Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review - A Plastic Classic

judging by our youtube stats nothing gets you folks more excited than a big glossy fictional war well i hope you've brushed your hair because today we would like to introduce you to eclipse second dawn for the galaxy and this conclusion crept up on me while writing this review but i think this could be the greatest war game ever made this bad boy is a new and refined second edition of the 2011 smash hit eclipse but what you need to know is that this dense dark box of interstellar warfare still feels perfectly fresh and relevant in 2020 and i absolutely like it enough to employ some classic shut up and sit down low cost low dignity cosplay and let's get started this isn't practical at all in the beginning there was a box and the box was godlike the new edition of eclipse ships with a superlative storage solution that feels like you're poking around in the chest cavity of optimus prime with all these plastic trays keeping everything in place now lots of games do have these plastic trays but eclipse second edition is the first time that i truly love them because they don't just hold things these trays are incorporated into the game proper for example just during setup you need to hand out to each player diplomats ships cubes trackers boards sheets reference cards so that in a full six player game you need to hand out 500 discrete objects you ready done the same trays that store the game also act as marvelously three-dimensional trackers displays and storehouses but as clever as this is it shouldn't be a surprise because the big thing you need to know about eclipse is that it takes the genre of the empire building war game but then performs a textbook orchidectomy which is to say it removes all of the bollocks the designer of eclipse the finn together has asked what is it that people actually want from this genre of the sprawling space war game and concluded that it is exciting space battles researching powerful technology getting more resources and figuring out how to spend them a dash of diplomacy on top of a whole lot of strategy and then eclipse simply does those four things better and often easier and simpler than any other war game on the market in fact you could say it eclipses them playing as either a beginner-friendly human faction or a funky alien species that all have their own unique rules and drawbacks players and eclipse are all racing to get the most victory points which will make them the winner and most victory points come from owning territory which gets better the closer you get to the center of this galaxy so you can think of eclipse as a game of king of the hill or if you prefer a kind of cone that causes everybody to slide inexorably down towards the center of the galaxy and into everyone else's business you also get points for specializing in a particular kind of technology and for just smashing stuff a whole load of victory point tokens are to be found in this bag and the bigger the battle you just started or suffered through the more point tokens you draw before you choose one adding to your reputation as a people who have seen some or just started some and this little system goes some way to fixing the most peculiar problem of tabletop war games which is that as much as people want to play them often they can be uncomfortable with the idea of spending their time attacking a player who's done nothing to them because if they win they're a jerk and if they lose they're a jerk and a loser eclipse however in giving you points for both starting fights and being attacked enables you to feel good about that exchange and better yeah it encourages players to fight early when there are more high value tokens in this bag as if you were skimming the icing off a particularly gory cake so you now know the three ways to get points in eclipse territory tech and fights you've got all your bits in front of you like a wealthy child's lunchbox now you just need to learn how to play now in games this big you'll often hear you can do anything well in eclipse on your turn you can do six things you pick one of those six things to do and if you don't want to do any of them you pass so because in this game territory is so useful points and you'll need territory to get income the first action i will teach you is explore now when you explore you simply reveal any of the hexes next to you and because eclipse is always jimmying interesting little decisions into your turn you also orient it because ships can only travel between spaces where there is a complete wormhole so in choosing to explore and choosing which way to go you're not just picking who your neighbors are you're deciding where the fences are it's very cool also often when you explore you will find discovery tiles which will see the game giving you a random and quite serious bonus from giant guns to money to monoliths which resemble giant chocolate bars and fittingly give victory points to whoever controls them now ordinarily i hate exploration mechanics like this in games because one player drawing a card to read what private reward they get feels like onanism but in eclipse this exploration mechanic i don't mind because it is ridiculously fast and the items you find are powerful enough that what you discover is of interest to everybody which is actually how i spice up christmas what have you got there henry but more excitingly to boring people like me is that often these hexes have planetary defense systems that you need to go and rough up before you can take control of that hex which has the marvellous effect of forcing all players in eclipse to routinely ask themselves how brave they're willing to be how big and shiny an armada are you gonna build up before you send it to take on those non-player ships to the point that if players in eclipse that i'm playing with choose to take on those npcs early enough with ships that can barely handle them which is such a tense proposition if that player then goes on to win the entire game i don't mind because they're braver than me and cooler than me and i want to have their children oh also and i love this one of the alien races you can be can co-exist with these defense systems and actually gets victory points for each defense system that's still alive in the galaxy at the end of the game opening up weird diplomacy where they'll say oh no no no don't go and beat up those npcs i'll give you a biscuit or whatever not a biscuit it's eclipse so it would be a space biscuit anyway once you've explored this new system the way you expand into it is placing one of these tasty looking lozenges down to show it's yours and then placing population cubes onto the planets and look you're revealing higher numbers here showing your income at the end of each round in minerals research and money which is simply how you build ships how you research tech and actually let's get back to money later money in this game is cool and then as you get income of minerals research and money you just move these trackers if there is a quicker and easier way of handling income and expenditure in a tabletop game than these trays i simply haven't seen it and on top of that because these trays are three-dimensional you can easily from across the table look over and see how much of any resource anyone has it's also pretty worth mentioning that while exploring players can in fact build the galaxy outwards they can explore away from their enemies and in a sense away from the game and this is balanced these hexes that you build outwards with aren't particularly great but what i realized when i watched my friends play the reason this mechanic is important is it gives players who are a little less comfortable with aggression like i described before an option to play in their sand pit they can build the sandpit outwards eclipse says here's the key to my dump truck your sand will block out the sun now i have realized that i've told you this is a relatively simple and easy to learn game and in teaching you one of the six actions i've been talking for like three minutes so let's teach you four more actions at warp speed you can spend your time building this lets you spend minerals building a number of ships equal to your species build activations with bigger ships costing more minerals you can spend your turn moving this lets you move a number of ships equal to your species as move action with your ship's engines showing how many hexes each one can move you can spend your turn influencing letting you pop a lozenge on an empty system that's already been explored or remove one of your lozenges controlling a system why would you do that well basically it's because controlling space costs money but we'll get to that later right now i'm trying to go fast to prove a point ah these things that's awful you can spend your time researching spending research points to acquire anything you can afford you can bankrupt your laboratories at the start of the game getting the most powerful canon in the galaxy eclipse does not give a hoot but technology you acquire in the same color offers an increasingly sexy discount on future techs you buy of that color and tech is one of the areas where eclipse blows the competition out of the water with the force of a cannonball performed by a really really large kid in eclipse you deal out technology from this bag at the start of every round onto this technology train which can and will be passed between players like a tray of chocolates at a party now this system is so good for several reasons first off because there's only often one of a variety of tech it makes the acquisition of technology that you might want a game that everybody is playing together i'm taking the fusion source you can't have it second it makes the acquisition of technology more exciting because if you grab a gauss shield then you know look no more gauss shield you know that you're the only person in the galaxy with that ability it's also a fabulous bit of variable setup for eclipse if you'd like to get a power source at the start of each game what are you gonna do if there is no power source what are you gonna do if there was a power source but your opponent takes it but i've saved the best for last the sixth and final thing you can spend your time doing in eclipse is upgrading your ships and if you buy eclipse if you love eclipse it is almost certainly going to be because of this system and i arguably definitely should have put it in the video sooner so a bit of background to this action players and eclipse can build small medium or large ships for a small medium or large fee and you can also research the ability to build defensive static star bases now the way that combat and eclipse works is that ships will first fire any missiles they have towards one another with faster ships firing first and after the missiles if anything's still alive ships will take turns firing cannons at one another once again with the faster ship going first and these rounds of cannon fire continue until one side has either fled the hexagon or is dead and if you look at your player sheet you'll see that all of your ship types have their own schematics so this is how many hexes that ship can move when they move that is the dice they roll in combat and this is the total energy they have to power other tiles so you can see that this cannon and this engine each take one of the ship's three available power now when you take the upgrade action you're going to take this fabulously satisfying tray that holds duplicates of all the different tiles that you start the game knowing and that you might research in the course of the game and it's not simply that was fake wasn't it it's not simply that when you take the research action you can put new tiles into the empty slots no in eclipse you can cover any tile with anything you've researched as many times as you want and no matter how good or odd you make your ships they always cost the same and any changes you make take place across your fleet instantly and just 20 minutes to the game when you've researched maybe one or two new high quality ship parts and you found some other weird fragment of alien tech that you didn't ask for floating around in the galaxy this system of schematics opens up like a beautiful flower and in that flower is space murder do you want to build attack craft that's how bristling with missiles even replacing the hull with missiles oh great idea all of your friends will hate and fear you in equal measure unless oh no to counter you your opponent has built ships with engines that are just a little faster meaning in combat they'll fire their missiles first and you'll fire your missiles never but what's this a third player has designed ships that can withstand those initial missile volleys so unless you get really lucky with your missile dice then you're gonna have to retreat but what's this it looks like a fourth player has built uh mid-sized ships with a really good computer something hit on every dice roll i have literally no idea how that is gonna perform against any of us so i suppose one of us has to just fight them and find out bag is he not it now even in a single player game i think this system would be fun and liberating like playing with legal lego but in a multiplayer game this system is b-a-n-a-n-a-s-i-n-s-p-a-c-e so we talk a lot about fuzz on shut up and sit down with fuzziness being the pleasurable state some board games achieve where rather than the game giving you all of the hard data you need to crunch out the correct decision in any given moment through calculation instead games that are fuzzy give you woolly probabilities and notions and concepts you can't fully calculate that see players instead asking what do i think i should do would i be an idiot for doing this and fuzziness means less work for the player it's often more satisfying when you make a good decision and it's less frustrating when you make a bad decision and because of this ship design system the question of when and how and where to attack in eclipse has thicker fuzz than the floor of a barber shop you're thinking about how many dice are you both rolling what dice are we both rolling what dice are we both hitting on how many hits can we both take who is gonna roll first it's ridiculous and it will probably be alienating to people who don't have much experience of strategy games but for people who do have experience of strategy games it is a delight that always ends in one player just going uh okay you know what sold it let's go pushing all of their ships in and that moment is so exciting for the whole table not only because the fuzziness means nobody knows what's going to happen next but because this is a moment of scientific interest for everybody where you finally get to see how these designs that you've been panickingly tweaking for the better part of an hour actually fair against one another which often has all the dismay of an episode of robot wars and combat is often one of the areas where games like this fall down because it runs the risk of either boring the players who aren't involved or frustrating the players who are involved or both but eclipse does neither it simply sees both players are pending big juicy handfuls of dice like they're tipping over fruit bowls until one or other person retreats and it's quick and it's exciting and then it's over i've only got one system left to teach you about and that system is money it's a gas but specifically it's the gas your empire runs on remember how you've got minerals that build ships and research that lets you get tech well you also have money which is how you pay exclusively for these little lozenges those are the same lozenges that you're permanently using to take control of systems and temporarily popping over here to pay for actions and at the end of a round when you pass the number you have revealed beneath your furthest lozenge which is a great pairing of words is your bill for the round in money coinage cash now this is a balancing mechanic because players that take more territory will find they have to pay more to take as many actions as everybody else but everything in eclipse does at least two things right this system is also a jaws of life prying open the possibility space of the game and allowing taking decisions in eclipse to be a decision in and of itself you see you can take a bunch of actions early and bankrupt yourself which will potentially give you a better board state but then you'll be less flexible later or you can save that money to take more actions later or if i don't know you just need to answer the door you can just pass a round of eclipse and know that that money will go into your coffers and you can use it later or my favorite you can punch a player in their wallet by specifically targeting all of their money producing planets or if they just utterly mismanage themselves that player might find themselves in the position of having to liquidate their assets to pay for their own bloated existence in the manner of empires throughout human history but while i am all too aware that i've spent this entire review so far gushing like a broken toilet about individual systems in eclipse the tech the ship design the territory the money the true grandeur of this game is of course sitting down to play it and seeing how all of these systems flop over one another like tactical tagliatelle you can't upgrade ships without first asking if you should research some new ship parts you can't research new ship parts without asking whether you should prioritize research in your economy you can't think about your economy without thinking about whether you can protect or expand your territory you can't think about your territory without thinking about upgrading your ships and in seeing how all of these systems are so immaculately balanced in relation to one another eclipse is revealed as the philosophical fusion between the action-packed war game and the masterfully considered euro game or eclipse is like being sat at a buffet and just wondering which oily calorie-rich moment you're gonna dull up onto your situation next whether it's researching some steaming new piece of technology or whether you're going to push it on crispy ships across the board or into conflict with someone else i might just be hungry oh one more thing i was going to mention eclipse as a final plus point is better at a wider range of player counts than almost any other game in the genre you care to mention i would happily play this game with a full six players i'd have to play it with five four three i would even be perfectly happy playing it with just two people at which point it becomes one of the most lavish and evocative duels that money can buy at this point in the review you'd probably expect me to pivot into explaining what's wrong with the clip second edition but uh i don't know look the first edition of eclipse had stuff wrong with it you know the tech was a little imbalanced it could run a little long but this second edition is an exhaustive and expensive and attentive refinement of a game that frankly didn't have much wrong with it in the first place so instead i've got a couple of things i can say first my main criticism of a clip second edition is just that it is expensive if we're talking about intriguing war games you could buy dune and inish and the original edition of eclipse for less than 150 this game costs or perhaps more relevantly if you're not a huge fan of combative strategy you could just buy things without miniatures and buy an entire mid-sized board game collection my other criticism would be the ridiculous amount of space that this game takes up i described eclipse's boxes like the chest cavity of optimus prime earlier well having it set up is like an autobot autopsy this is a four player game now if we squeezed everyone up and everyone put their resource tracker back on top of their bits we could probably squeeze a full six player game onto my table but a my table is larger than the average table so that's actually quite damning in and of itself and b even if we can fit six plus around this table all of the action in eclipse is in that central galaxy which is about the size of a dinner plate and i hate personally being sat far away from stuff i have to read in games i get that this is a luxury product that doesn't mean that i want the upper class experience of being sat at the end of a table squinting down at where the action is maybe i can muster up just one final criticism of eclipse which is that at 150 for most of you you're only going to want to pay for this game if you're going to love it but when i think about war games that people say that they love and the reasons they give for loving them i think about people loving the game of thrones game for retelling the saga of the books i hear that they love toilet imperium for the outrageous powers and frightening war sons they love comet for the giant plastic scorpion metaphorically speaking eclipse has no giant plastic scorpion i mean there's a big danger egg but someone just goes and kills it with lasers there's just not much of a hook for players to hang their imagination on there's fun in eclipse but it's the fun of interfacing with immaculate systems there's drama in eclipse but it's the drama of an unexpected integer well here's another analogy you know how three-legged stools are often more stable than four-legged stools well eclipse is like a flawless three-legged stool or if you prefer a stool sample so maybe the reason not to buy eclipse is that it's just too darn scandinavian a dark ergonomic and altogether superior construct but one where maybe that while it's fun to play it doesn't feel like the designer is having that much fun i mean maybe that's true for some people but it's not true for me i think eclipse is so good i will be giving my copy of ti4 to matt after this video admittedly that is partially because matt has simply played more toilet imperium 4th edition than i have which means that next year he'll be better equipped to do our review of the new expansion but it's also because i run a tight ship i don't need two board games in my collection that do the same thing look at that i don't need to go to the post office at all there's a letterbox right here doesn't fit hang on one two if i'm not actively looking for reasons to be mean to this game there's just no question shut up and sit down categorically recommends eclipse second dawn for the galaxy it is the luxury automobile of strategy games which is to say it's utterly humorous and tediously boyish and yet there is no denying you get what you pay for and candidly i'm also very excited for this game's fuchsia because while tokitakacaglio is so good at smoothing the wrinkles out of this genre he's pretty good at wrinkling the bejesus out of it too listen the first eclipse had a couple of expansions which included such bonkers ideas as roving anomalies that ate planets letting players evolve their own species and even dilate the flow of time to receive resources from themselves in the future and i think that just one firing on all cylinders expansion would secure this game in my mind as the greatest war game of all time at least until something else comes along i know that's a bold conclusion but i guess i'm just coming out at the end of 2020 just not giving a who i'm a wild man now anyway now it's time for me to end this video as we end all of our video reviews by me packing myself back in my box thanks for watching everybody if you've enjoyed this video please uh why not click on other war games of game of thrones or war of the ring i hate this song oh it's so bad oh it's so bad

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 440,653

Rating: 4.9621139 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster

Id: oO-YqmlY9XE

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TurtleFail]

well thats glowing

[u/Lautapelitfi]

Publisher here!
For our friends at the states, we still have some stock!
You can still get Eclipse: 2nd Dawn for the galaxy here: https://en.lautapelit.fi/product/42986/eclipse---2nd-dawn-for-the-galaxy-from-us-stock

Our distribution partners who might already have stock are as follows
UK:
Asmodee UK and Spiral Galaxy UK
Australia:
VR Distribution

Canada:
Lion Rampant

Our shop at https://en.lautapelit.fi/ will get stock early december.

For language versions our partners are as follows:

Spanish
Maldito games

German
Pegasus

French
Matagot

Russian
Crowd games

Korean
Starlight games

[u/fzkiz]

​

Me when a game has cheap components and costs less than $75:

"Why would they make the components so cheap and flimsy! I don't want to buy a game with terrible components that looks broken after a year or so!"

​

Me when a game uses components like Eclipse and costs more than $75:

"Why would they make the components so expensive that the game costs so much? This is ridiculous it's a board game and not a freaking car!"

[u/theotheraccountttt]

20:30 squinting down at the action (or research stack, or opponent resources and ship builds) at the far side of the table... is an issue however due to COVID our game group now plays Eclipse 2nd Ed on table top simulator (steam) and it is fabulous! And can be saved, quick to start and end etc. does not replace the experience of a game night fully, but is a very good option in these times.

[u/bobn3]

I don't like war games, but that storage solution and those trays make me feel things... beautiful things

[u/MrRocketScript]

I think a pretty big thing that isn't mentioned in the video is that Eclipse has no almost no text. So if you're looking for a big box board game to play with people that might not be able to read English, this might be the game for you.

[u/mbrochh]

Shit. I haven't even managed to get TI4 to the table and now I'm not sure if I should just sell it and get Eclipse instead.

[u/Excision]

Have ti4 and this, love both

[u/Waxmeneer]

I played a few games of the original eclipse and while I liked it, it had a few problems that caused me to sell it. Can anyone tell me if the second edition does anything to address the problem found below?

Maybe it was our table meta, but for a wargame there was very little actual war. Because war scores you points, and being attacked sets you back very far resourcewise, players would often only make very 'safe' attacks against the weakest player, since losing a fleet would make you a juicy target for your neighbours. To make matters worse, this weakest player was often weakest due to sheer luck thanks to the exploration mechanic. Losing in Eclipse seems to send you into a death-spiral which is very hard to recover from. So we often ended up in a situation where either no one really wanted to attack the weakest player since that would ruin their fun, but would not want to risk their fleets against stronger players. Or the weakest player would get eliminated entirely.

Furthermore, while the ship upgrade system is incredible, in practice in turned out to be a bit rock-paper-scissorsy. Most ships had a counter (for example, initiative was king with low armor ships) which, combined with the previous factor led to players upgrading to counter enemy designs. Then the enemy would be unwilling to attack, upgrading themselves to counter their counter etc. In the end this led to very stale games where combat only happened either in the very beginning (when there were few upgrades) or in the last turn when everyone was looking for points.

Finally, and this might be a more personal quibble, whenever I played Eclipse I always felt like the game was trying to stop me from actually playing the game. I always felt resources were relatively tight and you really needed certain techs (neutron bombs, the extra discs) before you could even consider getting to the fun part (e.g: invading other players). And then to get money to get these techs you would need the tech that makes your planets more efficient etc etc. In our games it often led to three boring hours of building and one big fun turn where shit hits the fan.

TL:DR: The first game didn't seem to reward those who attacked, but only those who attacked last

Edit: clarification