1516: New Dawn for the Galaxy

Been looking forward to this weekend not only for the fact I had the aforementioned shitty week, but also because it’s been planned for quite a while to be a weekend of board gaming goodness, perhaps punctuated with a jaunt into starship bridge simulator Artemis tomorrow once everyone is here.

Tonight, however, we played Eclipse, a game which we’ve had a good crack at on several occasions but never actually finished. Tonight, with no commitments, no-one needing to get home in the morning or any other considerations, we finally played a full game, and it was a lot of fun.

Eclipse, for those unfamiliar, is a sci-fi “4X” (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) strategy game in which each player is attempting to build the best galactic civilisation over the course of nine rounds. You do this through a combination of researching new technology, improving the ships and starbases of your fleet, exploring the cosmos and gradually expanding your sphere of influence across the galaxy. Meanwhile, your opponents are all attempting to the same thing, too, but interestingly — and unlike a multiplayer game of Sid Meier’s classic 4X title Civilization, there’s rarely a feeling that the game is forcing you into direct conflict against other players — indeed, the majority of our game tonight was a fairly peaceful affair, with most people building up their empires in relative isolation, but there’s a pleasing feeling of “cold war” throughout; the sensation that, at any moment, things could erupt into unpleasant hostilities.

This happened in the last round of the game, with several daredevil attacks and the unfortunate loss of a couple of my systems. I still managed to come second, though, which is considerably better than I usually do in strategy games.

The thing I particularly like about Eclipse is how well designed it is. Your player information board may be full to bursting with small wooden cubes and discs, but the way the game asks you to place these and move them around means that you can always see the state of your empire at an easy glance. Take more actions in a round and your cost of upkeep will be higher; have more cubes taken off your population stock and you’ll reveal higher numbers for production of money, science and resources. It works really well.

The research system is also rather neat; it reminds me a little of the PC game Endless Space in some ways in that you have basic “blueprints” for your various ships and can upgrade and retrofit them over the course of the game according to the situation. And there’s a lot of flexibility, too; I saw some mid-game success with interceptors and cruisers outfitted with powerful missiles and efficient targeting computers, while in the late game two of my opponents were slugging it out with immensely heavily armoured but not all that powerfully-armed vessels, leading to a lengthy exchange of dice rolls as they attempted to whittle one another down.

It’s a long game and a complete pain in the arse to set up due to the sheer number of pieces there are to lay out in appropriate places. There’s also a fairly hefty element of luck regarding things like initial placement and whether or not you come across powerful alien technologies to immediately add to your ship blueprints, but there’s also a pleasant feeling of being able to approach the game in your own way. I tend not to be an overly warlike player when playing something like Civilization against the computer, so I appreciate a tabletop game that doesn’t necessarily force me into direct conflict against another player until it becomes apparent that things are otherwise at a stalemate. (As it stands, I should have probably prepared better for the attack that came in the final turn, but eh; I’m happy with second place.)

The expansion supposedly improves the game in a number of areas, so we’re probably going to check it out at some point. This one is very much a “weekend game” though; it’s not one you can easily get through on a weeknight evening!