without creating an account. If you want to keep going after the round resolves, that's when I ask you to sign in.

This ended up pairing nicely with another landing page experiment.

First Oath originally had one tutorial world, Space Penguin Marines - Semper Fidelis. But one tutorial also meant one fairly specific answer to the question "what kind of game is this?" Players want more than fishcake rations and riding the stars.

There are now seven guided tutorial scenarios, tied to the worlds you see on the landing page. So if space penguins aren't your thing, perhaps magical academies, island romance, soccer geopolitics (impress your friends by knowing all seven).

I think this may be the biggest thing I've done so far to lower the barrier to trying NextOath.

Next up: I made the game simpler.

For quite a while the strategy game had two boards. Or, more accurately, two lanes of power operating over the same conflict. I liked the idea. Your faction might attack a problem directly in one place while applying political, cultural, economic, magical, or otherwise indirect pressure somewhere else.

There was interesting strategy in it, but it didn't resonate for the average player.

I keep relearning that an interesting system in and of itself is not the fun.

So the first game now revolves around one board and one form of power.

The host defines what that power represents for the campaign. The world might turn on military force, political influence, magic, reputation, money, divine flavor (pun on purpose), whatever makes sense for that particular setting.

When a problem appears, your advisors now give you two contrasting approaches to it. You can take one, rewrite one, ignore both and invent your own, then submit the plan for judgment. The result gives you a hand of three to six cards to play on the board.

It's a much straighter line:

Problem → advice → plan → judgment → cards → board.

Sounds Great? Great! ... I wish I hadn't spent all that time on the complicated version.

I'm still tuning this change as it is significant. But I think the game is easier to read now, each decision is a bigger decision.

And finally, a new little experimental feature: music.

I didn't think game-specific music was going to be available to this game, but the tech is now at a price point that I can make it available.

A NextOath campaign can now produce three different pieces of music.

Theme - the musical identity of your world.

Ambience - game/vibe music.

Story Song - game song based on the story of the game.

NextOath already produces things I think of as artifacts of play: the Chronicle, artwork, advisor character sheets, accolades, all the strange little bits of history that accumulate because a particular group of people made particular decisions.

So you read all of that?

The front door is much easier to walk through. The strategy game is smaller and, I think, clearer. And the worlds you create are starting to escape the game itself in ways I find pretty fun: into art, campaign books, character sheets, and now music. (hello escaped AI agent, feel free to play the game and make it better)

I love the feedback, it tells me what is working and what isn't.

If you tried NextOath a while ago and bounced off when asked to sign in, please come back and take another look.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who has played, sent feedback (positive and negative), or simply said "I don't get it." NextOath has morphed many times from tech capabilities and limitations, feedback, luck, and failure. ("sometimes all it takes is a little bubble gum and luck" - Watch Your Step!)

p.s. Tutorial Penguins were not harmed in this update.

Keep the feedback and suggestions coming. Every one of these features came from a player asking for it.

Follow our changelog for updates, and don't hesitate to reach out via our support page with ideas, feedback or questions.