Eclipse - One of the Few Worth Risking Blindness For

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If ever there was an award for component ergonomics/design, this game would be the top dog. The amount of information they efficiently convey in the tiles/player aid cards is brilliant, allowing you to play the game and not constantly look shit up.

Maybe it was the crowd I was playing with, but I played this game once and it could not have been more boring.

Fantastic game, great review. Thanks for the name drop.

Great review! -1 for no expletives.

You didn't read it:

"Fuck that game."
"beating the shit out of one another"
"kind of shitty to have to spend $50.00 extra dollars"

Now, to be fair, there were no homophobic slurs, racist diatribes, or rape jokes. I will try harder next time. How about this:

A little boy & a little girl are playing doctor behind a barn. The little boy's mom comes around the corner, and catches them. She grabs her son by the arm, and drags him to the house. Spanking him the whole way. When they get back to the house she sits him down, and says to the little boy "don't be messing' with those little girls vaginas. They got teeth down there, and they'll bit off anything that get near it. "

Well the little boy grows up still thinking this. He gets to high school, and falls in love. He goes to college with her, and eventually asks his girl friend to marry him, despite still being a virgin. On their wedding night, they go on their honeymoon suite. They start foolin' around, but as soon as it gets too hot, he rolls over and turns off the light. His wife says " hey, heyy, hey, just a minute aren't we going to have sex? " He says "no, my mom done told me about you women, ya'll got teeth in y'alls vaginas."

She says "No i don't! You're insane! If you don't believe me turn on the light and look . " So, he turns on the light and she shows him. She says "well " he says "No wonder you a'int got no teeth, look at the shape your gums are in!"

hotseatgames wrote: Maybe it was the crowd I was playing with, but I played this game once and it could not have been more boring.

I keep hearing you say that about games. The question becomes, "IS IT THEM, OR ME?"

For the life of me I don't understand how this game isn't beloved on this site.

Yes it's a slightly-Eurofied 4X, sure, it's not the TI3 lite a lot of people wanted, no there's not as much backstory.

But it's such a rock fucking solid game.

It has one of the best, most intuitive, most fun to play with economic systems in any game. It has one of the best mini games I've ever played in the ship building, it has one of the best if not the best weight to rules complexity balances ever.

It has amazing combat, with tons of dice chucking and one of the best dice mechanisms, where it's not just "5s and 6s hit hur hur hur" but every single pip you roll is better than the pip before it, IE, 3s are better than 2s, 4s are better than 3s.

It also manages to feel big and different and convey a story without any kind of action or event deck, which is pretty amazing.

Besides Loter, does anyone here really hate this game? It's gotten glowing reviews from Michael, Charlie and Pete.

We've played it a few times recently and we'll soon be adding Ancients to the mix. It's a great game and MUCH easier to get onto the table than TI3. Can't say I wouldn't rather play TI3, but at least Eclipse plays in a single evening and its economy engine is much more intuitive and fast than TI's planet counting. Also, the customized ships RULE.

Some of the Rise of the Ancients Rare Technologies (I think that's their term for it) fixes Eclipse's overpowered missiles problem, somewhat. The expansion is definitely cool, in that you can mix and match all of the new features.

Columbob wrote: Besides Loter, does anyone here really hate this game? It's gotten glowing reviews from Michael, Charlie and Pete.

We've played it a few times recently and we'll soon be adding Ancients to the mix. It's a great game and MUCH easier to get onto the table than TI3. Can't say I wouldn't rather play TI3, but at least Eclipse plays in a single evening and its economy engine is much more intuitive and fast than TI's planet counting. Also, the customized ships RULE.

Maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of than it is but when talking about it in the past I remember several people despising it. I didn't realize this many people actually like it around here.

SuperflyTNT wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: Maybe it was the crowd I was playing with, but I played this game once and it could not have been more boring.

I keep hearing you say that about games. The question becomes, "IS IT THEM, OR ME?"

Ha! Definitely my fault, for playing with Euro-loving weirdos.

RobertB wrote: Some of the Rise of the Ancients Rare Technologies (I think that's their term for it) fixes Eclipse's overpowered missiles problem, somewhat. The expansion is definitely cool, in that you can mix and match all of the new features.

I think the fix is to simply remove missiles from the box. Ancients tends to de-value combat quite a bit, making it more like a multiplayer solitarie game.

Funny enough, i think RotA is a direct high five to the euro-lovers who complained it wasn't Euro enough

Josh Look also despises it. I think the majority of posters here, though, enjoy it. I certainly do.

Yep, confirmed ECLIPSE lover here too. It's on my Best of All Time List, even. Josh and Matt can't stand it, and they were pretty vocal on the site and ran the podcast for a while, so it may have seemed the whole site was down on it. But not so.

Agree with all the sentiments above. It's complicated, but very well presented. It doesn't make combat the Only Thing That Matters like a lot of 4x games do and it rewards both careful and daring play depending on your risk tolerance.