Ulthuan

For any other board gamers out there I just played a 6 player game of Eclipse. We made good time at just 5 1/2 hours. We were playing with the Rise of Ancients and also the new Shadow of the Rift expansion which were fun. The new anomalies are tougher than I initially anticipated and they rather decimated the pinky/purple player when he took one on with 2 dreadnaughts in round 2.

I think the odds were in his favour but he did get shut out of the game from it

I won (I was red), but I was amazed I was never challenged for the centre of the Galaxy. People just considered me too strong to fight.

Black occupied large areas of the board but had a huge amount taken off him in the final round.

Nice gaming!

Looks like a great, fun game (though one where you need to have some spare time... 5 1/2 hours... ). What's the game about?

Eclipse is a Civilisation building game set in space. The goal is to build the best empire; you can do that by spreading out and occupying new planets, you can do it by developing your technology, you can do it by building monoliths/statues on your new planets... or you can just decide to beat the crap out of the other races and/or aliens (the neutral player).

Different races have different abilities, but the tech which you research goes on to your ships so you can all end up with some very unequal designs. Some races will be predisposed to go for really heavy tank like ships, some will aim for lots of little ships, some will go for big guns and some will aim to shoot first and be more accurate... there are lots of different ways to build your ships and what works against one enemy may fail against another.

I love the game. The box says 30 minutes per player, I've always said it's 45 minutes per player that knows what they're doing, one hour per newbie, 45 minutes set up and an hours rules explanation. 5 1/2 hours wasn't bad going for 6 of us with 2 newbies And of course next time we'll be faster still!! 4 hours is definitely a limit though, there's no way we would ever get it down below that line.

Sounds like fun! 5+ hours on a boardgame is rough, I've tried Runewars a couple of times and couldn't wait for it to end A 2h game of Chaos in the Old World is much more like it.

That does sound fun! It sounds like my kind of game. I love empire building But finding 4+ hours for a game is rare for me. Or perhaps, finding 4 hours and my friends also finding 4 hours (at the same time...).