But for a game generally considered to be a wargame, Eclipse does a fantastic impression of a low-interaction eurogame at two players.

When playing a two player game you see MUCH less interaction and of course there is no diplomacy to offset it. The dice holders did not hold the dice neatly as seen in the content description and the dice colors did not match (The rulebook may have been shown the 1st edition of Eclipse 2nd Dawn). The box is on the bigger side of board games for sure, coming in larger than the Twilight Imperium box. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This results in most games ending with the same handful of technologies on your board as must-owns, with a few tertiary techs lingering around the edges to add a small twist to your game.There will always be some leftover tiles for the 1 or 2 sections and the only time all the 3 tiles will be used will be during a 6 player game. During the game you’ll be taking discs from your player mat and add them to the action you have taken. When one side is wiped out or retreats, both sides draw point tokens worth 1-4 points from a bag based on the ships they destroyed and choose one to keep, and the victor may attempt to wipe out the opponent’s population and take control of the sector.

What this means is that you might not ever connect paths between players if you choose to not explore specific pathways.

In Eclipse you will be controlling one of the 7 different races (6 alien races and 1 human race) and you will be taking a single action on your turn. Beyond that, there are monoliths that can be constructed for victory points, and orbitals, spherical constructs that have pockets to hold some of your civilization’s cubes for a boost to your economy. I’ve already mentioned the unique ships for each faction, but there are also evocative, strange NPC pieces representing ancient tech, beautifully coloured space sectors, and lovely translucent plastic discs and cubes to show your presence on the board. The third player might build a group of mid-sized cruisers that have incredibly strong hulls, which means they survive long enough for their ion cannons to poke a fatal number of holes in their opponents…you get the idea!

If there is a note of caution I should sound it’s that a game like this certainly isn’t for everyone. The way the gameplay mechanic works with actions and income is incredible and I simply LOVE the customization you can make to not only your ships, but your ever-growing tech tree as well. Seeing the orbitals holding different colored cubes scattered about or the mass of ancient ships gathered on random tiles is breathtaking. This is a fairly low-scoring game–at the end of eight rounds, my multiple plays have averaged out to around twenty-five points, usually.

One of these spots, the galactic centre, is guarded by a horrendously tough definitely-not-a-Death-Star Galactic Central Defence System. These range from upgrades to your spaceships to economy upgrades and new structures that can be built across your systems. These increasing numbers are meant to represent the rising cost of your empire and during the upkeep phase you will take the highest uncovered money number on your tracker board and minus the highest number uncovered on your player sheet. We are a group of passionate individuals who share our love of board games through written and video reviews, articles, and humor, so that others can join us in our journey.