by Ben Bruckart

Designers: Dennis K Chan, Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, Matt Riddle

Artists: Agnieszka Dabrowiecka, Klemens Franz

Publishers: Cranio and then Asmodee and Capstone and a bunch of others picked it up

No. of Players: 2-4

I didn’t come home with a lot of Essen games, but I did come home with this one. Why, you ask? Simone Luciani is credited on the development and God knows I love my Luciani… (GAH, Lorenzo, Nucleum, Grand Austria Hotel). I get this game to my home and punch it and immediately realize I am missing a corrected tile. I emailed Cranio support and received a corrected tile within a few weeks. Cranio gets a lot of bad press from its Kickstarter fulfillment, but I think we should also highlight their successes.

What is this game?

This is a twist on and addition to the Beyond the Sun’s (BtS henceforth) technology tree. This game takes away the area control planet board and replaces it with a hexagonal civilization style set of tiles. I have played BtS and enjoyed it, but I eventually tired of the title. I will endeavor to describe the turns and set-up for someone who has never played BtS.

Setup:

Setup isn’t super quick. You place a big mainboard on the table. You populate it with level 1 technologies (face up) and then randomly deal “Leader Cards” on all the undiscovered Level 2, 3 and 4 spots (there are Leader cards for each respective levels). You also deal (face up) the three Level 4 (final technology cards). Level 2 and Level 3 technology cards are shuffled and set aside in their respective piles and will be consulted when discoveries are made.

You select some common goal cards from different sets (A, B, and C) this will be the goals and timer for the game’s end triggering.

Then set out a “Cradle of Civilization” tile and starting tiles for the number of players. I have only played the game four-player (several times), but there are different configurations that will be setup according to player count.

You shuffle a stack of territory tiles and keep it nearby. There are 24 territory hex tiles.

Then there are construction tiles that are separated into three stacks (I, II, and III) and you lay them out making a 9-tile tableau.

(Screenshots taking from their rulebook online).

You will have stocks of markers for money, settler and soldier tokens and each player will have their own player board.

Players get an action board with space for a government card (think async power) [tag 12 below], five columns for population markers [tag 9], a turn structure on the lower left (which is pretty handy) and three tracks across the bottom for marking progress [tag 10] in food, economy and infrastructure that are tracked with some cubes. 

Let’s talk about the Government cards. They are all different. They have different rewards, different criteria for scoring and different skills they unlock along the way.

Despotism (first level) gives you a small advantage with a type of action.

Theocracy (second level) and Monarchy (third level) give stronger advantages and flexibility that you might aim for to score.

Democracy is all end game scoring for achieving it and different levels of it.

The top right is your current supply of items, and the game does try to differentiate between things in your supply and things in your stock. The top middle is called your investment track.

I am going to do my best but it’s going to be hard to show. The population pawns have a top and a bottom where their ‘width’, aka fat side, is portrayed. If they are inactive and not available, they are normally depicted as ‘fat’ side down. When that ‘fat’/’thick’/’whatever’ side is up, it looks more like a chalice and that’s an available population pawn. This is an important distinction to learn when learning the game as several icons can portray where the population pawns come from. So Active = Chalice and ‘Thick’ side up. Inactive = on your population track and ‘biggie’ (as my kids call it), side down.

Here you can see it was implementated and minor visual distinction.

How it plays

Turns are simple but the choices are difficult.

1.      Action Phase

2.      Expansion Phase

3.      Production Phase

4.      Goal Phase – this cannot be skipped.

Action Phase.

Each person has a single action marker. Place your marker on an available orange octagon space. Spaces are limited and so there is blocking. There are 4 basic actions and 4 advanced actions and of course there are spots that become available as you unlock technology.

On your turn you must move and place your Action marker. You can stay in the same action space if a different spot in that action is available (this is like in Beyond the Sun). Some spaces require the payment of an additional coin, as shown.  The spaces labelled “3+” and “4” are only used in 3 and 4 player games.  Action 4 can accommodate any number of Action markers.

Basic Action #1 – research a level 1 technology. Put an “ACTIVE” population pawn on it.

Basic Action #2 – Pay 2 coins (red means pay), and research a level 2 technology. Again, you need to have an active population pawn to place on it.

Basic Action #3 – Turn a Population Pawn into a settler or a solder with strength 1 and move 2 (more about movement later).

Basic Action #4 – Take a population pawn from your leftmost column and place it face up in your available resources area (top right). This makes it an active population pawn. You almost always pull from left to right, top to bottom. This rule can be broken of course.

I am not really going to even discuss the myriads of action spots on the technology cards. And with that brazen omission, we go onto the advanced actions!

Advanced actions have a requirement at the top and an action at the bottom.

Advanced Action #5 – IF you have researched a level 2 technology, well now you can pay 4 coins to take a settle token. Pro tip. See the difference between the top icon with no background, and the bottom icon with a black background. Yes, those are separate. The top is the action. The bottom is a token that you take and can later use.

Advanced Action #6 – IF you have settled at least one village, you can pay 2 coins and exhaust an active population pawn to take a fortify token.  (Exhausting a population pawn means you send it back to your board in inactive status, filling in from right to left/ bottom to top).

Advanced Action #7 – IF you have fortified at least once or settled at least twice, you can pay four coins to assign an active population pawn to a level 3 technology.

Advanced Action #8 – If you have at least two fortifications, you can pay six coins and exhaust 2 population pawns and now you can claim a level 4 technology.

This is the gist of the Action Phase. Now if you are the first to research a technology, you take a leader card which is generally a one-time bonus or some good thing. Once it’s gone, you replace it with a discovered technology. You pick a color corresponding to the track of technology you are learning and flip technology cards until you have two with that color and then get to pick one to permanently settle in that spot. The left side of the technology cards have one-time bonuses and the right side will generally have an Action marker space that only people who have access to that technology can access.

The bonuses vary from extra coins, to increasing progress on the food/economy/infrastructure tracks or allowing you to convert population markers to settlers or soldiers.

Another pro tip, when you increase on the food/economy/infrastructure track, you take a cube off it and move it to the top investment track and that usually gives you something immediate or an on-going bonus or points!

Now wait, you say 4 basic actions + 4 advanced actions + actions on 19 potential technology spots. Isn’t that enough? No!

You remember I said you can make settlers and soldiers. [Stay with me now… You take a population marker and place him chalice side up (Fat side up) and you can place a marker on his head.—now he’s a settler or soldier.]

Well, you can also increase their values by Upgrading. They go up to level 6 and are depicted on the little shields (Brown for settler, Grey for Soldiers).

Moving is another thing you can do but there are rules. You can explore a new tile when you move off the map with a SETTLER to a spot where a tile would be touching two existing tiles. You may only explore and reveal one tile per turn! You can also move these guys between tiles already explored. This is because they can do the actions of Settle and Fortify! If your marker meets or exceeds the strength of the tile, you can do this.

Settling is when you spend all the points on a token on a settler and then mark the tile as yours and get a bonus. Fortifying is when you do the same thing with a solider, but you can only fortify after a village is settled. If you exceed, you don’t get change and lose the population marker the same as if you just met the costs.

Expansion Phase.

This phase is optional but you can do one of four things.

1.      Build a new construction (need to have a settler on a tile and a construction tile in hand already).  You pay for it and mark it as yours. Unlike settling and fortifying, more than one person can do this on a construction tile but with lesser reward (see #2 right below). The construction tiles offer efficiencies, bonuses, and rewards. Pay attention to them.

You have to have a settler with a strength you can reduce and then pay coins. When you get to mark settlements, fortications and construction, you mark them with the same cubes from the food/economy/infrastructure tracks making those better too.

2.      Build on an already constructed tile (like above). Same costs, lesser rewards.

3.      Play a settle token to do a Settle action

4.      Play a fortify token to do a Fortify action. (Both of these are described above).

Production Phase. Choose ONE of these.

1.      Take 1 inactive population pawn from each column that you have activated with your food track (getting more cubes off, gives you access to more columns).

2.      Gain the coins you have activated with your economy track,

3.      Perform as many Trades as you wish in any combination.

a.      3 coins for a population marker.

b.      Exhaust a settler or soldier to get an active population marker

c.      Move an active population pawn from your available resources area back to the columns to earn a dollar.

Goal Phase.

This is not an optional phase. Remember back in setup when we set out 3 goal cards. If you meet the requirements of a goal, you must put a cube on it (you can pick from which track you want to pull it from). When four cubes are down collectively on the goal cards (3 in a 2p game), the game end is triggered. You finish the current round and then play one more full round.

Points are all at the end. Points come from Goal cards, first person gets 5 points, others get 3 points. Technology cards are scored if you “learned” the tech. 1 VP for level 1, 2 VP for level 2, and 3 for level 3, 4 for level 4.

Those level 4 technology cards also give some pretty clear and big bonuses too so add them in if you got there.

Then the map scores.

Victory Points for settlements, fortifications, construction tiles you built, investment tracks, and leader cards.

Lastly, we score the Government Cards. The final level of the government cards, Democracy, allow the player to score its goal. If you upgraded the infrastructure track enough, here is where you would get to add more points to your total.

Here is the other side of the government cards.

My thoughts:

I like “Beyond the Horizon” but I feel like I am in the minority. Make no mistake, this a gamer’s game. My wife did not enjoy our quick 2p plays. She had to put her head down and ignore half the game. That said, in the end our scores were close. She focuses one or two things and tries to maximize them.

What I really like about the game is the competitive nature of balancing technological progress with the growing and evolving world board while trying to maximize your player ‘Government’ powers. This is not a sole tech tree game although that’s a big part of it. You need to focus on the map and the government powers and tech equally. The teach is relatively straightforward. I like the tech tree and find its straightforward nature is still a strong aspect of the game. I also enjoy the race aspect to the goal cards and seeing the different paths one takes to achieve them. You can see why they made certain graphical choices, and I like that there aren’t pages of icons to reference.

As I keep trying to get it played, people are not convinced the government cards are balanced and they would rather play something else. As I get more repeated plays, I hope that some of the government cards do even themselves out, but I estimate that you need 5-10 plays to really see the breadth of their abilities and make use of them.  Most people I’ve played with don’t feel like it’s an improvement on Beyond the Sun but rather just a different, more complex game.

Another personal gripe is the lack of any flexibility within a turn. In some Luciani games, you can trade down resources to perform actions (i.e. in Nucleum when you can convert a Nucleum to a worker or a worker to a coin). While this isn’t necessary, when a player takes a long turn and realizes at the end, they can’t pay for the action they wanted to take, they undo their turn adding to the length of the game. That lack of even a little flexibility adds to the rigidity of the game and makes for a longer and sometimes less enjoyable experience.

Also this game is a bit of a table hog. The map grows pretty quickly and requires alot of stopping and looking at it and each of the tiles to see whats available. This with the small print and covering the tiles with pawns, also adds to game length.

See how a 2p map looks at the near beginning and the end.

Also consider how this is in addition to the technology map.

How was the rulebook? Honestly, the rulebook isn’t great. I’d label it as fair. The layout leaves a lot to be desired. We constantly had to jump between sections to confirm the rules and there were a lot of unanswered questions about when the bonuses of certain infrastructure improvements trigger, especially when they may be triggered midway through a turn. The game also seems to rely on someone already knowing how to play BtS.

The art is good. Iconography isn’t a lot, but it does take a moment to get used to (like the black bordered icon vs just the action).

The pawns are kind of annoying (both in orientation) and placing those little cardboard chits on them, but lots of people have posted 3-d printed solutions or just flat out replaced them (like the water tokens from the Kickstarter version of Barrage—I will never forget!)

-Ben Bruckart

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Joe Huber (1 play): I think Ben’s evaluation of the rulebook as fair is generous.  We learned the game from the rulebook, and I can’t recall coming across a greater density of grammatical errors in some time.  Beyond that, the game felt like a longer, more complicated Beyond the Sun; as much as I enjoy Beyond the Sun, I really wasn’t looking for a longer, more complicated version.  Not for me.

Justin Bell (3 plays): I think Beyond the Sun is one of the 20 best games I’ve ever played, so I came in very excited to try this updated version. What I tell friends now: if you prefer a more “fighty”, area control element to your games, stick with the original. If you do not like interaction—in every game I’ve played, the civilization area sprawls outward, with little or no interaction between players—Beyond the Horizon is the right call. The tech tree is roughly the same in both versions, and the level 4 techs being face-up to begin play is absolutely a game changer. I agree with Joe that Beyond the Horizon adds about 30 minutes of extra playtime (and a load of required table space thanks to the exploration tile requirements), but that means that I’m still able to get this done in 2-2.5 hours. The government tiles are absolutely imbalanced so we draft those and provide the better ones to newer players. As Ben suggests, I’m hopeful that an expansion covers/fixes this issue. I like it.

Tery Noseworthy ((1 play): I am not a fan of Beyond the Sun; it just feels very dry to me and while I can appreciate some of the elements, i just don’t enjoy playing it. I tried Beyond the Horizon to see if it improved things for me, but it did not. I liked the way the tech worked better; it was clearer to me. However, the whole exploration board seems odd and like it doesn’t fit, and the game overall felt very disjointed to me. Also,ihe spelling and grammar errors in the rule book were very distracting. Not for me.

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In the end, this is a gamer’s game with alot to pay attention to. Almost too much. The cat’s spillage over the reasonably sized box is a metaphor.