Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game
<p>I&#8217;m a big fan of the game genre called &#8220;4X&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.&#8221;. I&#8217;ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, <cite>Empire</cite>, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game.  <cite>Civilization</cite> is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it <cite>Master of Orion</cite> &#8211; the game &#8220;4X&#8221; was coined to describe &#8211; would have hooked me even harder if I&#8217;d known of it when it came out.  </p>
<p>I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3297">favorable review</a> of <cite>Twilight Imperium</cite> (hereafter &#8220;TI&#8221;), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete &#8211; a new design called <cite>Eclipse</cite> which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.</p>
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<p>When you unpack the components for <cite>Eclipse</cite>, you&#8217;re going to immediately get the impression that it&#8217;s <cite>Twilight Imperium</cite> lite.  Hexagonal starsystem tiles for variable board layout &#8211; check. Plastic ship models in different sizes &#8211; check. Playing mats, describing human and alien species one per &#8211; check.  This impression is not exactly wrong, but the differences turn out to be more important than the similarities.</p>
<p>One difference is that the game doesn&#8217;t start with all the board tiles down.  Instead, player homeworlds are arranged in a broken ring with unexplored space between and around them. Unlike TI, which has exploration only as a bolted-on afterthought with the Distant Suns option, exploration is central to this game and one of the ways to win is to explore more aggressively and successfully than your neighbors.</p>
<p>Another difference is that instead of a huge pile of available ships you have only a relatively small handful.  Interestingly, this actually encourages combat, because losing your fleet-in-being isn&#8217;t a catastrophe that will take you half the rest of the game to recover from.</p>
<p>But the most important difference is not local to one aspect of the game, it&#8217;s a global fact about the style of the entire game.  <cite>Eclipse</cite> is as tightly constructed and carefully interconnected as a Swiss watch.  By contrast, TI is a huge sprawling pile of game mechanics that make terrific thematic sense but don&#8217;t integrate all that well and in some cases are only half-realized (hello, politics subgame, I&#8217;m looking at you!).</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s an example of what I mean by tight construction.  Your player mat has a track with disc-shaped pieces on it.  You have to expend one of these temporarily (getting it back at the end of the round) to take a game action such as moving ships performing research, etc.  You have to expend one of these <em>permanently</em> to control a solar system. This matters because the track beneath the pieces has numbers on it representing the upkeep cost for your empire; as you take actions and seize systems, it rises. If at the end of a round you can&#8217;t cover that upkeep from your money reserve, you have to give up solar systems (taking back disks to cover numbers) until you can.</p>
<p>That one mechanic (somewhat reminiscent of the resource market in <cite>Power Grid</cite>) creates a delicate multi-way tradeoff between seizing territory, taking actions, and building a money reserve that you can use to finance a late-game surge. Because it does so with very little state, you can reason about your option tree more quickly and effectively than in a game with heavier mechanics.  This nets out as faster turns and shorter overall playing time; where a 6-player game of TI can easily take 8 or 9 hours, I&#8217;ve seen a 5-player game with mostly newbies take about 5 hours and a following 6-player game take about 4:30.  After another play or two I expect my group will get down to the designer&#8217;s estimate of a half hour per player.</p>
<p>Most of the the people in both games had previous experience playing TI with each other, and after the first game the consensus was already becoming clear; this game pretty much <em>obsoletes</em> TI.  You give up some thematic chrome; the real draw in TI&#8217;s sprawling elaborateness is the way it ticket-punches every trope from battlestars to the Galactic Council in a loving tribute to all those classic space operas you read as a kid.</p>
<p>What you get in return is a <em>much better game</em> &#8211; tighter, faster-playing, less vulnerable to runaway-leader effects, packing just as much tactical and strategic depth and multiple paths to victory but with much lower total complexity overhead. <cite>Eclipse</cite> is <em>elegant</em> in the way a mathematical theorem can be elegant &#8211; minimal premises worked to a powerful and satisfying conclusion.</p>
<p>I learned this morning that Eclipse, though only released in 2011, has shot up through BoardgameGeek&#8217;s game rankings to make #7 in the top ten. I&#8217;m not even a little surprised, and expect that game designers will be studying it as an innovative example for years to come.</p>
