Dragon Eclipse from Awaken Realms — Review

I look at Awaken Realms solo game of narrative exploration.

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Publisher — Awaken Realms

Designer — Andrzej Betkiewicz, Kamil ‘Sanex’ Cieśla, and Wojciech Frelich

Art Direction — Bożena Chądzyńska, Lukasz Cywinski, Jakub Dzikowski, Patryk Jędraszek, Ewa Labak, Pamela Łuniewska, Mateusz Michalski, Piotr Orleański, Krzysztof Piasek, and Marta Szudyga

Game Type — Campaign, Cooperative, Deck Building, Fantasy, Narrative, Scenario, and Solo

Initial Year of Release — 2025

Age Range — 12+

Expected Playtime — 60–120 Minutes

Number of Players — 1–2

Theme and What is it?

You are a trainer in a world filled with Mystlings, fantastic creatures that are a part of everyday life and society. You and your mystling friends are placed on a path to adventure when a series of earthquakes draw you down a path filled with questions. Follow the clues, explore your world, and see if you can discover the truth behind a mysterious eclipse.

Dragon Eclipse is a solo or two player campaign game where you battle, train, improve, and collect mystlings that fill the land. Each creature has a deck of cards that you use for its combat in a system that builds energy that can be used to pay for powerful abilities. Most creatures you encounter will have a method for adding them to your stable. Follow the story and see what you can accomplish.

Initial Impressions

Opening the box was a fun experience. The pieces were nice, the organization system looked useful, and the quality of the books looked impressive. I had watched a couple of videos online and was somewhat familiar with the mechanics so knew a bit about what to expect. I was excited to see how this game played and very optimistic about the implementation.

I filmed an unboxing of this one. If you want to see my reaction you can look here.

Game Mechanics

I’m going to do my best here. There are a lot of mechanics for different phases of the game. I’m not going to go into a complete breakdown of the rules but will cover the broad strokes.

The game breaks down into two main phases and one minor phase. The two mains are Adventure and Combat with an exploration bit as a sort of third type.

In Combat you’ll take your Mystling and their deck of action cards and go up against an opposing mystling. The game comes with a number of hex based maps that are used in various places. Each arena will have a card with it to give you any excess terrain, rules, and conditions that might come up. To set up your opponent you’ll collect their main attribute cards, power cards, and capture requirement card. You’ll also build their action deck. For opponents they have three abilities they will cycle through. To build their deck you’ll use cards from a special deck that features these icons. The mystling will tell you what cards to use to build their deck. It will also let you know where to set out their special ability trigger on their track.

Each combat begins with you dealing the top four cards into a combat row. You will choose your ability from this row. Each space in the row will generate energy with the space farthest to the right generating the most energy.

You can take a bonus action, play a card from the row, and then take another bonus action. Bonus actions all cost small amounts of energy and allow you to move, make a short attack, or use your ultimate attack.

After you take your turn you’ll activate the top card of your opponent’s deck and take its action. Once done, if the opponent’s card is on their power space they’ll use their ultimate power as well as their action. Then all cards are collected and shuffled. The top card of the enemy deck is then displayed face up so you always know what they are going to do on their next turn.

To capture an opponent you’ll need to perform a specific set of actions in a specific order. As you complete each one you’ll mark it off on the card and move down to the next one. If you complete all the training actions you’ll add the mystling to your stable and have access to it at the start of your next mission.

For the Adventure phase you’ll be using the story book and might also be using the Adventure Journal that shows images of specific locations. As you progress through the book you’ll read prompts that will offer choices with directions to additional entries in the book for you to read.

If you’re using the Adventure Journal, then you’ll have a picture of your current location. When setting up this area you’ll set out a mystery card face down for if you’ve taken too long at the location. You’ll also set an hourglass marker to show how much time you have.

The picture will have numbered locations for you to interact with. You’ll choose a location and look up its number in the book and much like the previous section you’ll follow its options to their conclusion. Occasionally, your actions will require you to move the hourglass down the track. When it moves off the track you trigger the mystery card. This will generally be an event that will move the section along, cause a timed event to happen, or end the scene. You have a limited amount of time to explore and need to be aware of it.

In both instances you’ll occasionally have to take tests to see if you succeed at something. To do this you’ll use the item deck. You start flipping cards from the deck. Each item card has a number in the upper left corner that will add to your test attempt. Some cards have a danger symbol. When you stop, the number you’ve achieved will be how successful you are. However, lower numbers aren’t great and if you score too high you overexert yourself and will result in negative outcomes. Typically, there will be a negative effect for flipping too many danger symbols as well.

The final, lesser phase is the exploration phase. Here you’ll use the world map to choose your next scenario. Once you’ve chosen your scenario you’ll choose two mystlings from your stable and create their decks. The game includes deck building rules and a few cards you can use at the beginning. As you play you’ll add more cards from blind envelopes to your pool of available cards.

That’s the long and short of it. Mostly short of it. Like I said, there are large chunks of rules I’m glossing over, but these are the basics.

Game Build and Quality

I am incredibly impressed with the quality of this game. The different bits of cardboard are very nice. They have a nice thickness and are quite sturdy. Some of the hit tokens are a little small and I have to be careful not to drop them, but for the most part everything is really nice.

The card quality is great. They are sturdy with a nice finish. They hold up well to shuffling. I’ve considered sleeving but haven’t found it necessary just yet.

The rules are decent and pretty straight forward. There have been a couple of bits where I had some trouble looking things up, specifically some of the icons and symbols. Most everything is well laid out and indexed.

The organizer that comes with the game is very nice and does some very heavy lifting to getting the game to and from the table quickly.

Artistic Direction

I like the art here. The mystling cards are all fun and colorful. They are very characterful and filled with a nice humor and cute factor that makes them fun. The Adventure Journal is filled with nice clear art that gives a good impression of what you’re looking at. It makes it easy to figure out where you want to look and what you might be interacting with. They also have some hidden numbers on some pages that add new things to look at and secrets to uncover.

Fun Factor

This is a strategic narrative focused game. The combat is a puzzle of where to place your creature to do the best while mitigating the damage they will take. Since you can see what the opponent is doing next you can plan around it.

As a two player game it adds a bit of additional strategy where the opponent will be taunted by one creature or another allowing you to manipulate it more.

The narrative adventure section is nice and functions in a similar fashion to a choose your own adventure. With two people you can swap back and forth who is making the decisions or chat about what you’re doing.

Age Range and Weight

The box says 12+ and I think this sort of works. As a two player game where one adult is helping then yes, I think the basic rules work pretty well here. As a solo experience I think 12 might be too young. The rules are straight forward, but you have to learn a couple different sections of rules and I still need to look some things up. It might be a bit overwhelming for younger players to solo.

Conclusions

I like this one. The strategy in combat is a lot of fun to work out. I like that you know what your opponent is going to do on their next turn. You also know what you need to do to capture it. Trying to balance all of these factors against one another is an interesting puzzle that makes me happy.

The deck building is really nice, with the bonus cards you start with and gain later on all being nice changes to your deck that you can gain access to. It’s random which ones you get so you might not get cards for your chosen elements. TIs also important to balance which elements you’ll have access to. You can’t have two mystlings with the same element type. You also only get two when heading into the wilderness. Which means you need to choose well. You’ll be given hints of what you need to look for to help you decide. It’s a nice push and pull.

The adventure phase is fun. I like choose your own adventure books and this fills me with a good kind of nostalgia. The time mechanic works well as you need to choose which way you’re going to go and what things you want to look at, but you need to be aware of the clock. You might not be able to see everything. You have to be able to prioritize.

The test mechanic is also nice. Being able to flip cards and stop when you want works great. Typically you want 5, 6, or 7 with 7 having the best result. But you need to balance how you’ll draw cards based on where you are and what you think you might draw. The danger symbols can suck if you have some but not so many as to trigger their effect, do you stop? If you’re at 5 points but really want to reward for 7 do you keep going knowing you might bust? I really enjoy this system.

I think it works well for two players. I’ve played it both solo and with my niece. I’ve had fun both ways and my niece enjoys the game as well. The combat change of needing to manipulate the taunt to keep the opponent moving back and forth works great.

My only real negative is the rules have one or two things that aren’t really well laid out. I would have liked a list of all the symbols in the game made readily available. Other than that it works well.

I’m keeping this. It’s tons of fun and tickles all the right spots on my brain for the puzzle. The narrative is very well written and I like the mysteries that come up as you play. Everything feels like a decent challenge but never insurmountable. It’s a ton of fun and I really like playing this one.

If you’re interested in the game and would like to pick up a copy you can follow this link to Amazon and pick one up for yourself. If you do, it helps us out at Meeple Gamers and we would appreciate it.

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Until next time, stay safe and be well.

Overall Rating — 9/10