1301: Eclipse of an Empire

My regular group of board gaming buddies and I finally got around to trying a game of Eclipse today. We didn’t finish it, but we all had a pretty firm grasp of what was going on, so the next time we play things will hopefully run a little more quickly and smoothly. It’s very much a “weekend game,” though, due to its length, so I find myself wondering how often it will hit the table.

Eclipse, lest you’re unfamiliar, is a sci-fi empire building game in which you take control of one of several spacefaring civilisations (human or alien) and then proceed to attempt to score as many points as possible over the course of the game’s hard time limit. Scoring is achieved through controlling sectors, winning battles, forming trade agreements with other players and researching new technology.

The nice thing I found about Eclipse is that its sheer number of components make it look hideously complicated at first glance — and the rulebook perhaps doesn’t help matters, either — but its mechanics are actually pretty simple to understand once you get into it. It is essentially a game of resource management and ensuring you don’t overstretch yourself — there’s a lot of having to restrain yourself from doing too much too soon, lest you find yourself having to undo all your hard work in order to, well, pay for your hard work.

Eclipse works with three currencies — money, science and resources, each of which are produced each turn in varying amounts according to which planets you’ve colonised. Each planet has a particular colour according to whether it’s a money, science or resource planet, and one or more “slots” for adding population cubes to them. Taking a population cube off your civilisation’s reference sheet reveals your new income level while simultaneously giving you the means to mark your ownership of a planet. It’s an elegant system, albeit one that requires a lot of “bits” to function.

The main mechanic of Eclipse involves making use of your “influence” to perform various actions. By spending an influence point, you can take another action in the current round of the game, but the more influence you use, the more money you’re going to have to spend at the end of the round. Influence is also used to take control of sectors (and indirectly, by extension, colonising planets) and thus you can find yourself running up a significant bill rather quickly if you’re not careful. This is where the “pacing yourself” thing comes in — you need to balance a series of productive actions with ensuring that your expenses are kept at a manageable level.

Eclipse has a great research system, whereby you use collected science units to purchase technologies, and then, using another action, use your researched tech to upgrade the blueprints for your various types of ship. Your civ’s reference sheet has a “blueprint” for each of the ships and starbases, and adding new tech is a simple matter of laying tiles over the existing stuff to upgrade them. You can customise each ship a huge amount in this way, though you have to do things like ensure there’s enough power available to power the massive cannons you’ve just strapped onto the hull.

I enjoyed what I played. I sometimes get a bit weary during games like this as they can sometimes be a bit too heavyweight for my distinctly non-strategic brain, but Eclipse seems to strike a good balance between accessibility and depth. Plus the excellent iPad version means I can practice whenever I like!