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!

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!