Eclipse Review - with Tom Vasel

and now it's time for another diced our review with Tom vassal [Music] good alrighty today we're looking at a game that people when asking me to review for a while and that is eclipse now Eclipse is basically a Forex game exploration extermination I don't remember all the X's stand for but basically it's a to explore it's a space game it's a big space game in fact a lot of people have compared it to Twilight Imperium although they're not as comparable as you might think and we'll talk about that a little bit later what equips is certainly one of the most popular games that was published in 2011 it's a game that a lot of people like and it's an epic space game that takes about I would say maybe 45 minutes to an hour per player and because it's so big and sprawling it because there's so much involved with the game this review is gonna be a little bit different I'm not going to show you how to play the game there's plenty of stuff that you can find to do that I'm just gonna take bits and pieces of this game and talk about why I like them or why I don't like them in different things but first of all of course and with any game let's look at the pieces [Music] [Music] well after that plethora of pieces and there really is a ton of pieces in this game each player is gonna get a color and these there can be up to six players in the game and players are gonna each get a board and you can see that there's a board here there's a lot information on it and players that for the basic game are playing one of several humans and the thing about humans is is that they are all pretty much the same so if you play an all human game it's very symmetrical however each sheet can also be turned over and played as an alien and aliens have different starting positions and they also have different special abilities over the course of the game now here's something I very much disagree with the game rulebook itself says oh you should play with the humans first and then the aliens you know so that you don't over complicate things but I think if you play with the humans first there's a good chance you won't even want to play again because it the game almost feels a little bland but the aliens bring a lot of - to the game I like asymmetrical games in which you are trying to and which you have different powers so there's all that going on and so I'm a big fan of the alien now here we have a board and you can see all the different things that you get with this board and there's there's so much to talk about but one of the things I want to concentrate on is right here where you have all those cubes now these cubes keep track of your resources your money your science and your materials orange pink and brown and over here on the side you can see those three markers those markers are going to move along this track to keep track well if I have those markers what do I need this for well the way this works here is every time I discover a new planet so here's for example this alien starting planets and you can see that there is a cube on each of these worlds and there's two on the brown world well let's say I discover another planet over here you can see an orange a brown and a white on the orange I'll take off one of my orange cubes the brown I'll take off one of my brown cubes and on the way I can do anything I want so let's say I do another brown cube well in that case I look back at my sheet here and you can see that my brown my materials is up to eight my science is that for three still and my the first one here my money is at four and so as you go out and explore and put these cubes out your numbers will go out I'm not sure it's the most easy system that there is in existence it's a little clunky especially with these cubes and it only takes a bit of shuffling on your board and look at the mess that it makes what it is very unique I haven't seen in many other games and very interesting let's jump to another part of the game now something that is to me the single best part of Eclipse and that is these spaceships now you may have seen these particular spaceships before and they look a little generic there's three of them small medium and super large but these spaceships are used in combat over the course of the game and before I get into that let me explain that combat in this game is something that can happen but it is very possible to play a game of the Eclipse where you never fight anyone else I guess I should rephrase that if you're not playing me and had this because if I'm playing her is gonna be combat let's take a look here you can see at the top of your board you have three different spaceships and you also have a orbital orbital platform and each of these spaceships is made up of different pieces for example this here which is your medium spaceship this spaceship right here has an ion cannon has a nuclear power source of three it also has a hull it has gauze shields it has a nuclear drive and electronic computer but as the game progresses you will have the possibility to add things to it so I might say I don't care about this electro computer and I'm gonna add plasma missiles as the game progresses or I'd like to replace this ion cannon with an antimatter cannon of course that doesn't work very well because that requires for power and supplying three but I'll drop my shields to put a fusion source in here now I can shoot my antimatter cannon and each of the different guns in the game uses different colored dice and these dice are basically just so you know which gun you're shooting at any specific time and they do different amounts of damage and ships have different amounts of damage that you can increase the damage of your ship by adding hull pieces you can increase the speeds of your ship you can increase the weapons of your ship it's possible and I have done it to take these ships especially the big ones and put tons of guns and missiles on them and leave them almost defenseless or you can armor the suckers up and have fewer guns or you can add speed and this is just a very fascinating addition to the game to be able to customize your spaceships basically into whatever you want or Endor can afford now the way you afford these is with this center board now this center boards a big deal it's a big deal because there's a lot of things that set up on it and I just was not gonna set all those things up for this because it's it really does take a lot of work and I think it's fair to say that equips has a huge amount of set-up time but as the game progresses there is a bag and from this bag you are going to be pulling each turn a bunch of tiles and then you're going to find on here where those tiles are the beach so here for example avanced economy would go here and a phase shield - - goes here and here's another face shield - - and here's a fusion fusion storage and here is advanced mining which okay Vasil cannot find advanced mining but I'm sure it's on there somewhere and you're probably looking at right now saying why can't be put on advanced mining okay so you have these special abilities that are out there and this is one thing that I'm not a huge fan of the game on because it just seems a little wonky to me that your technologies that are available to be discovered are randomly pulled from a bag and so there's only so many like for example here you see this - faceshield so if I buy face shields and add that to my technology list then someone else can too but if I buy a fusion source nobody else can buy that for now now these technology that you buy might give you a special ability or they might let you purchase those tiles that will let you upgrade your ships and those tiles will be a nice tax here which again I didn't do but you can pull off the different tiles you have regular tiles that anybody can build you can add more of the original stuff to your ship and as you collect these research tiles you're going to be placing them on down here to show all the different technologies and if you get enough technologies of a certain type there's three types of technologies which is shown by a color on the chip but as you get more of them you have a chance to get victory points and so if you finish a cut a whole row here you can get victory points so one of the way to get victory points in the game is by researching technology one of the things about Eclipse of course with a 4x game one of the X stands for Explorer and it and Eclipse has an exploration theme and you know I think at this point in time that we shouldn't be surprised that it uses hexagons because what good self-respecting space game doesn't use hexagons as you go out these hexagons you are going to do two things you're looking for more planets and I've already shown you how finding more planets can increase you to your resources your money in your science but you can also find basically special chips that will give you special abilities so you cannot just sit around at home and build up a defense what you need to do is go out and explore because it can get you victory points it can get you extra money extra cash and there is a bit of blood the game comes with three piles of these in it that all depends on the positions of the plants at the beginning of the game now the way this game is set up is you have this one large ancient space platform in the beginning of the game like the old ones and you have different each player's our home planet that they're going to put out and start and then whenever you explore with your spaceships you are going to turn over a tile for example this is the one ring here so I will turn over one of these from the beginning from from one and you can orient these so that when you orient them having these circles connected to each other basically allows you to go from one tile to the other tile so you can actually block people but then there's a pile of two so that's for this out ring the one that includes your home planet and then when you go beyond your home planet backwards you will go into the three ring and you can see here as you come to some of these for example this one here this has a tile on it that can be worth two points when you explore there or you can use it right away and take eight dollars which can be a really big deal especially at the beginning of the game now I know I'm jumping around from point to point in the game you're saying oh come on you're not really giving me the big picture well let's let's try to do that a little bit here you're an alien race you want to win you want to do so bite points you saw there's some ways to get points by technology there are other ways to get points by fighting let's take a quick look at fighting when spaceships from two different armies fight each other and and they fight after the battle is over you will be drawing from a victory point bag and as you draw from these these are victory points you're gonna get from at the end of the game the winner gets the draw and if you participate you get the draw so the game does encourage combat I said you can win without combat but at the same time combat is certainly helpful to winning now when you draw from this bag it could be 1 to 4 victory points so the more you fight the more points you're going to get and it this is another thing that I'm not real fond of because this is very lucky these tiles that you draw and I don't know it just game can be decided by who draw these tiles this is my biggest fault with the game here I believe is drawing these combat itself though I love I love having two different spaceships and the different dice that I rolled involved there that is a lot of fun but before I so rudely interrupted myself there with combat what we need to talk about is how the game actually works now I want to talk a little bit about the overall feelings of this game this is a space game where you explore you build your own spaceships you fight combat you find new planets you there's even a bit of diplomacy which I won't get into but that's very possible with other players but when it comes down to it eclipse feels like an economic game you are constantly juggling the points that you have in your money materials in science and using science points and and you're constantly you have this economic feel because you're trying to make sure that your empire has enough money or materials or whatever basically so that you can accomplish the goals that you want to do and this is the driving force behind the game anyone who tells you otherwise is not real true and this is why I think so many euro gamers like the game and so many people who like games like Twilight Imperium are not drawn to this game see Twilight Imperium and and you've probably seen my videos of that is this huge epic sprawling space game eclipse is big compared to most games but compared to Twilight Imperium it's still kind of a baby in and what many people have told me it's not really fair to compare the two games well I disagree on that I think it's very fair to compare them it's just that you've got to realize that they're very different Birds Eclipse looked like Twilight Imperium but it's a euro game in disguise now don't get me wrong it's a euro game that's incredibly fun and includes combat and for people who don't like combat and like interaction with other players this isn't gonna make them happy and I think the reason this has done so well in that so many people have flocked to this game is because it kind of meets a whole different a whole bunch of these things it has combat it it has building your own spaceships but at the same time it has a very strong economic flavor and I'm talking a strong economic flavor along the levels of Puerto Rico and Power Grid and that is that I mean the game is that well designed in that regard in fact it's probably the best design of the game so now let's talk about really the most important part of this game and I'm moving these cubes to the sides here so that you can look at these disks that you have down here each turn you can have these disks and you're going to be using these disks and to take different actions like maybe move your spaceships or to build more spaceships or to upgrade your spaceships or to research technology you know there's different things that you can do and as you move these disks to the different spots and you can do spots more than once at the end of your turn you're gonna have an upkeep fee to pay and so the more disks that come out the more that you use over the course of a turn the higher that upkeep fee is going to be and at the BNA of the game you're simply not going to be able to afford it but hopefully as time goes by you will be able to afford it not to mention some of these disks are gonna be pulled off permanently and stuck in other places which will cause your upkeep upkeep fee to go and this is really the the most striking part about the economic part of the game is that you must keep an eye on this you must watch the ebb and flow of your money because that will determine how many actions you have and how many actions you have of course determines how well you do at the game and so there's a lot of different things that you're balancing yes this is important to balance here and you really can't fall behind in any of them yes it's possible to be someone who gets more money or gets you know so that you can control these disks better or to get more material so you can build more spaceships or get more research points so you can well I get a lot of Technology and I think it's a very valid point to follow any one of those three tracks more than the other ones but you can't skip one either you have to be able to do all of them so this is kind of a economic strong point of the game and I think how much you find that interesting is gonna really determine whether you like the game or not so that's eclipse fans of the game are probably saying fast with youth there's so many things you skip yeah I know because there's just too much and I'm not here to give you the rules of the game you can get that from the rule book but I guess I why I'm talking about that the game is not that difficult to understand there's a lot going on of course but I mean once you have it explained to you where you go through the rule book you'll get it there is a lot of cleanup involved in the game and there's a lot of things that are going on in there but it's once you set it up the game most of the games I've seen have been three hours to play three hours for a four player game five player game so that's reasonable it's a longer game but it's not overwhelmingly long you get points at the end of the game for science technologies that you've done for tiles that you've discovered for chips that you got from battles from special abilities from your race there's different ways to get victory points and you add them together and whoever has the most points is the winner now what do I think about the game the fact is I really enjoy it I am hesitant to call this one of the best games of all time and I'll tell you there is a hankering that I have when I'm done playing eclipse for Twilight Imperium because Twilight Imperium does different things it has a sprawling political intrigue system and massive battles in combat eclipse has really cool battles with custom spaceships but I would hesitate to call them massive Eclipse does not feel strong it feels more like foundation the game in the sense as you go out and you your small Empire grows and you do come up with other players but you might not have combat with them and you still might win with technology or something like that the technology and building your spaceships to me is the most fascinating fun part of the game and if they took that and broke it out and made their own game about it that would be like that'd be really cool as it is I will gladly play clips III think it's fun I think it's entertaining I think it's a very strong economic euro game with combat which in essence is what I've always always wanted to do so how can I complain about eclipse I think it's going to appeal to a lot of people I've seen it appeal to a lot of people it's a very popular game it's certainly full goodies inside the game so I'm gonna give this one two very strong thumbs up of recommendation it's not for everyone but it's the closest Forex space game that is for everyone that I've seen and I think a lot of people are really gonna enjoy it thanks so much for watching the diced our videos find more great videos and reviews as well as our top audio podcast at dice tower calm you can also find the latest for game news at dice tower news.com I'm Eric summer and you've been watching the dice tower the dice tower is sponsored by fun again games the world's best game source fun again games has over 5,000 games available check them out at Flanagan calm you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 197,802

Rating: 4.790576 out of 5

Keywords: 4x, board game, boardgame, game review, review, dice, dice tower, aliens, dice game, card game, space game, scifi, scifi game, 4x game, Eclipse, Tom Vasel, Asmodee, eclipse board game, eclipse review, eclipse board game review, eclipse game, eclipse second dawn for the galaxy, how to play eclipse, eclipse dice tower, eclipse overview, tom vasel eclipse, how to play the game eclipse, how to play eclipse 4x

Id: uS157k0m-YU

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Fri May 11 2012