Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (2020)

How to Play Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

Goal of the Game

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a game about advancing your species’ control of the galaxy. Players each control one of seven unique factions all bidding to be the biggest and baddest there is, with points available at the end of eight rounds for controlling hexagonal space sectors, discovering technology, winning combat and a few minor activities.

At the end of the eighth upkeep phase, the game ends and points are totalled. The player with the most wins.

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Official Rulebook

Gameplay

On your turn, you move an influence disc from your expense track to one of six action slots. The more actions you take in a round, the more money you’ll need to pay at the end of the round to maintain your sprawling civilization. Each action can be taken 1-3 times per disc, depending on your species.

The six actions are all fairly simple:

• Explore: Connect a new space sector hex to one of your controlled regions.
• Move: Move a ship a number of spaces up to its move value.
• Research: Pay science (one of the three resources) to choose an available tech and add it to one of three tech tracks on your species board.
• Build: Pay materials to build ships (for attack and defense), starbases (for defense) or a couple of other structures that give you points or resources.
• Upgrade: Improve your ships with teach that you’ve already researched.
• Influence: Shift control of sectors you have access to, and give yourself the capability to colonize more planets than normal (leading to extra resources).

At the end of the round, any sectors that have at least two opposing factions (including NPCs – more on those later) engage in combat. 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.

Finally, the round ends with an upkeep phase in which players pay or gain the difference between the money their planets generate and the expense they uncovered on their influence track – possibly withdrawing from some sectors if they’ve overextended – before gaining technology and materials according to the planets they control.

Review of Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

“To be clear: this is one of the best physical editions of a big box board game ever… Eclipse carves a unique niche and in doing so it compares quite favorably to its competitors. It is faster and more playable than Twilight Imperium by a wide margin, while still being interesting and tense. I can’t really think of an exploration game I’d play over this one, and that’s pretty high praise.”

Derek Thompson, geeksundergrace.com

“I mean there isn’t much more I can say about how much I love about this game. It’s my favorite space themed game of all time and I will NEVER turn down a game of this. The immense amount of customization you have available to you is simply fun and the replayability is off the charts good…

The only real negatives I have are with the game setup in the rulebook (the rest of the book is excellent) and the low player count with the way the randomness can really harm players when exploring. With a little house ruling the exploration randomness can be alleviated and once understood, the game setup isn’t bad at all.”

fuzzyllamareviews.com

The content of this article is originally from Board Game Geek and thefriendlyboardgamer.wordpress.com. For more information and a better understanding of the game, you can watch the videos below.