• Game: Eclipse
• Publisher: Asmodee
• Designer: Touko Tahkokallio
• Genre: 4x space conquest
• Players: 2-6
• Playtime: 30-40 minutes per player



• What's Hot: Brilliantly executed, streamlined design; compelling resource management; customizable ships; great die-rolling combat; fast-paced and always engaging



• What's Not: Lacks a strong in-game political element; fiction is generic

by: Michael Barnes

The genius of Eclipse, the new 4X space conquest game from Finnish designer Touko Tahkokallio, lies in its supremely judicious compression. It's an epic, Civilization- style game with a complex three resource economy, three linear technology trees, and a unique, modular system for players to customize four ship classes to their martial tastes. There are also ancient alien ships to battle, unknown reaches of the galaxy to discover, and plenty of direct, dice-rolling combat between plastic spacecraft. Eclipse is board gaming space opera at its best, a brilliant design that may very well be the apotheosis of the hybridization impulse that has wedded the streamlined European and more baroque American design sensibilities over the past decade.

There's a lot of game in Eclipse. The scope is grand and it touches every almost every significant aspect of its direct inspirations, chiefly classic PC games like Master of Orion and more complex tabletop fare like Twilight Imperium and Through the Ages. Yet it's an extremely tight design with almost no dead weight. In play, it absolutely blazes along with single-action turns that smartly compacts functions that in other games would require multiple phases or processes to accomplish.

Mapping an adjacent galaxy hex, claiming it as territory, and dropping colony ships onto available planets is a single Explore action. Researching a technology allows you to freely build that particular ship component, two per Upgrade action. No need to build ships at a specific location and then spend turns getting them to the other side of your empire- you can just build them anywhere under your control.

These kinds of smart compressions are hugely innovative in a "why didn't somebody think of that before" kind of way. There is also quite a bit of exceptionally well-considered automation aided by the best player mat I've ever seen in a game. Every piece of administration and upkeep is handled by it at a glance. Every action costs money at the end of the turn on an escalating scale. When action disks are removed from the display, the new cost for your turn is right there, and you can take a quick glance at a population box to see what your income for the turn will be based on how many resource-generating planets your people currently occupy.

Claiming sectors also removes action discs from availability which in turn increases your upkeep costs and larger empires are more expensive to run. Here again, it's a brilliant distillation of mechanics and thematic concepts that keeps things simple but doesn't foreclose on depth or complex decisions.

Every turn is engaging and interaction is high. You might need to figure out a way to buy a needed tech to upgrade your starbases so that you defend sectors against a hostile neighbor. But then in that same round you might be in a position to broker an alliance to police a player that's researched their way into dreadnoughts with dual antimatter cannons and impenetrable hulls. Or you might want to take a chance on exploring local sectors to try to find more materials to build ships or to colonize science planets to make up for a research deficit. Nine turns isn't enough to do it all, and every choice counts.