TDG: Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

hello and welcome to the discriminating gamer the board game review show that in the third grade actually did a lip-sync of the Monkees Daydream Believer now I can't do it right now for you because of copyright issues but I'll give you a little taste of my part you ladies and gentlemen today we're gonna go ahead and take a look at eclipse second dawn for the galaxy [Music] in eclipses second arc of the galaxy from Elana pellet two to six players take on the rules of various races or factions as they attempted by for supremacy throughout the galaxy they're going to do so using a variety of warfare diplomacy and economic measures this is of course a tile laying space exploration game a lot why light Imperium but it's quite a bit different in many fundamental ways you're each going to have a set of kind of dials or what look like dials essentially you have cubes around these circles they represent money materials and science and you're gonna be spending these things as you expand on the board you're also going to have your own individual player board it's going to have blueprints for your ships with kind of your basic ship layout you're also gonna have room to develop your science you're also going to have a space for discovery tiles as well as the cylinders at the bottom for your actions now the game of the game you're going to count out a number of tiles depending on how many players you have you're gonna have the same number of the number one tiles number two tiles but you're number three tiles will vary depending on those numbers at the very center of the game board you have kind of a supercomputer there that you can get a lot of points for for destroying but then you also have out a kind of the ring - you're gonna have the various home systems of the players now the first thing that happens every round is you remove a number of tech tokens from a bag and place them on the tech board these can be purchased by paying the science cost and taking the science action but that goes out first so everything kind of see what Sciences are available what what does tech is available for that round now during the action phase players have a number of actions that they can take now the first thing they can do is explore you do this by taking your cylinder from your from your player aboard there and placing it on another section of your player board that says that says what action you're taking these actions also say how many actions you can take per activation of that kind so you can explore you place a disk there you can grab or another one of the tiles place it next to one of the warp gates that's on your home tile and you have to line up the warp gates there and you can then move your ship in there and then you can also if you want place another disk there to show that you control it if there are any planets there and some of them will be of course materials planets or science planets or you know random planets you can go ahead and flip over some your colony ships to actually take cubes out of those areas on your dials and place them on the board you can also do research essentially take the research action and you can spend a number of research that you've got that you keep track of around those dials to purchase some of those technologies you can take the upgrade action essentially what you can do is you if you have the appropriate technology you can pay a cost to essentially build a better part of your ship you can either improve weapons or shields or your your drive system or your power because everything has to receive power in order to work you can also build new ships and structures you have different kinds of ships you've got just kind of interceptors you've got cruisers you've got dreadknots you also have space stations you can plays out there you also have kind of orbital stations that give you a special you know where you can place your cubes there and then of course you also can build monoliths which are just kind of you know static victory points you can take them move actions you can move a number of your ships a distance equal to their drive capabilities and then you can also take an influencer action meaning you can move disks from one second your control to another second controller you can just reclaim them you can also flip over to of your colony ships back to their ready status so now you go ahead you take all these actions and as soon as you can take anymore actions because every disk you spend is gonna cost you money so you have to constantly keep an eye on how much money you're going to spend that round well as soon as you can't spend any more you don't want to you can go ahead and flip your player summary card over to the kind of pass side and you can pass now you can still take some reactive things if you want to which are which are actions that are less powerful than on the other side but those the only things you can do from that point forward once everybody has passed then that's the end of the phase now if there are any ships of different factions in the same location you go ahead and you do battle you conduct battle now each ship as I say has those blueprints so you look at the blueprints with any upgrades on there and that's going to tell you how many die you roll in any advantages you get or any disadvantages you deal to your enemy during combat so you go ahead you do the roll you keep rolling until one side of the other is kaput and then whichever side wins of course the damage is repaired at that point now at the end of your turn you collect your income then of course you have to spend whatever you've spent based on how many cubes you spent you also will collect your research and science and that will go up on your chart around the dials there so you keep track of all of those things at the end of the round you go ahead you return all of your your influence disks back to your track from the actions back your track they can be spent next time you're also going to flip over your colony ships that still remain and prepare for the next round so you're going around and around doing these things you also have some other options are gonna come up like I say you can you can build those those monoliths what's your kind of static victory points as long as you hold it you're also going to trade ambassadors which will give you a point and allow you to remove one of your cues from your dials the places there to give you an economic advantage but critically whenever you take over a new sector in most new sectors I should say or whenever you win a battle you're gonna have an opportunity to get discovery tiles now the discovery tiles are in a bag depending on if you're in combat depending on if you destroy the ships or just engaging the combat you can draw a number of these tiles you can also like I say take those when you when you take over certain systems now these tiles you can place on your player board they'll be spots form you place them usually facedown now these discovery the discovery tiles are gonna have point values from one to four obviously you want to draw the higher point values but you essentially are banking those and when you draw the discovery tiles you can bank those if you want or on the other side they will have other advantages maybe you gain a permanent boost to one or more parts of your economy maybe you'll gain some kind of a tech maybe you'll gain a ship there's different advantages you can get from those tiles you find on the board after those eight rounds you're gonna go ahead and tally up everything you get points for me get point from the reputation tiles or drop the bag from the discovery tiles are taken from the board from planetary systems you control any monoliths that give you point values any tech that give you point values any other specific species bonuses that may give you values and critically if you've ever broke an alliance you get a trader card and that trader card won't allow you to engage in any other alliances until somebody else breaks it and make it the credit card that trader Crescent worth negative two points to you if you've got at the end of the game whoever has the most points in the end of the eight rounds wins eclipsed second dawn for the galaxy so I play the clips the original version of Eclipse the first time a long time ago as I recall that was the first game I bought that cost $100 and it was like oh and man I loved it it was so much fun my friends and I played it a few times and we just got a kick out of it and then it kind of stopped getting to my table it's not getting my table because it was at the set up was a bear the set up was an absolute bear for that game but still it was you know we were glad every time we played it it was it was worth it was so much fun I didn't play it nearly as much as I wanted to play it though because of that set up time but I really really had fun with it and I haven't played it for years I brought it with me when it came to Texas it's over here on my shelf I still have it and I keep thinking I'm gonna play and we plate and always wanted to review it the problem was it just I just never like I said never got the chance to get it to the board to the table again so when the Kickstarter happened I was thinking I don't know if I want to kick-start this I don't do a lot of kick starters but I thought man the components look great and it does look like they streamlined it so I went ahead I I kick started it one of the rare times I kick start and it arrived not too long ago and we broke out and played it and I got to tell you something first of all the game is it's very similar to the original version in how it plays but it is more streamlined it does move quicker and critically that set up time is cut dramatically because of the way the game is organized the game is comes in this great storage compartments where everything is very easily stored very easily to find very easy to set up I'd say you know when you play the original game setup took quite a while this this shaves it down it's you know five minutes set up now it's very quick very quick seven that right there is just awesome but we played the game and I forgot is I remember loving the game I forgot how much I loved that game I remember I forgot how much I truly enjoyed I mean I'm playing this game again and I'm thinking you know I could see this being in my top 10 top 20 and I don't I don't think it's been there for a while I can remember where it was my last top went to my last top 100 that's you know over 2 to 3 years ago now but it wasn't in my top 10 or 20 I don't think and it probably should be because this is such a good game it's such a fun game now some people just kind of said well it's a euro and I don't agree with it I don't think this is just a euro I think it's it's it's a big part euro but I think it's more of a hybrid and I generally like hybrid games I like games that are hybrids of euros and kind of a merit rash and do it well and balance it well and this one does because yes you got that economic stuff going on but you've also got direct conflict you've also got building your own battleships to go into that combat so it but it's it's not a war game and it's not a game that's just revolves around combat which is something that's really really cool so I really liked that quite a bit um you know for a long time when this came out people were saying it could be a TI a killer could be a Twilight Imperium killer and it wasn't this is not the same game this Twilight Imperium by a long shot I still think Twilight Imperium for me is a superior game just because I do like the stories that tells and I and I think to me it feels bigger it feels more grander and I do like that it's a more open game and frankly I got to admit I do like that it's a longer game I like that it's that big epic story this is a much shorter game we played a four player game the other day it was about three hours it wasn't very long so this is cool because you play this game quit when you want a quick game but to me it's not quite as epic as ti4 having said that though it is an epic game and it does have an epic feel to it that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy eclipse second off for the galaxy I really really like this one quite a bit I'm really glad I did the Kickstarter looking forward to playing it a lot more and the soon as this is available in retail I highly recommend if you know if it's in the price point you think is worth it I recommend picking it up it is an amazing game I love love love the clip second valve for the galaxy recommendation is buy it thank you once again for joining us today on the discriminating gamer as always wants you to please leave a comment for us on youtube by working geek on her Facebook page on the discriminating gamer comm it's gonna please like us on Facebook subscribe on YouTube and follow us on Twitter we are the discriminating gamer and you [Music] [Music] yeah sorry comes up and that's listed in email I apologize

Channel: The Discriminating Gamer

Views: 11,646

Rating: 4.918644 out of 5

Keywords: Lautapelit.fi, twilight empire 4th edition, space 4X game, tile laying game, eurogame, economics game, spaceship combat game, dice rolling, player actions, board game review, review, 4x game

Id: Vr82I5kx5nM

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020