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Steve Berger
United Kingdom
Borough Green
Kent
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So this is the big game right now that everybody seems excited about? This no doubt will settle down, and the race up the ratings will also settle as Eclipse starts getting rated by those that don’t own it, so haven’t invested hard earned cash into it, and aren’t as determined for it to be the next great game.
The entire point is this though - is it really any good?
To clarify how qualified I am to speak about it, I’ve spent money on it. I’ve played it three times.
The sheer volume of ‘bits’ in this game is staggering – 24 various ships and tiles per player, add to that 52 discs and cubes each, we start with 76 pieces over a potential six players, so 456 bits to put somewhere. We then have 44 sector hexes to sort through and shuffle, 7 boards to check and distribute, 96 Tech Tiles to shove in a bag, 154 Ship Parts to sort onto the Supply Board, 70 other counters to sort out and put on the Supply Board, 32 Reputation Tiles to put in a bag, 11 Cards, 18 dice, 13 bits of wood for the Supply Board, and a Start Player marker. So, in setup, that means handling over 900 bits. Blimey Charlie. Even in a 2-Player you’re looking at around 600.
To deal with this, I’m using a tackle box, but then that puts the price up. For the retail price on this I’d expect a storage solution in the box already. With the Tech Tiles, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest – they all get chucked in a draw bag. However, with the Ship Tiles, they need sorting into 17 piles. Yes, you can simply throw them in a pot, and hunt for the one you need when you need it, but that still means sorting. I’m daft enough to have timed the setup, and it takes 15 minutes. What would have been easier would have been a storage tray with the tech tiles in compartments.
The bits are ok, and no more than that, certainly not up to the standard of what you would expect for the money. 1 of my hexes is oddly printed on the reverse which makes it instantly distinguishable from the back. I was missing a cube. The ships come from a game that was published 4 years ago. The little tiles are fiddly, and chunky, clumsy or nervous hands are going to send the neat little piles toppling over. It has that cheap, slightly dusty, musty printing look about it. The economy markers are supposed to be orange, and they aren’t – they are a light brown, which would be fine if materials weren’t brown as well. Economy could have so easily been green. Moans aside, what does work best here is the artwork on the hex faces – there is a comment in the rulebook about hex images being sourced from the European Space Agency, and this has been handled well.
It strikes me that rulebooks are a matter for personal preference – I squirm every time I pick up a Fantasy Flight rulebook these days – I can’t stand rulesets that triple reference themselves, and this is apparent in games like Gears Of War and Rune Age. A common irritant is ‘On your turn, you can do action a. To see what you can do in action a, turn to page 10’. Page 10 then reads ‘Action a lets you do this, this and this. For more detail on this, this and this, turn to page 14’. Just tell me what I can do, and how I do it. What I tend to do is summarise a rulebook, and for 2 reasons. Firstly, it is the best way for me to understand the rules. If I’m putting them into my format, then I need to understand them, and what they intend. The second reason is to put them into an order that makes sense to me. This order is Game Setup, Game Principals, Playing The Game, and Game End. For me, this is the most logical order for rules to be in, even if the best way to explain a game can often be the exact reverse of this. Eclipse rules follow my preferred order almost to a tee. The only change I would have liked to see is to move the examples to the back of the book, and not have them after each section – a full summary at the end of a round in the middle of a game would have been better for me, and having the summaries after each section makes finding rules in the book a slower process than it needs to be, but I nit pick.
When on the table, this game takes up a lot of room. The hexes can spread out considerably, and all players need to be able to see the supply board, which is quite a challenge – even in our three player, it was on the opposite side of the table to me, so meant that each round I was moving around the table to see what techs were in play. To properly see what is on offer, you can be no more than a few feet away, and players with poor eyesight, or in poor light are really going to struggle with this. The supply board can’t be moved either – even if you place the ship parts elsewhere, the tech tiles mean the board stays in one place.
Understanding and explaining the game is fairly easy. The game is played over 9 rounds. Each round has a series of phases, starting with the action phase, followed by the combat phase, and ending with an upkeep phase. You do, you fight, you tidy. When you do, what you are doing makes sense, although the player aid cards could have provided some more information on the limitations of what you can do. This is included on the player sheet though in an abstract way, so is there if you need a gentle reminder (typically you get to explore 1 tile, move 2 influence, research 1 tech, upgrade 2 parts, build 2 ships/techs, or move 3 times). But the options are intuitive, and the cost is the same regardless. What resources you have is easy to track, and what rate you earn at is cleverly recorded – as you move cubes onto discovered hexes, you take them off a value track, which then shows an increased value for your resources. When explaining this, it is very simple for players to grasp quickly, and see the ease of use this provides during the game – there is no long drawn out counting of hexes, or figuring out of resources – all the numbers are on your sheet.
There is some room to play the system though – if you place an influence disc in a deserted hex simply to take a discovery tile for the benefit it provides, you can deliberately bankrupt yourself by taking actions to allow you to return this disc to your sheet without having to pay the price for it. Although you can convert resources on a 2:1 basis, you aren’t forced to, so there is some element of playing the system here. Also, the first player to pass goes first in the next round, and this is a good position to be in if you are looking out for a specific tech. Again, it is possible to exploit the rules slightly by passing earlier than you might need, and still being able to take actions through the reaction option. When you pass, you still have the option of taking 3 of the actions in a limited form. However, if you were planning to use all of your materials to just build a monolith, then you might as well pass now, and then use the reaction ability to build it anyway. Unless, of course, every one else passes.
The order you take your actions in is important – do what there is competition for first, and then fill in the gaps. Attack your opponent before they attack you, take that tech before someone else does, discover that final hex before it’s gone, and leave the ship upgrades till later.
When you fight, you work out which ships have the highest initiative, and you hit on a 6. A die roll, plus computers, less shields. You get blown up, you don’t get to attack. Repeat until either someone runs away, or to the last player standing. Early on, though, this can lead to some rather long, drawn out combats with 2 players rolling to get a couple of 6’s. This changes, however, as the ships are upgraded and you hit on a something more like a 4+ rather than just a 6. Missiles, combined with computers, can be deadly, and may turn out to be too powerful – in my last game, a powerful attacking fleet was destroyed by missiles before it even got to take a shot. Grabbing that tech, and being the only player with it gives a distinct edge.
Three games in for me, and this is a game full of questions. What do you do? You need economy, to pay for your actions. You need science to give you the tech you need to build stronger ships, build other structures, to give you more action discs, and other advantages. You need materials to build those ships. Concentrate too much on one area, and the others will cost you. Yet you are limited by what the game offers you. You don’t have to place a hex, but if you don’t you’ve lost an action which early on your competitors are going to get. With experienced players of equal skill it may come down to who draws the best hexes, or buys the best tech first, but at the moment I have no idea what the best approach is. Logically, you build an engine, and then you use it, but in the mean time you need to react to what is happening as the game progresses. Being offensive is a strong strategy as this allows you to draw the rep tiles which could quite easily make the difference between first and last. Hexes don’t seem to create much difference in scoring, nor does tech research. Monoliths in your outer reaches may help, but the best bet seems to be to create an aggressive fleet and go blow things up. That makes it a hostile, confrontational game of pick on the weak, which might put some people off.
What is pleasing is that you get the whole game. It doesn’t feel like 70% of an overall design, with parts skimmed out for an expansion – it’s all in the box you buy. 7 races (6 aliens and the humanoids), 4 ship types, 24 types of tech, 17 ship upgrades. There are possible additions, but your play experience is a full and complete one.
The play time is a bare faced lie. 30 minutes per player isn’t going to happen. On average you’ll be taking 4 actions per round, and will likely see 1 combat per round. That means 36 actions, 9 combats, and 9 upkeep phases at 30 minutes per player? Don’t forget the 15 minutes to set up, and the 10 minutes to pack away. My reckoning is 45 minutes per player, maybe 40 with more players as the upkeep phase routine of adding tech takes less time per player, as does set up and pack up. 4 hours for 6 players is realistic, 3 hours isn’t. With each player taking 1 action before play moves on though, players are almost constantly involved. If you aren’t involved in combat, then you may have some down time, but it is enjoyable to watch other player’s plans fall apart, or get nervy when they move ever closer to you.
I play games to escape, to challenge myself, and to enjoy a collective experience. Eclipse delivers this for me. I find the space theme more interesting and involving than ancient civs, or modern economy. I like rules that make sense. I enjoy creating something visual, and with this I can. At some point in the not too distant future, somebody will find a way of breaking the system, be it with missiles, or by playing the economy, but for now it all works. There are no cards to confuse things, no shoe-horned rules exceptions to make it play. It could be glossier, look more expensive, but I’m not sure it matters that it isn’t when you are in the middle of a game.
Eclipse seems to work with all player numbers. I can play it with my game groups, and at home with my son. I’d really like to try with more players, but for me the play time will restrict the ability to do this. To try and wrap up, I’m glad to own it, and the designer has done an exceptional job. There are faults, mostly cosmetic, so it isn’t perfect, but it deserves to be well thought of. It does nothing new – it is no more ground breaking than the vaguely similar Age Of Empires III (or whatever it is called now) or the recent Civ game, but it works well as a whole. As of today, I rate it a nine, and it could still go either way. Many of us gamers, and I do include myself, have a short attention span for games like this, so it could burn bright, and burn out, but for now I’ll enjoy it burning bright.
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) The green aliens do quite well turtling and having lots of cheap territory.
