Lautapelit.fi Eclipse: 2nd Dawn for the Galaxy

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In the end, the weaknesses in Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy only really become apparent after nearly a dozen playthroughs.

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). In fact, the game slightly incentivizes other players to capitalize on the downtrodden civilization, swooping in like vultures to pick apart the corpse for their own gain. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a sprawling space game of conquest and expansion, praised for its tense, rewarding inter-player conflict, clever board constraints and implementation of diplomacy mechanics. 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! She is very familiar with the game of Scythe, and I explained the six action options of Second Dawn as being a feature just like the four action options (actually, 4x2) available in Scythe.

There are three different colors of techs, each focusing on a specific idea like ship upgrades, military or economy. Your desire for more conquest and exploration must be tethered by your civilization’s economic reality, which means understanding what actions will tax your economy more than others. But you’re also using these very same tokens to mark the star systems that you’re controlling, which means that the more systems you own, the fewer tokens you have for actions before they start getting reeeally expensive at which point you’d better hope that your economy is strong enough to cope with this level of spending and what’s this? The game board itself is composed of many tile pieces that form the overall galaxy once fleshed out and explored.

In fact, if one could level a criticism at it, it may initially seem to be too much of a Euro game with such a large focus on resource gathering. At two players, Eclipse plays like a marvellous, excessive economic face off with both players more or less doing their own thing. After that the play passing to the next player and around and round this goes until all players have passed. There are many differences between the two games, of course, but if someone can handle Scythe, that person can handle this game too.

What really excites me about Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is that I know it’ll give me a very different experience when I can finally play it with more people. Each alien race is setup completely different as well so playing through the game as any of the 7 selectable races will give you a bit of a different style. However, on the plus side, it has some very good examples of gameplay broken down between 4 fictitious players to give you a better sense of how Eclipse plays out. Game came with very minor damage to the box, which is annoying for a board game because the box is part of the product. These ambassador tiles are then placed on the others player sheet with one of their population cubes of their choice.

There are many potential paths to victory, so you need to plan your strategy according to the strengths and weaknesses of your species, while paying attention to the other civilizations’ endeavors. So in some cases you will need to build up a decent military just to pave the way to deeper regions of space. Individual faction boxes make setup super easy, then remain on hand as your resource tracking components and supply tray for the rest of the game.

The designers have cunningly made the player's board the hub for all those otherwise annoying end-of-round resource calculations. Furthermore, if you are able to destroy a ship before it attacks then they are out and don’t get to attack, so needless to say initiative is very important.