Eclipse Again!

Posted on by Paul Beakley

Eclipse Again!

Now that we’re boned back up on the rules, we got in some more of My Favorite Space Game. Tried the last of the weird new races from the latest supplement, the Pyxis Unity, and sure enough they’re very weird.

Two player wasn’t great last week but three player is so strong and relatively fast. Trained MadJay Brown​ up on how to play and he took the Rho Indi space pirates. They’re a fun choice! But super aggressive. I used some map control tricks to shut his little aggro assholes out of my area but jeez, super ugly when he figured out how to latch onto my face.

The Unity is all about using a single currency for everything, which can be flexible but ultimately takes a lot of practice. I used them to sprawl out on the map, leaving me struggling to advance my technology. Player three’s Magellans steadily marched to a competent victory built on a diverse portfolio of victory points and a conservative map.

I already want to play again.

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

9 thoughts on “Eclipse Again!”

  2. Right? It’s so smooth.

    I used to table it only if I could get 5-6. It wasn’t ponderous but it sure can be swingy. Get your tech-track or monument building race pinned between a couple jock races and you could kiss your species goodbye.

  3. Do fewer players really help with the swinginess? I’ve only played with 6 or more players and it always felt like it mattered less about what plans or strategies people had and more about who was lucky enough to have good techs pop up the turn after they passed first.

  4. On the tech tree side, at least there are fewer draws. And now there are lots of rare techs as well as Developments. Lots of things to spend your pink on. But yeah, for sure, sometimes one person gets the Rock and the Paper never shows up, both greasing Rock’s rails and making it very hard on Scissors to leverage their advantage. Hard to stop computer/missile platforms if you can’t score that -2 shield.

    Smaller table also means you can spend quite a bit more time doing your own thing without your aggro neighbor, two hexes away, getting in your business. We played with the “lost homeworlds” (or whatever it’s called) variant where you populate the other homeworld spots in ring 2 with NPC homeworlds, populated with tough-ish Ancient cruisers. That’s another speedbump to deal with. By the time we finally met it was turn 5, maybe? And we’d all had a chance to go down our respective paths a bit.

    Those big tables get so claustrophobic so fast.

  5. I’ve almost exclusively played two-player Eclipse and loved it! My only gripe is that most sessions had the same arc of each player doing their own thing until the last few rounds and then one massive combat showdown that determines the winner.

    Does anyone else feel that way? Does that change a lot at 3 players?

  6. We played that 2p game last week and, yeah, it was just that: two solitaire games and then a throwdown or two in rounds 8 and 9.

    Three did feel different in that the threat of PvP is a bit higher but not so high that everyone has to scramble to fleet up at the expense of tech and exploration.

  9. Oh! So the Unity race I was playing? Their killer app was that they could convert ship types. Combine a couple interceptors into a cruiser, combine a couple cruisers into a dreadnaught, and ultimately combine a couple dreads into a “death star moon” which is pretty tough but also worth 4 VPs.

    I had stumbled into a 3-hull discovery tech (shard hull maybe?) and later into one of the rare guns, pair of two blue dice at 3x hits/die. I was short-sighted and put the shard hull on my cruisers, which was fuckin’ rad because I put my big engine on my dread. Then I’d fly the one dread super-fast all over the map and it’d barf out a pair of overarmored, overarmed, otherwise immobile cruiser.

    I think the REAL trick is to do that with the interceptors. At the cost of a handful of resource (transmatter I think is what Unity calls it), you can convert one dread into four of the little fuckers. 16 total hull to get through! 8 dice hitting with 3 hits each! Aaaaahhh bliss.

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