Players: 3-5
Time: 45-90 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Oasis comes with:
- 1 game board
- 88 land tiles
- 100 wooden camels
- 20 wooden control markers
- 62 scoring markers
- 5 priority counters
- 54 playing cards
- 1 rule book
Game Board: The game board is a four-panel map printed on solid, linen-textured cardboard. It's fairly abstract, featuring a camel path running through the middle of the board and three areas for placement of land tiles separated by that camel path. The land tile placement area include a few steppe, stony plains, and oasis "bonus" tiles which are pre-printed on the board; the steppes are unfortunately very similar in color to the underlying desert, and thus easy to miss.
Going around the edge of the board is a scoring track which is used at end game; it's numbered 0-99 and unfortunately just a little short, as two of our four players ended up in the 100-110 range.
Land Tiles: These square, cardboard, linen-textured tiles are placed on the board during the game. There are three types: steppe (yellow), stony plains (gray), and oasis (green). They're each simple, but easy to distinguish.
Wood Bits: The two-humped camels are attractively cut out of wood and painted in the five player colors: red, blue, green, yellow, and black.The wooden control markers are painted in those same player colors and are shapped as simple, but large wooden pawns.
Scoring Markers: These are rectangular markers which players keep to their side of the board for final scoring. Three of them match the three land tile types: the yellow horses, the gray oovos, and the green water wells. The fourth scoring marker, the red commodities, match up with the camels. Like the tiles these are printed on linen-textured card board. They've each got some type of figure in the middle of the tile, such as the horse on the yellow horses tile, and thus they're attractive and very easy to distinguish from the land tiles themselves.
Priority Counters: These are circular discs which are numbered 1 to 5. Each one also has artwork depicting some person in Mongolian society: the noble, the aristrocrat, the merchant, the monk, and the herder. Having these named professions associated with the numbers adds nice color and even caused some roleplaying in our game. ("The noble demands a better offering than that!")
Playing Cards: These large, thin cards, with rounded corners, are printed in evocative sepia tones on the back and full color on the front. Each one simply depicts the offering which the cards grants. These can include camels, land tiles, scoring markers, or more cards, and in each case the component is clearly depicted on the card.
Rule Book: The rule book is 8 pages, printed in full color on slightly glossy pages. It's filled with examples and was well written, making it easy to learn from and also easy to use for reference.
Box, Tray, Bag: The box is sturdy and features attractive artwork. The tray contained within is very nice, featuring individual spaces for each type of land tile, each type of scoring marker, the priority counters, and the cards (though the land tiles slosh a bit if you tip your box upright). There's a big central slot for the camels and control markers, but to help make sure they don't go all over there's also a plain cloth bag to hold them all. This last was a very nice feature that makes the storage of the game much better.
Overall, the components of the game are attractive, well-designed, and colorful. They improve the enjoyment of the game and thus earn a "4" out of "5" Style rating.
The Game Play
In Oasis you must manage a simple offering system in order to gain control of Gobi land and the various resources which actually make that land valuable.
Setup: Each player chooses a color and is given 20 wooden camels and 4 control markers in his color. He's also given a deck of five cards face-down, which he does not look at. The board is placed in the middle of the table.
The Board. The board is a somewhat abstract representation of a portion of the Gobi desert. It's all laid out on a square grid. There's a camel path which is a few squares wide; it starts at the left and then branches to the top right and bottom right. This divides the map into three desert areas which are used for land tile placement. Most of the placement area is empty desert, but each of the three areas also has a few "bonus tiles" printed on the map. These match the three tiles which players will be able to place: oasis, steppe, and stony plains.
Order of Play: At the start of the game the players randomly draw Priority Counters which are labelled 1-5 (thoughly only 1-3 or 1-4 or used if there are less than 5 players). These counters determines order of play within the round. It'll shift each turn.
The general order of play is this:
- In order, each player makes an Offer.
- In order, each player selects and resolves an Offer.
- New priority counters are determined.
Making Offers: Each player makes his Offer in turn, starting with #1 and going to the highest numbered player. A player makes an Offer by flipping cards up from his Offering deck. He may ffer between 1 and 3 cards and flips them one at a time, deciding after each flip to continue or not. When a player says he is done, his Offering deck is then refilled: he gets 2 cards if he offered 1, 1 if he offered 2, and 0 if he offered 3. These new cards are placed at the bottom of his deck.
Selecting & Resolving Offers: In this phase each player, starting with #1, chooses an Offer from another player. He may select any from the table except his own (unless its the only one left). When he takes an Offer he hands his current Priority Counter to the player who presented the Offer, who places it face-down.
The player must now resolve the cards in the Offer he took. These cards will allow him to place tiles, scoring markers, or camels, or add cards to his Offering deck.
Camels. Cards allow players to place 2 or 3 camels. Camels are placed anywhere on the Camel Path. Only the largest group of like colored camels is scored, so that's a prime factor in placement, both to optimize your own caravan and to harm your opponents'.
Land Tiles. Cards allow players to place 1 or 2 land tiles of a specific type (oasis, steppes, or stony plains). Land tiles are placed in the desert areas of the map. A player may play a land tile either orthagonally adjacent to others of his same tiles on the board or else next to specific starting locations (steppes go next to the camel path, oases next to special, green oasis areas, and stony plains anywhere within the desert). If this is a player's first placement of a tile to that area of land, he must place one of his control markers on the tile.
There's one other rule: tiles of the same color that are controlled by two different control markers can't be bridged (e.g., you can't play an oasis in between a set of your oases marked by your control marker and a set of your opponent's oases marked by his control marker). This is true even if you own both sets of tiles! You can put tiles of different colors next to each other with no problem.
There are a number of constraints here, and they really make the game.
First, each desert area is fairly tight and compact, making it very easy to block off opponents and to get hemmed in yourself.
Second, you only have a limited set of control markers. If you run out of control markers and need another you must pick up one of your control markers and place it in the new location. These leaves an uncontrolled set of land which can be taken by the first person that manages to link up to it with an orthagonal connection (including yourself).
Unlike camels, tiles don't have to be in a single group to be scored. (They're limited instead by those four control markers.)
Scoring Markers. Cards allow players to take 1 or 2 scoring markers of a specific type. These are placed face-down next to the player who owns them. There are 4 scoring markers, 1 for each of the tile types, and 1 for the camels. They'll be multiplied by the appropriate type of piece on the board in the End Game.
Cards. Cards allow players to add 3 cards to the bottom of their Offering deck.
Determining Priority: After all players have selected and resolved an Offer, all the Priority Counters are flipped back face-up. The new player with the #1 Noble Priority Counter now may make a free placement of one of the land tiles or a camel on the board.
End Game: The game ends when the last Stony Plains, Oasis, or Steppe tile is placed or when a player gets an Offer that has an unplayable tile. Afterward scoring occurs. Each player:
- multiplies his largest group of camels times his number of Commodity scoring markers.
- multiplies his total number of Oasis tiles by his Water Well scoring markers.
- multiplies his total number of Steppe tiles by his Horse scoring markers.
- multiplies his total number of Stony Plains tiles by his Ovoos scoring markers.
Camels are advanced along the scoring track to keep track of all the numbers; the player with the highest total wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Oasis is a Moon & Weissblum game that explores some of the same themes as their other games, though in new and original ways.
Moon & Weissblum seem quite interested in forcing players to make hard decisions, where they can only benefit themselves by benefitting other players. We saw it in San Marco, where you cut a set of cards and then your opponent selects half of them, as well as in Mammoth Hunters, where you have to play cards to benefit opponents in order to gather the resources to play the cards to benefit yourself. Oasis takes this trend in a different direction by forcing you to decide how much to directly offer your opponents, and balances that with not just a benefit to yourself, but also a scarcity in your cards.
The tile-laying aspect of the game is very reminescent of New England with ownership of like-colored tiles solely marked by a player control marker. However, because of tightly controlled placement areas matched with relatively free reign to begin new tile groupings, the tile placement of Oasis is much more tactical and (I think) more interesting.
Ironically, Oasis was actually the first game designed by Weissblum and Moon. It's just taken a while to get to market.
The Game Design
Overall, Oasis is a thoughtful game that's fun to play. Here's some of my favorite design:
Offering System Innovative: The offering system is quite original, and that really makes the game stand out.
Offerings Very Tactical: The whole procedure of making Offers is very nicely tactical. You flip up your first card, then look around and see how valuale it'll be to everyone, particularly the players with the current highest Priority. Sometime you'll keep going to make a more pleasing offering and sometimes you'll stop, afraid of giving a leader who will probably already take your Offer too much of an advantage.
Tile Placement Very Tactical: The tile placement is equally tactical. You can open up new areas for yourself or try and block off opponents. You can give up old controls in order to move into a new area of more interest. There's considerable room for real thought and good play here.
Roleplaying Possibilities: There is definitely some fun roleplaying possible within the game, based on who has what role currently. We did a lot of this, particularly in relation to the noble.
Here's some of my complaints:
Lots of Fiddling: You are constantly passing tiles, cards, and scoring marking back and forth around the table, and this can all be a bit of a hassle.
Scoring Opaque: The scoring system is opaque for two reasons. First, you have all the scoring done at the end. Second, counting during the game isn't very practical because it's all based on multipliers. (I generally find that multiplier systems are opaque in and of themselves and require a lot of math throughout the game that really shouldn't be necessary; that was definitely the case here where, e.g., I'd have to calculate if adding two tiles or one scoring marker for a specific color was better based on what was already on the board.)
Overall, I think Oasis is a better game than Moon & Weisblum's award-winning New England release from last year, and definitely aimed at a similar audience. I gave New England a "4" and if I could I would give Oasis a "4.5", to reflect that it's a better game though not necessarily an instant classic. Since I don't have half-points available to me here at RPGnet, I'll simply say that Oasis rates a very high "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Oasis proves itself to be a great strategic game with interesting tactical possibilities. I also suspect it'll have very good replay possibilities. With a number of other releases already on the schedule, it's hard to say if this will be the Game of the Year for either Moon or Weissblum, but it'll definitely be a strong contender from these two strong designers.
