First stab at Eclipse today, with Reldan’s copy and a training 2p game and then a more complete (but still aborted) 3p.
My first impression is to really want to highlight the excellent job they did with the parts of the game. You take one look at the first page of the manual, another at the main board, and you can sort everything quickly and efficiently. The transitive property of how symbols connect to one another is immediately apparent, and just about the only thing I could hit it on is the choice of fonts, size, and dark on dark coloring on a good chunk of the player aids (which I will blow up and photocopy because one copy of each on a tiny card is silly).
The way chance is handled is really quite interesting, and I think the emphasis that people who haven’t played it yet are placing on the victory point (reputation) draw might be a bit premature. There are enough chance events that are significant to mitigate that one outcome’s significance, namely the combat and the hex draw, and you can improve your chances quite a bit by targeting big battles if it’s a place you’ve drawn soft points on. You can avoid it altogether and go for more builder oriented strategies that are “sure things” by making a big grab to stash resources and mass produce what you need. And so on. I think the VP draw gets overemphasized in discussion because it is, as Reldan observed, the one that is felt at the very end, but in the aggregate I would be surprised if the game required a house rule scaling down of the 1-4 range it currently offers.
I love the technology in this game. Unlike many other game with techs or tech variants that I’ve played, the tech is valuable, it’s empowering, but it’s also something you get to enjoy using during the game rather than acquiring after a long effort in order to watch it sort of matter in the last turn. Our game had a surprising twist when a relatively common tech proved unusually scarce, but that one draw of stronger hull tech was less a game winner and more an important step in the strategy of that player as he exploited his comparative advantage.
I really like the incentive to pass if you really want something first next turn. Early on I had great results with this locking down the first draws of the +1 and then +2 action techs, but unlike other games (like the Hansa Teutonica it reminded me of in that specific aspect), it was important but not the end of the world for others that they picked it up later. They just had to adapt to that scarcity while working on the places they had an edge.
The combat is tense, brief, and color coded for streamlining. The symbols on the tech match the dice, it’s easy to keep track of modifiers, and you don’t often have a mountain of d6 to resolve. When crossed with the ship upgrading, it’s pretty exciting in a way that TI3’s ship/war system suggests on paper but always fails to deliver in practice. I love being able to look around the board and easily assess the tech progress and ship competencies of my rivals.
I expect diplomacy will be ok but not gamechanging, but I could surprised. The basic version of the game suggests sticking with all humans, so we did, but I look forward to seeing starting asymmetries factored into the game by luck of the draw. Dibs on the genocide bomb species!
At any rate, this fires a small number of games from my shelf, and may end up killing a few more depending on how quickly I can get good at explaining the instructions. Just about the only thing I really wish I could fix is getting replacement ships for the different sides, because the crap ships that come with it are fine for Eminent Domain, but I’m going to have to find something a little more dignified for this.
