So Oath is not a legacy game, because there's no permanent changes to the game (no destruction, no stickers, no writing, nothing). It's not a campaign game either since there's no overarching narrative covering multiple games (well, not one provided by the game, at least). So it's kind of its own thing.
I really like the idea of what Oath is going for: a living game that changes and evolves with each play, but not in a permanent fashion, and not with an end. In that sense it's markedly different from a legacy game (which has both permanent changes and also a set end to those changes). But when trying to find other games like it I find that I don't have a word to describe it. It seems like right after Risk: Legacy came out everybody agreed on the legacy tag for that kind of game, and then when Pandemic Legacy came out it was irreversible. Now everybody knows what a legacy game is. Oath seems to be doing something just as new as the legacy thing was back then, but no term seems to have come out. Like, there's no category of "chronicle games".
I’m sort of peeved that boardgames has gone from a “hey, I get to sit in meat space not staring at a monitor and doing something fun with friends” into a consumerist dog and pony show.
I feel like part of the problem is that the people participating in and boosting the consumerist aspect are the ones with the shiniest toys to show. Like, sure, 1830 is an awesome game (even if I still can't get a regular group to play it), but you won't get more upvotes for showing off your 100th game of 1830 than your first game of .
An look, I like having new games. I enjoy the feel of new puzzles to try. But in the end, it's as you say, the best part of the games is getting together with friends and doing soemthing fun for a few hours. Having a collection as a backdrop in my video calls is not the point of buying games.
What I don't like about your categories is that you're focusing on the buying and owning games part.
If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.
But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.
The problem with this is chatgpt is shit at facts. You ask it a question and it might just give you bullshit, and you tell it to provide a citation and it will happily invent one. There's no easy way to verify whatever it says to you, other than going to the source, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.
I have four Uwe Rosenberg games. Three of those follow a similar format: game title on top, then a line, then some dude, another line, publisher logo. But Feast For Odin had to go and be all creative and unique.
I'm thinking something like /r/SubredditDrama in Reddit. There's always some interesting drama in the Fediverse and it would be nice to have some place to compile the info and watch it.
It's my favorite series of his. I read the first couple of Laundryverse books, and while they're fun, I'm not a fan of the lovecraftian horror thing. But Merchant Princes hooked me right from the start. Tons of politicking, and by the end it gets messy, like really messy. It's basically The Godfather meets Game of Thrones meets Sliders. And then the followup series (Empire Games) is a Cold War spy thriller with portals. You can just start with Empire games, it's written to be a separate series, but it does have massive spoilers for the original series.
The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry
A note on this: the series is written under the Jack Campbell pseudonym. Took me a while to find. The first book is Dauntless
I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he's basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the "ok I know this is not real but what if it were" variety.
The Laundry Files series is "what if Lovecraft was right and there's magic math that can summon the old gods", but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can't get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can't let that magic math run wildly.
The Merchant Princes series is "what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension". So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn't exist (or at least doesn't exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There's also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).