There are seven playable races to choose from. Each of them feel both unique and balanced. During the course of the game you will of course build up your empire to achieve galactic dominance, but the way in which Eclipse does this is perhaps the most unique I have seen. Again, this is a very streamlined game. It flows! But still takes about 2 hours for a two player game, more for more players. Still not as long as the other Big games out there. With all that said, and taking into account the price (not cheap, but with the length of play and quality and quantity of components), if you think you have the friends to play this with then buy it. It’s a great game and will absolutely justify the price. Even if you only get it off the shelf a couple of times a year, that’ll be well worth the epic science fiction event that takes place everytime you do. Because the streamlined nature of the gameplay really made it addicting for us. It flows with grace through each of the 8 game rounds. And although the pacing starts the experience with little to no confrontation, by the time the end of the game comes, there is the potential for a gloriously climatic battle. Build – Spend some of your build points to add to your fleet or build a space station to improve your infrastructure. Later in the game you can build a monolith (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) which gives a boost to your victory points.

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy - BoardGameGeek

The second edition of Eclipse (now subtitled “Second Dawn For The Galaxy“) carries on from where the original left off with a narrative taking place after the events of the first edition. To this end there is a new piece on the board alongside all the different factions in the shape of the GCDS (Galactic Centre Defence System), a Death Star like space station at the very centre of the map. This doesn’t have a significant effect on gameplay but does make travel through the centre of the Galaxy a lot more hazardous than previously! The Way To Empire Combat is another animal altogether. Eclipse is clear with its stakes. Your ships are weak and you have to improve them. How you do it is up to you, but you need superior firepower, armor, accuracy - or all three. With the dice generally being more receptive to generating hits (with only one of the die’s six sides guaranteeing a miss), when you initiate a fight it’s because you know what’s coming. Eclipse - 2nd Dawn for the Galaxyis a new release of 2020 and it replaces the classic 2011 versionof the game.First and foremost, the production quality of the game is top-notch. Every component is designed to have its own little niche inside of the game box, and there is virtually no spilling over of components when inside. It is perfect.

Eclipse: 2nd Dawn for the Galaxy | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

There is a constant battle in resource management in this game, making it so you always need to be sure to have enough gold to maintain your population scattered across various planets. 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. What this means in gameplay is that if you somehow manage to go broke, you are out of the game! Though it should be mentioned there are ways to eliminate your debt by relinquishing systems you control, it is nevertheless very easy to bite off more than you can chew (yes, it has happened to us on more than one occasion!). This all means that in the games I’ve played, combat tends to be a late game rush as various players finally decide that now is the time to throw around those fleets that they’ve been building up since turn one. Dawn? Or Sunset Eclipse wants you to know the arc of the galaxy before you get in deep. Twilight Imperium takes you for a joyride. Travel between various sectors/hexes in this games requires warp portals between two hexes be aligned. If the symbols for warp portals do not line up, you need to find an alternate way to get to your destination.Secondly, and linked, the upgrade system means that it wouldn’t take much for that enemy cruiser to become spiky enough to deal with being outnumbered by becoming effectively unkillable. It wouldn’t take much for even a fighter to start posing a serious threat to cruisers and even dreadnoughts. That means that you need to at least keep pace in the interstellar arms race if you want to do any conquering later in the game. For anyone familiar with first edition, the biggest change might be something that’s not actually related to the game play. In these big games, the set up and put away time can take another hour on top of play time. No longer. With each faction’s pieces in a separate box and each box carefully set up to fit together, it can take only a few minutes to start play and not much longer to put away.

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Is there a solo mode? | Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

In my wife’s own words, I can tell if a game is good if she keeps on coming downstairs to the game from her at-home job to take turns all day long. Eclipse provided such an experience for her, despite her initial misgivings. Color me surprised. This new edition features new components and thoughtfully revised content, incorporating material from former expansions to create the best possible updated version of the game. Rules:These differences in approach show even more starkly in other areas of the games. The nature of Eclipse as a structured game comes from the way it resolves its rounds, especially in stark comparison to grandpappy Imperium. Eclipse is honest with you: eight rounds and no more. Over those eight rounds, you grind for tech, control territory and participate in glorious battles to win. Twilight Imperium is far more snarky. Sure, it says, you can win by winning fights and controlling territories, but the mercurial objectives revealed slowly round after round say otherwise. Combat, while it still uses dice to determine hits and outcomes as is traditional, nevertheless manages to offer up something new in allowing a good advantage to the Defender in battle situations. Moreover, it is especially nice that while it is more typical in other games to have players trade hits and damage at the exact same time, in Eclipse, if you manage to destroy an enemy ship first, they will never even get a chance to fire at you! Twilight Imperium's latest fourth edition released in 2017, 20 years after the sci-fi epic first hit tables. In terms of basic gameplay, over a series of several rounds players take it in turn to spend their actions doing one of a number of things: Research – You can spend some of your science points to research one of around 40-50 different technologies. These range from upgrades to your spaceships to economy upgrades and new structures that can be built across your systems. Which brings us to…