The exhibitor hall at last month's Adepticon was a feast for the eyes, with jaw-dropping display tables wherever you looked bristling with miniatures from games large and small. The display that got its hooks deepest into me was for Oasis, an upcoming 6mm scale sci-fi wargame where corporate mercs battle for salvage in an alien galaxy. I haven't seen the rules yet, but the miniatures, art, and lore now live rent free in my head, and I cannot wait for the game's crowdfunding campaign later this year.
For full disclosure, I received an influencer swag bag from the game's publisher Collins Epic Wargames at the con, with two terrain pieces, a pair of miniatures, a slightly-too-large T-shirt, and a setting primer booklet. As mentioned above, I haven't seen the rules, so I have no idea if Oasis is going to be one of the best miniature wargames or a complete catastrophe. At the moment I'm just hyped by the game's style.
I will be asking for review samples when the crowdfunding campaign launches, both to test if the rules hold up, and because I am completely in love with the minis and I would like to have more of them, thank you very much.
Oasis has a simple and unique premise, and you can find most of the lore on the game's website. Not too long after humanity masters interstellar travel we discover a wormhole to a tiny pocket galaxy. Nicknamed the Oasis, this sector of roughly 100 star systems is uninhabited, but shows signs that dozens, maybe hundreds of alien civilizations have occupied it before, using it for everything from research bases, to military staging posts, to religious pilgrimages. Naturally, humankind's corporations send in paramilitary expeditions to loot the place dry.
That would be a good set-up for a sci-fi wargame, but it gets better - after all the corporate players have sent their forward expeditions into the Oasis, the wormhole closes behind them. It's not gone for good, but it opens so irregularly that the forces there are almost entirely cut-off from support. It's a struggle for survival, salvage, and profit, with the smallest viable crews operating in the most rugged, bare-metal gear to shave operating costs down and keep margins high.
The models in Oasis have a really distinctive vibe: they're an oddball mixture of military, paramilitary, space exploration, and industrial, that reminds me most of the RTS game Homeworld: Deserts of Kharack and weirdly also of Studio Ghibli. The printed lore primer has the official corporate sales pitches for each vehicle, and then annotations from some poor grunt, often talking about how uncomfortable or likely to die you are piloting a given craft.
It's clear that every vehicle exists for a reason in the lore; the AEV18 'Buffalo' is a salvage recovery vehicle, vital for scoring a payday but essentially defenseless - unless the crew has replaced the crane arm with a disguised railgun, turning it into a high-risk ambush vehicle; the UHB 'Bandit' is a modified VTOL transporter with rotary autocannons in place of cargo space; and the massive LCV-G 'Atlas', an utterly colossal transport vehicle, may only exist to drive sales of the equally vast 'Tigershark' battleship. Whether there's good separation in how units perform in game remains to be seen.
Aerial units seem to be a major part of the experience. Interception fighters and massive air-to-ground drone snipers operate alongside airborne behemoths. Those hovering battleships are the flagship miniatures in Oasis, and they loom over the battlefield like birds of ill-omen. Visually, it adds a sense of vulnerability to everything - these massive hunters can see everything and carry huge arrays of weaponry, but they're also showing their soft underbelly to ground units.
The miniature samples I received were 3D printed and came in very few parts - members of the team told me that both physical and digital minis will be available in the crowd-funder. One nice feature of the bigger kits was that turret weapons and their corresponding mounting points had holes that made the joins easy to magnetise.
There weren't loadout options in the kits I got, but pivoting tiny guns and making 'pew pew' noises is fun, and if the model gets dropped the turrets should come off at the magnet joint rather than breaking unpredictably. The fliers use graphene-rod flight stands which will themselves be very hard to break, but I suspect will snap out of either the model or the base if mishandled.
Will Oasis pan out? Man, I hope so. This is the most excited I've been for a 6mm sci-fi range since Full Spectrum Dominance, but the hover battleships are so idiosyncratic that they're not going to be easy to use as generic minis in any other system. If you can think of other small scale lines I should look into - or have tried Collins Epic Wargames' generic small scale game Polyversal - let me know in the Wargamer Discord community.