I liked Eclipse! The mechanics are really interesting. You want to get out there and colonize as much space as you can because the more people you have out, the more you can research and build. On the other hand, the more actions you take during a turn, then the more upkeep it takes to maintain your empire. You are always trying to push yourself as much as you can without going overboard. The mechanics for researching and upgrading your ships are really cool. You get to customize each ship type's blueprint to a pretty high degree, so my little crap ships might be speedy, yours might be slower but heavily armored.

It is pretty quick. It took Matt and I about 2 hours to go through with rules, but everyone swears that after you've played a couple games it gets close to 30 min/player. I can see it because everything resolves pretty quickly.

The way Matt (and Keith, who'd played it before) felt was that it was too luck-dependent in that when you explore new hexes, sometimes you find awesome shit, sometimes you get crap, but I don't know if I agree. Admittedly I might just be too invested because it's my game, but I felt like even though Matt had a few great ship upgrades that he found through luck, that with better play I could've tied or won the game. I also think that having some luck dependency isn't as much of a big deal when you get the game time down.

Anyway, it was fun and I'd like to play again. Five-six might be a little painful with rules, but I think four would be totally doable.

Looks like you/Ja-el won't be making it up to Kubla this year (why, Ja-el!? I'll protect you from Rich) but I am gonna be down in LA several times this summer, so hopefully we can get together for a game day at least once.

OK, so a question for Aeryk, fArt or Ryan if anyone got through all that. Who came up with the name Torch the Toilet? I was assuming it was a Rich-ism, enr0n wasn't sure.