Game Review: Eclipse

A space game! I love space games. 2-6 players is good - one of my game nights hits the 5-player mark, which limits the number of games available to us.

This was first produced as a Kickstarter game - sadly I saw it after it closed, and didn't get one of the few first-runs that made it into stores. The second printing is supposed to come out in April/May 2012.

My first feel of the game was that it was Through the Ages in space, which would be perfectly fine. Everyone has a scorecard that tracks their space civ - your bank of Science, Materials, and Money. It also keeps your blueprints for your 4 different ships/battlestations, as well as the technologies you've bought.

We played a 4-player game, all of us being humans. There's an option to play alien races with different powers, but we stuck with the basics for the first game.

It's a dense game, but good. There's a space map that is built as you explore - certain stacks of tiles go for the inner, middle, and outer rings of exploration. A map is useful for explaining locations of planets and ship fleets. (It's 2-D, not a brain-buster.)

Each player takes a turn, in clockwise order. You take one of your order markers and put it on an action on your scorecard...exploring, researching, updating your blueprints, moving markers around, building ships...etc. Sometimes you'll also put an extra order marker out from your scorecard onto the table, to take control of a system. Each marker uncovers more and more Money cost - if you settle a bunch of systems, you might start with quite a deficit, just starting the round!

You spend Research on picking up new technologies...finding better ship technologies (important for battles), reducing costs, finding more order markers...that sort of thing.

You spend Materials on building your military fleet, as well as some of your economy devices.

At the end of the round, after everyone is done passing, you gain Materials/Research/Money based on what you've developed. (It's a nicely elegant system.) Start player moves to the person who passed first...which can be a tempo decision in the early game, to get a better pick of the technologies. The game ends after 9 rounds of play...it took 4 novice players awhile to finish our first game, but we all had fun. Maybe we could have skirmished more, but fair for the first game.

This is definitely a game I want to add to my collection. The mechanics are nice, the game play is interesting, and the system is fairly unique. It's not a casual pick up game...but for one group of gaming friends, I'm betting it will be a regular on our occasional Thursday game nights.

(I'll do a follow-up of the games beyond the initial plays.)