Eclipse, the best game ever?

I first heard about Eclipse in the beginning of Autumn semester, as a rumor that "a great game is about to be published in the near future". Then after a few months, in November, Tapani and I were discussing Christmas gifts wishes. He mentioned the game once again.

In late November we thought about making a pre-order, but due to tight budged we ended not getting it. A week before Christmas I thought about surprising him by buying one copy of the game, when we learnt that all copies were already sold out on the same week as it's release in the market.

Rumours of the "best game ever" started to pop here and there, Tapani was reading things about the game online all the time, we had to try it out. Fe days before Christmas I meet Hannu Sinisalo on the bookstore, and he says "we have so much pieces to punch"... My fingers started tingling of excitement.

This game is rated 8,63 in Board game geek, while the #1 game, Twilight Struggle, is rated 8,31. Is this rating so high because only people that were really eager to play it (mostly people that have pre-ordered the game) got to play it, or is the game THAT awesome? I had to experience it for myself.

As far as my imagination goes, since this is a pretty new game and only GAMERS have tryed it out, there are only votes in BGG from those enthusiastic gamers. Can we really trust those ratings? Maybe this could be compared with the movie theatre, where only fans of a given movie get to go to the premier.

So last Tuesday we gathered with Hannu and Ville, 2 Tampere board gamers, to finally play the so amazing game. As expected, I had not read anything about the game, but had high expectations nevertheless.

We met at 16:30 in Artturi Pub (yes, thank you Hannu for taking Tapani to the pub! An Epic Eclipse Miracle). It took us about an hour to go through the rules and we played until about 21:15.

The rules were not complicated as such, they were quite straight forward and rational. There were just too many of them to start with. The theme of that game is not my favourite, just like Race for the Galaxy, Battle Star Galactica, Star Wars... For a science fiction fan like Tapani, this is of course a great theme. But for me, too far fetched to be believable. I like putting a story on my games.

Eclipse is not much of a story telling game. It's more of building ships, solving quests, fighting your opponents kind-a-thing. There is a lot more to it, of course. But the intention of my post is to to make a review of the game, but to tell my experience and impression.

All in all the game was interesting, had nice graphics (thumbs up to the graphic designer), good strategics. But I wouldn't say it's the ultimate best game. I can understand the fuzz coming from "hard core gamers", but I wouldn't expect this game to be very popular among "soft gamers" like me, not to mention to general population.

This is my impression after playing one game. Well, I have to say that the location wasn't the best after all. Artturi had an open state after 19:00, which made our concentration a lot lower then before. Before the pub got full, both, Tapani and I were enjoying the game quite a lot. When the pub got so full that there were no tables available left (about 3h from the game already) I wasn't able to keep up the strategic thinking and got to loose a couple of battles I was not expecting to have.

I would like to give the game another try in a more quiet place. It was good that we played with fast players, otherwise I'd say the game would suck. Tapani, Hannu and Ville were great gamers to be with, coz they are fast, helpful, and competitive at the same time.

Player interaction was just about perfect. If you build your game in a certain way, you might not get interaction almost at all... But depending how you place tiles in the beginning of the game, you might be between battles and diplomatic relations for the entire game.

Now, let's see if the Internet will work so that I can post this article at some point...