This tile prevents you from forming ANY new relations with anyone AND you will receive a negative 2 vp score at the endgame. It’s easy to keep track of what you have going on because of the action placement and board state with the different easily distinguishable colors.

I placed them in the bags provided but am afraid the contents will spill out when I travel with the box. I never played the original Eclipse so I can’t compare to that, but the components here are absolutely gorgeous and the player trays are a joy to play with. Upgrading, building, and moving are the three actions directly tied to combat in the game, allowing you to swap out modules on your four ship blueprints, pump out new ships in your sectors, or move ships into adjacent sectors to conquer new lands. Games like Eclipse can often be a daunting prospect to play, but here there are a lot of things to help. While you do generally need to spread your influence throughout the Galaxy to obtain the all-so-precious Victory Points needed to win the game, having a large galactic presence means you need to pay more to maintain your power.The lid of each player’s storage tray doubles as the tracker for the tech, build and income for each player.

At the end of the day, my life is better when there’s intergalactic civilization mayhem in it than when there’s none, and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy may very well be the best box for that experience on the market today. When exploring, a player chooses a tileless space which is accessible from a star the player occupies. In many ways, this way of managing resources is the invisible glue that holds the game’s many flashy, awesome features together. But you’re also using these very same tokens to mark the star systems that you’re controlling, which means that the more systems you own, the fewer tokens you have for actions before they start getting reeeally expensive at which point you’d better hope that your economy is strong enough to cope with this level of spending and what’s this? Each time we’ve played, at least one of us (usually me) has been wiped out in combat because we got overconfident in taking them on unprepared.I love how the game gives you that option, letting players push to the limits of what they can afford. For anyone familiar with first edition, the biggest change might be something that’s not actually related to the game play. Of course you will need to spend an amount of knowledge that you generated from your tech track so you won’t have access to everything available at the start. Each player with have their own tray and lid which have practical functions for tracking certain stats within the game. Eclipse’s action economy is literally that: your civilization’s income/economy correlates directly to how many actions you can take.

During the game you’ll be taking discs from your player mat and add them to the action you have taken. These are AI NPC ships that just sit on some luscious space tiles protecting them and the only way through is with battle (One of the playable races actually befriends the Ancients). These range from upgrades to your spaceships to economy upgrades and new structures that can be built across your systems. There will always be some leftover tiles for the 1 or 2 sections and the only time all the 3 tiles will be used will be during a 6 player game.There will be ample opportunity to as you explore the galaxy and encounter opportunities to do something good, something bad or a little bit of both! Combat is resolved at the end of each round in any sector with more than one civilization present, and usually involves throwing truckloads of colorful dice until one side is obliterated. At two players, Eclipse plays like a marvellous, excessive economic face off with both players more or less doing their own thing. Over 8 rounds, each player will select actions to achieve their goals, carefully managing resources, engaging in epic battles with one another and the Ancients that lie in wait.