Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood

Every chapter here splits into a story half and an encounter half, and the story half is the reason people who don’t even like dungeon crawlers end up loving this. It’s some of the best writing I’ve hit in the hobby, subtle in a way board game text usually isn’t, and the choices during it feel like they matter even when, if I’m honest, they mostly move a token count around rather than branch the plot in any real way. I noticed that on my second campaign and it didn’t bother me much, I was still leaning forward.

The combat is where the component-to-rule bloat shows up. Multi-hex boss figures complicate movement in a way that made line of sight and stomping rules genuinely fiddly at my table, we had to reread sections between sessions more than I’d like for a game this polished elsewhere. A full chapter with setup ran five to six hours for my group of three, and one late boss fight where a single character clung to one health for what felt like forty minutes taught me this game has a real problem with its own difficulty curve getting punishing rather than tense in the back half.

Here’s my actual gripe though, and it’s not really about the rules: I don’t like it quite as much as Too Many Bones, which does a lot of the same job with less setup and less rulebook diving between sessions. Oathsworn wins on story and atmosphere, easily, the world building and the boss variety are genuinely a level above. But if you’re choosing one boss battler to actually get to the table regularly on a weeknight, this isn’t the one, it’s the one you clear a whole Saturday for.