Board game session review: Eclipse

The other day I was invited to a game of Eclipse, a board game about galactic conquest. I thought I might as well do a review of the impressions I got from the session.

This is the first time I've played Eclipse. It was reminiscent of Twilight Imperium in the basic premise - you're playing as a human or alien race and the goal is to ... win. You win by earning lots of victory points, which can be gained in several ways. You have to balance resources and research new technologies in order to stay ahead of your competitors, annnd... the board consists of hexagons.

The similarities end there, and the specific game mechanics is what sets this game apart from Twilight Imperium. Eclipse is turn-based and does not have the "roles" that TI has (the roles system is the same as in Puerto Rico, if you've played that). In Eclipse, all players have access to the same actions. But taking an action requires resources, so in a given round the players may take various numbers of turns, based on how many resources they have. Maintaining control over various star systems also requires resources, so the more systems you control the less turns you can take - unless those systems also provide you with more resources. The hexagons aren't in place as the game begins - well, some are, but most of them you add as you explore. And you cannot necessarily move from one hex to an adjacent one - there must be a connecting wormhole. Since you're allowed to place the hex in the orientation you want, this allows for strategic placement of the hexes - if you're defensive you can close all entries to your own part of the galaxies (except there's always a way through the galaxy center) or if you're aggressive you can create shortcuts to the weakling nextdoors.

Each turn, you can build, upgrade or move your ships, research technologies, reshuffle your resources or explore new systems. At the end of the round (when everyone have taken all of their turns) combat is resolved and resources replenished.

You can play as the mysterious and tech-savvy Hydran Progress...

 I played as a human race (here is a peculiarity, by the way, which I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind: there are very many human races, all of which have the same racial boni). I was situated between two alien races who were both quite aggressive, while the humans are more balanced. So initially I chose to explore and turtle, leaving only a couple of ways into my territory. I ended up not having to fight once throughout the whole game.

I wasn't really going for a turtling strategy per se, and my exploration was rather aggressive initially. At a pivotal point though, the neighbor who had the easiest way into my territory offered an alliance. This was when he was about to move into his other neighbor's territory, so he didn't want a war on two fronts. I should not have accepted, but not having a very strong military myself, I did. He could easily have turned around and charged me instead, offering the same deal to the other neighbor.

In the end, the lack of fights turned out to be a major show-stopper for my part. You gain victory points from participating, and these victory points are an important part of your complete portfolio, the other two parts being technology victory points and territory victory points. I ended up having victory points from only two out of three of those parts.

I beat one other player, who just committed hara-kiri early on (if he had pulled off what he tried to do he could easily have won, but he lost a crucial battle and thus ended up being dead). All the other players lasted until the end and had plenty of victory points from all three sources.

...or you can play as the extremely interesting Terran Alliance. No really, they're fun once you get to know them.

So what is my impression of the game?

I am not a big fan of this kind of games in general - you know, the kind where resource management and tactics are important, and where it's every man for himself. For some reason, I don't get much joy out of it, just a lot of competitiveness and adrenaline. I prefer more casual games where the outcome is less up to you. However, I must say this is one of the better games of this kind I have played. I liked it better than TI, because it feels almost like the same game but it plays twice as fast. I do wish the diplomatic part of Eclipse would have been deeper than it currently is. Other than that, this game ranks close to the top (of resource management games, of course - there are many board games I would rather play than Eclipse) as of now.

This was just one session, though, and one data point has no significance. I have also just played TI once so the comparison between them is equally invalid. In fact, all I have written above has no error bars whatsoever, so it is useless for any practical purposes.