Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy
In Eclipse, you must explore Space, humanity’s continual yearning struggle for Victory Points pushing it beyond/(into?) the stars.
You will start in a little star system, with your competing players and you forming a little circle, with a not very little Danger Ship in the middle. You will all explore outwards (or sideways, or inwards) through the space around you. As you explore outwards you reveal and place hexes to represent the exploration and build out the board, with the revealing player setting the orientation of the hex. This is not how I was taught space exploration was conducted when I was a kid, but here we are. I guess public interest in space has dropped and the precise facts have passed into folklore.
As space can only explored by placing hexes, the players control the orientation, and hexes can only be traversed when they have back to back wormholes (mostly), the act of exploring space is less about freeform adventure than it is constructing a maze, blocking or allowing routes to neighbours as best you can. By the time the tiles are laid out, your corner of the universe will be so convoluted and restricted in its traversal paths it will look like a plan for a communal living apartment designed by the Discworld’s Bloody Stupid Johnson.
(Some of these also contain NPC guardian ships, which are effectively impassable early game. I am assured the above board state (in my first game!) where I, the noble red, managed to find myself almost completely boxed in, was ‘really unlikely’.)
Basic board state established, the next phase of Eclipse is upgrades, and this is the best part of the game. Research and equip upgrades for each of your ship types - changing guns, adding missiles, armour, shields, targeting systems, all through adding tiles to your ‘basic ship board’ to represent all the myriad ways you are customizing and tooling your fleet.
Feel like putting all your resources into building the biggest, tankiest, super star destroyer imaginable? You can. Carved out a nice bit of territory with a choke point? Tool up some defensive starbases. Remove all the shields and add swarms of missiles to a flotilla of fighters and hope it creates enough of a pre-emptive strike force that nothing survives the first turn to fight back. You, after all, wield the absolute authority of Lord President Space Emperor, setting out engineering goals and designs for an entire galactic civilisations fleets in ways either capracious, calculated, or called out by your fellow players as illegal because you forgot you needed to upgrade the generators on the cruisers before mounting the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator.
There’s a huge amount of upgrades to choose from, yet it’s all represented by sliding the upgrade tile onto your fleet sheet (isn’t that neat). This means that even across the table in a six player game, you can get easy information as to roughly how customised and painful their units are going to be, rather than having to crane your neck or ask (or lose track and stumble into).
(For instance, this has a Lot Of Numbers and Lots of Stars and Lots of Tiles and Lots of Orange - coded to ‘missiles’ - so its easy to see that this will be Lots of Bad Times).
At the end of the day, it’s still rolling dice with all the variance that brings, but such randomness has been the plight of the wargamer ever since the move away from using dedicated military staff as rules arbiters from the Prussian military academies. And given this is a space game, the circumstances to get the expert knowledge to recreate that seems unlikely.
Though one can dream …
Eclipse also does a great job in reducing the cube-moving admin that can be endemic to Big Wargame.
This is boring to write and read about but feels so good in the breach that I feel compelled. There’s a huge box of potential research options that could cause analysis paralysis, but as it comes in its own tray it can be passed around ahead of the active player, like a shishah pipe in a Riaad ahead of the active speaker, to allow planning ahead of time.
The nicely-designed systems continue! You have a supply of discs for actions. However, every time you take a system you must place a disc onto it from your supply, reducing your actions, as your intergalactic civilisation clogs with bureaucracy. You can also choose how many actions to take in a turn, with each disc being progressively more expensive. In one stroke there is a catch-up mechanic, risk-reward tradeoff, and method of miscalculating numbers and accidentally bankrupting yourself out of the game two hours in. Wonderful.
What all of this means is Eclipse can play fast (relatively speaking) even with a full six, and stays engaging throughout. The game splits into three distinct phases; explore to make a maze, put gun on ship, chase other ship and pew pew.
Three caveats. Firstly, if you don’t have a table that is at least six by four foot, this is not playable. And even that will be tight.
Secondly, I did find myself wishing for a bit more flavour text and worldbuilding. Is it necessary for one to know one’s little plastic red ships represent a sentient plant race to enjoy watching them fight the little yellow plastic ships? No, but I feel like it would be free fun real estate.
Thirdly, and this is really more a matter of personal preference - there’s relatively little politcking and diplomacy compared to other games of this ilk (there’s no intergalactic council meeting stage, or somesuch).
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how compact and fun this was. For a game that looks like it will take all day and grind into tedium at points, it took only all afternoon and never lost momentum. Give it a try, and enjoy being your own best mad boffin at a very literal interpretation of the Pew Research Centre.