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Oceania is a simple exploration and tile-laying game by Klaus Teuber, based on his Entdecker game.
Players: 1-2
Playing Time: 10-30 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Oceania comes with:
- 1 game board
- 60 exploration tiles
- 16 scout tiles
- 1 explorer ship
- 1 rulebook
Game Board:As with most elements of this game, this board has been miniaturized. It's just two panels, about a foot by 9 inches total. The focus of the board is a 7x5 grid which shows where land can be discovered. Circles on three sides cleraly show where ships can be launched from
The aesthetic design of the board is generally pleasing, which a nice sepia-toned map backgrounding the game grid and ornamentation edging the board.
Exploration Tiles: These are the tiles used to fill the game board. Each one shows some mixture of land and sea edges; they're all attractively and colorfully designed as well as linen textured. There are actually two types of tiles, 35 sea tiles, which are used for random draws, and 25 reserve tiles, which are used to fill in gaps on the map. The reserve tiles are marked front and back with clouds so that it's easy to pick them out, but they're otherwise identical to the sea tiles.
My one complaint is that there aren't quite enough of the reserve tiles. On 1 of my first 5 games I ran out of one of the types (the three land/one sea tile, as it happens); I expect that will happen every several games. The rules state to just act as if the space is filled in if a tile to fill in the space isn't available.
Scout Tiles: These are teeny gray and white tiles which show 1-3 pawns on them. As with the rest of the cardboard, they're linen textured.
Explorer Ship: An attractive wooden ship used to mark starting position for exploration. Unfortunately, it's the one piece that hasn't been miniaturized, and it looms over the tiles, making it a bit hard to see where the sea routes are.
Rulebook: A short, 4-page rulebook with examples and pictures that makes it easy to figure out how to play. There's also a pointer to the online rules at profeasy.com, which are always well done.
Box & Tray: The box is a small bookshelf size, though it could have been smaller yet. The tray is, unfortunately, bad. It's much too big for the tiles, and so they slide all over and there's no good way to separate the reserve & sea tiles. (The Carcassonne games did this much better by having a small "alley" in their tray which was just the right size for a row of tiles.)
Overall, the components of Oceania are all high-quality and attractive, though not amazing. They earn a solid "4" out of "5" for Style: above average.
The Gameplay
In Oceania your goal is to adroitly explore and take control of the islands of the undiscovered realms of Oceania.
Setup: The board is laid in the middle of the table, and each player chooses a color and takes the 8 pawn tiles in that color. The tiles each show different numbers of pawns: 5x 1; 2x 2; and 1x 3.
The reserve tiles are placed face up next to the board, organized by type. The sea tiles are shuffled, 3 are removed from the game, and the rest are arranged into face-down piles.
Order of Play: Each turn a player takes the following actions:
- Choose a Starting Point
- Explore
- Fill Surrounded Areas
- Place Scouts
Choose a Starting Point: The active player must first decide where his explorations begin. He places the ship either on an edge of the board or on an already placed tile with water that can be traced back to a legal edge of the board, which also has at least one blank water edge (e.g., with nothing in the adjacent space). Note that the map only allows exploration from three sides: everything but the top.
Explore: The active player next draws a tile. He may place it on any empty space adjacent to a water edge of his starting point. The placed tile must match all edges of adjacent tiles to it (water to water and land to land). The edges of the board are all water.
If a player can not place a tile on the board he discards it in front of himself; he might place it later or take it as a penalty at the end of the game.
In either case, a player only gets to place one tile on his turn.
Using Discarded Tiles. Instead of drawing a tile, the active player may instead choose to place a discarded sea tile sitting in front of him (which he'd previously failed to place). In order to do so the player must discard one of his scout tiles.
Fill Surrounded Areas: Any single spaces entirely surrounded by tiles or board edges is filled in, using the appropriate tile from the reserves. Any set of multiple spaces entirely surrounded by land edges is filled in, using the all-land reserve tiles.
Place Scouts: If the player successfully placed a tile with land on it, he may now choose to place one of his scout tiles if he wishes. Once a scout is placed, it stays on the board for the game, and there's no "making change" for scouts: you choose to place a 1, a 2, or a 3, and do so.
Winning the Game: The game ends either when the last sea tile is placed or the entire board is filled. At this point the game is scored. Each island is won by the person with the most scouts on that island (with ties going to no one). An island is worth a number of points equal to the number of tiles that compose it. Unfinished islands (particularly a problem at the top of the board, since you can't explore from the top) are not scored.
A game takes just 10 or 15 minutes; the rules suggest playing a few rounds, with a winner determined by whomever has won the most games.
The One-Player Game: There is also a one-player variant suggested for the game. You, one a a time, lay out the land tiles using the normal rules for exploration without worrying about scouts. At the end you score points for each completed island equal to the square of its size, but lose 20 points for each space you neglect to fill in.
It's an amusing enough diversion. I played it 3 times and got some big negative score the first time, because I underestimated how hard it would be to fill in the board, but then scored a 170 and a 134.
It's not as easy as you'd initially think because the tiles are in such short supply.
Relationships to Other Games
Oceania (2004) is the junior (and just two-player) version of Entdecker (2001), Klaus Teuber's original ocean exploration game. This newer game has a smaller map, a fair amount less strategy, and is overall simpler and shorter. (The original game has a simple economic system, the ability to build scouts, forts, or settlements, and a subgame involving scouts heading into the interior.) Surprisingly, this new game is also a bit more aggressive, perhaps because of the singular gameplay, perhaps because of the smaller board. Finally, Oceania is a filler, while Entdecker is a serious, full-length game; each has their place.
Like Entdecker, Oceania is a majority-based area-control game built on exploration and edge-matching tile-laying; my original review of Entdecker lists a lot of other games that fit into the same category. Carcassonne (2001) will be the most familiar. Oceania actually plays a lot like Carcassonne, though it's much more aggressive with its scout placement than the meeple placement is in Carcassonne (primarily because you can explicitly grab someone else's territory, while you have to be cunning to do the same in Carcassonne). Nonetheless, Oceania is simpler than Carcassonne too.
The bottom line: Oceania is a filler game, where the others aren't to the same extent. (Comparing, Oceania is about 15 minutes, Carcassonne about an hour, and Entdecker about two hours.)
The Game Design
Oceania's top points are definitely that it's very short and very simple. It also maintains some of the good elements of its parents:
Evocative & Interesting Exploration: The exploration in Oceania is interesting and pretty. The method used for laying in surrounded tiles helps keep the game moving along.
Some Strategy: The strategy in the game is fairly light, but definitely extant. Among other things, you can: try and force an opponent to make a penultimate play, so that you can claim an island (much as in Samurai and other tile laying games); try and make clever plays to close an island quicker by surrounding areas; keep careful track of scout resources, so that you can determine when you can guarantee a majority; and force your opponent's valuable islands to become unclosable by jamming them against the top of the board.
On the other hand, it must be clearly said that there's a large random element to Oceania with its tile draw; although this can be somewhat helped by careful choice of starting position, it still remains a large factor.
Overall, I think Oceania is a fine filler, that maintains some of the exploration and majority control elements of Entdecker, but loses most of the complexity and strategy. As a result it earns a high "3" out of "5" for Substance, slightly above average.
Conclusion
Oceania is another two-player variant of a larger Klaus Teuber game, this time Entdecker. The result is much simpler and shorter than the original, without any particular two-player nuances. It's OK as a filler, and might scratch the exploration itch if you don't have time for a full (much longer) Entdecker game, but isn't particularly exciting or innovative beyond that. I'd suggest it as an Entdecker variant, but not as a filler in and of itself.
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