Beyond The Sun Review - The Best Tech Tree In Games?

hello and welcome to episode 12 of tom brewster reviews board games and this week we're talking about bts no not them this but before that let's talk about something else this is what some people like to call a tree and for literally millions of years board gamers everywhere have had an almost ritualistic fascination with them harvesting their wood for games like chess go and flying goblin but the youths of today have shunned their leafy cousins and are now hooked on tech trees mechanical metallic perversions of our leafy relatives where have they come from where are they growing and how do they get their roots inside of bts as you can see in this inexplicably grimy security footage of beyond the sun most of its board is a joy wasteland in which the tech tree sprawls outwards a tangle of limbs and iconography like paul rand on a nudist beach now i know what you're thinking you're thinking that is yucky and gross i don't want to play a game that's just a tech tree i hate this boy and i'm never watching a youtube again but what if i told you that this game this game of texts symbol and croobs is one of my favorite games of all of last year [Music] also the rest of the team likes it as well [Music] beyond the sun is a game where players will compete to catapult humanity into the stars or maybe just get stuck in a parallel universe depends on how your day's going and the winner of beyond the sun is the player who predictably gets the most points which she'll score by exploring space researching tech and meeting criteria but how do you do any of this well beyond the sun is a worker placement game a kind of game where you take a little worker and put it on spaces on the board to collect stuff but the twist here is that beyond the sun just has one tall hexagonal worker per player and throughout the next 60 to 120 minutes between two and four of you are going to be using your very own tall hexagonal workers to claim spaces on this comically large and comically empty board your first worker placement of many will likely to be toddled on over to this basic space fairing spot which lets you place one of your human cubes onto a level one technology to research it advanced genetics terraforming these are baby steps into space but they're your baby steps baby those starting technologies might let you turn a box into a people or gather space rocks or they might let you automate your production of those people and space rocks lifting these discs to reveal symbols anew increasing the number of resources you'll take when you produce it at the end of your turn and that is a full turn in beyond the sun place your big hexagonal worker do the thing it says there and then produce either humans or rocks and that well that's just pretty nippy but what about all this empty space and all this empty space well we'll talk about space space first some of these action spaces like terraforming or narrow bum lasers will have you turn your little human cubes into spaceships spaceships that are soon going to travel the stars in search of planets landing on these planets is another way of moving those little discs i talked about earlier temporarily parking them over here to increase your end of turn production for as long as you're the top dog in that location and if you save up enough of your pocket money then you might be able to take one of those systems home parking it next to your player board for a bouquet of bonuses end game points placing another disc for more automation sacrificing an entire person to achieve progress and a unique one-off bonus oh and look here one of the end game objectives is to colonize four systems a whisper of direction in this smorgasbord of options but another objective is to research a level 4 tech and how are you going to climb all the way up there at some point you're going to find these basic actions like turning one boy into one ship aren't exactly cutting the mustard anymore and that's where beyond the sun pushes you into exploring its vast tech tree if you have the prerequisites you can use this space to research a level two tech spending two rocks and one man to get mass cloning or space-time anomaly studies or even human experiments party popper sound effect every single one of these level two texts is gonna give you something new to play with either a bevy of immediate bonuses or a new space to place your worker on on future turns or just a couple of end game points and when you've had enough of two and uh ready for a third you can research a level three tech if you've got the prerequisites there and furthermore level four texts right at the top some of the most exciting top shelf material but right now there's nowhere on the board to research a level three tech where might i find such a thing and here is the beauty of beyond the sun because the answer is hidden between the cards so that is sort of the most straightforward overview i can give for beyond the sun so now seems like a great time to talk about the game feel what you've got here is a game that is cut cleanly down the middle a crafty soup of tech tree and area control and bisecting the game into two halves like this feels the most appropriate way to talk about it after all in every single game the two objectives that are persistent are to colonize four systems and research a level four tech and central to each of those halves is a simple little management system of humans and rocks and only being able to produce one at the end of a turn is going to get you into some sticky resource cul-de-sacs if you don't plan ahead whilst rocks are freely available to take from the supply cubes are a little harder to manage you'll only take one from each available column so you must get this at least a little bit automated because otherwise you might turn people into spaceships with no way to get them back or get them stuck up the branches of the tech tree so you'll want to get more humans because more humans means more ships which means more exploration which means more planets which means more automation which means more rocks and people and then more tech and then objectives and so on so forth until the end of time now on its own that system all sounds quite satisfying but it also sounds and is quite dry in a game that is all clean white lines and simple iconography how do you find out what's special here well for just that purpose i've drafted in a professional it's time for dr tom's board game school when i wrote this bit in the script i thought i'd be more like [Music] like a professor doctor [Music] a doctor of like science but all i had was the stuff that makes me like a doctor doctor like a body doctor a medical doctor you know you you play the hand you're dealt don't you the tech tree is a mechanic that's been given a hard deal by games generally often existing as a hard to grok sideshow to the main event remember passing to3's tech tree around the table or the way that in comets the tech tree is all the way over there and you can never remember what anything does but these are by no means bad uses of tech trees they're just not exactly the focus and are often difficult to pass and navigate they are spice to a system but sometimes a spice that becomes tricky to comprehend like sumac or ginger spice but in beyond the sun you literally cannot look away from the tech tree in all of its sprawling glory it is the game and as such prompts an entirely different way of approaching the importance of the tech on display but that's not to say that beyond the sun is just a tech tree that's been made into a whole game no it is one of the most elegant and considered tech trees in all of board games which is why it supports the weight of an entire game and now let's move on to some research from the very first turn of beyond the sun your opponents are going to be pulled into pursuing different starting texts and then from there they'll start thinking about level two texts that will expound on those differences further and further creating divergent play styles on the fly and the reason that players do this is because a it's cool having something that no one else has and having it first and b because beyond the sun actively encourages divergences in strategy with these event cards at the start of the game there is an event card on every single level two and three space on the board and if you research the tech in that spot first you get a bonus and they'll do a little something for everyone but often offer a little extra for the person who reveals them that's you so within the first few rounds you're already hitting some divergence in what parts of the board people care about but not only are you personally diverging you're also sculpting the fabric of the game itself you see when you research a tech you get a choice of two but those texts have to be of the color that came before them denoted by this little arrow but you'll notice that sometimes a tech has two colors on one side that get narrowed into another so by placing a tech you might shift a limb of the tree into an entirely different type of tech so what you're doing here is cutting off entire schools of thought or areas of interest by manipulating the tree if here i'd have chosen to research these texts then there wouldn't be a possibility for military tech to grow outwards on this side of the board you can refocus entire areas of the game towards a specific mechanic that you're after and so the board becomes this battleground of knowledge where everyone wants a stake and i have never seen a game utilize fomo so effectively and all of this adds up to make beyond the sun's tech tree so rewarding to explore even when what you're getting is just a pile of numbers and icons it's joyous to take the new tech action and watch the possibilities unfold the implications of tech is the whole game so it bathes acquiring that tech in an entirely new light but i am aware that all of that sounded like the ramblings of a madman it is very hard to make this game sound arse clinchingly exciting because it is quite dry and what better than to prove that this game is a real excellent piece of work than with empirical evidence that's right it's time for the scores drumroll please a pitchfork 9 best new board game congratulations mr sun i can't imagine how you're feeling on this historic night i am truly over the moon no you're not you'll be on the sun [Applause] now all of this and i haven't really talked about the scope of an entire game of beyond the sun and here's what's special the game of beyond the sun will end when players have collectively achieved three or four achievements three in a two player game or four in a three or four player game and what's neat about this is how dramatically the time that takes gets shorter and shorter as you get more comfortable with the systems in my experience and your mileage may vary players who are new will stumble through their first game then relax into their second and get ruthless in their third fourth and beyond now that ruthlessness manifests itself in all of the juicy blocking and denial of a worker placement game and the ruthless bitey area control you've got on the other side of the board but rather than making the game sprawl outwards into petty arguments and analysis paralysis and kinds of territorial squabbles it actually draws the game much much shorter some of my games ended wildly quickly as skilled players leapt up the tree and smashed out objectives one after another and that's a juicy euro game that starts off sprawling over multiple hours and then quickly snaps into a juicy 45 to 60 minute punch up that is something that we do love to see and whilst beyond the sun builds into a game that doesn't have a single roof in it your first games can be joyously exploratory and off the back of that just deeply funny beyond the sun is one of those games where you're gonna narrate all of your turns for the first few rounds and games to make sure that you're getting everything right and because of its relatively spartan theme and iconography all your actions get reduced down into simple little phrases that are so bored games i'm binning this man to have three spaceships i'm gonna sacrifice two of my humans for a level three tech my human experiments just didn't pan out this round and you know these only work and indeed are appropriate because beyond the sun's sleek corporations and endless techno greed is a subject matter ripe for satire you and the players if you choose it are going to be boiling down something that can be quite serious into something laughable by virtue of its mechanical brutality [Music] hello and welcome to this new segment which i'm tentatively labeling uh tom's caveat cupboard uh in order to deliver these lines about things that i didn't like about the game my caveats if you will i've set up a tonally and visually distinct space from the rest of the review the visuals are dark and bad and the tone is panic caveat number one is if you want to play this game with more than two players you'll only just sit on the same side of the table which is really annoying uh because you can't all see the text the right way up and that is a weird practical consideration that i wouldn't normally think about but but boy it's present in this game but that does lead neatly on to uh point number two which is that i have only played this game in person twice uh most of my play testing has been online in board game arena where i'm currently getting demolished and tabletop simulator and that actually leads on to kind of a positive point which is that because this game is dry and specific and weird you might want to give it a go on those platforms first where you can test it out in a digital environment and see if it suits you anyway that is the end of tom's caveat cupboard um it was this was dark and it was scary and uh now i'll have to get on with the rest of the review goodbye [Music] i'll round out my review with this i've heard from other various reviewers that players should just leap straight into the advanced boards that come in the game these are slightly more complicated versions of your standard player boards that add faction specific effects i like the advanced boards i think they're nice i like the replayability they add and the variety i think the advanced boards are just good but i would say that i kind of like the non-advanced boards more simply because you have more ownership of the tech tree more divergence in your strategies that are player driven which is precisely what is marvellous about this game i have left out a bunch of things from this review of beyond the sun partially intentionally because there is a bunch to discover inside this game both in how your players react to the systems on show and how those systems become more and more elegant and clever the longer you play the game and that that is just pretty neat and you know what else is pretty neat it's this exclusive reveal videotape that we're gonna play right now it is my pleasure to tell you people at home about beyond the expansion beyond the sun it's getting an expansion it's called leaders of the exodus and it adds leaders they're gonna have two powers each you can use them in space you can use them at home or you can charge them up at home by giving them a little rest it's also gonna add a bunch of new techs some new double color level twos for more mid-game variety and replacements for some existing techs as well as new events and new systems that will go nicely with the new advanced player boards one of these is code named voltron which our contact rio grande insists that i should be able to guess what that does i don't know what it does this is like a transformers thing alongside that the expansion will be entirely modular and fit in the base game box as well as having a much requested solo mode it's a must-have says rio grande games but i'm inclined to believe them because i like this game and i'm a sucker for expansions that is beyond the expansion leaders of the exodus working title hopefully hopefully it's going to be out by the end of this year all that's looking at this review represents the words business organizations all information changes well wasn't that just a special performance and that's the end of this week's episode of the shut up and sit down video review show on youtube.com thank you very much for watching and i'll see you again very soon stay safe inside of space [Music] so um

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 146,645

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster

Id: -qwJhdDejyg

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/nowyouknowchris]

I'm surprised they didn't mention price. The second printing has gone up to $84.95. For components that are arguably an acquired taste, the price is high. I'm not asking for Stonemaier components, but what is going on with Rio Grande pricing?

[u/Caderade24]

Ugh... this game was already too hard to find!

[u/[deleted]]

I hate this boy and I'm never watching "A Youtube" again.

[u/raaayden]

This game is really fun, i played it on BGA and TTS. Cant wait to get my hands on this game.

[u/InputJ]

Doctor Professor Thomas is so articulate and helped me put my thoughts about some games into technical terms - BLEUGH!

[u/wallysmith127]

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and I already had high hopes going into it. There's an excellent tension between the two main arenas and curating your decision space is compelling. BTS also does "worker placement" right, with the shared technologies creating excellent timing moments. Dennis K Chan is definitely someone I'll be watching going forward.

And kudos to Ken Hill for holding off the detractors (like me) who lamented their suppression of the TTS mod. The BGA implementation is excellent and I've actually needed to pull myself away so that I won't be too familiar with the system when I get my physical copy in.

Also highly recommend Dan Thurot's interview with the designer

[u/Tranquili5]

Any pointers as to real life availability?

[u/maxlongstreet]

I'm not an expansion guy at all, but variable player powers, new techs, and a solo mode? Yes please.

[u/I_Nut_In_Butts]

God damn and I thought I was gonna find one this year.