After six plays here’s my Good ✅ Neutral ➡️ Bad ❎ views on Beyond the Sun.

Good:

✅ The use of the not-dice resource cubes. Makes for a challenging decision of what you use them for.

✅ Production. Oh how you really want to produce more then you get. Balancing ore versus population. Great.

✅ Events. Makes being first to discover a technology something you want to do.

✅ Immediate benefits on technology cards. A nice bonus.

✅ Balance of exploring space versus getting technology cards.

✅ Competition for both space and tech.

✅ Ignoring the issue below with the edge case cards, the general game is super smooth. Simple to teach and understand.

✅ If dual layer player boards are you thing then this game has them…

Neutral:

➡️ Setup. The resources cubes are a pain.

➡️ Action selection markers are too tall and skinny. Easily knocked over.

➡️ The game is expensive for what you get in the box.

➡️ I am not convinced there’s enough variety of events. Seeing the same ones often only after six games.

➡️ The main board is too big. A lot of this comes down to the issues in the ‘bad’ section. Specifically the poor use of white space.

➡️ Thematically it’s a little hit and miss.

Bad:

Hope you’re sitting comfortably as this might be ride…

❎ Graphic design is just not good. Specifically:

❎ Poor use of white space. There’s either way too much or way to little.

❎ Inconsistent use of typography. Tiny type faces combined with poor use of white space is bad. Like can’t read what the card says from sitting close to the board bad. Like cards have lots of space for bigger text but instead have lots of white space.

❎ Colours. Who signed off on having a shade of blue and purple so close to each other to be indistinguishable by colourblind folks? It gets worse as the designer said on Facebook this was because they needed different colours from those on the board to “avoid confusion” yet there’s red technologies and a red/orange player pieces! They even double coded the colours for the technologies.

❎ Wall of text event cards. Walls of text often presenting edge case rules. Some of the event cards are - in my and Mrs B’s opinion - just confusing and distract from the general smooth flow to the game. The reason we love Anno 1800 so much is how smooth it is. There’s very no wall of text cards or edge case rules.

❎ Planet cards are too small and very cramped. With ships on them they become unreadable quickly.

As far as “tech tree” games go, Anno 1800 is the superior one. By a fair margin. However despite the issues I have with #BeyondTheSun it’s a solidly enjoyable good game. You can try it out on BoardGameArena and I recommend you do!