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Cover Story. Beyond the Sun
Ad astra
“In the year 2264, we discovered that entire worlds can be made habitable through terraforming. Twenty-five years later, the theory of space-time anomalies revolutionized our understanding of
the universe, which led to the development of wormhole technology towards the end of the 23rd century. Finally, the galaxy came to lie right in front of our doorstep.“ – Stanislaw Clarke, Beyond the Sun, published by Skynet, 2302.
By GERALD RÜSCHER
In Beyond the Sun, humankind sets off for outer space. Players explore power­ ful technologies, travel the galaxy, and
colonize planets – in short, it‘s a space civilization game. To this end, you are out and about on three differ­ ent boards: A small explo­ ration board attracts you with a handful of planets that you might want to take in possession. On the large technology board, you can activate new action spaces over time. And your individ­ ual player board provides you with the resources required for activation, in the form of multi­functional action cubes
that stand for spaceships or researchers. Wait a moment: Space conquest? Re­ search? Resource management? That‘s just like Eclipse, the conquer­the­ga­ laxy stunner from Finland. I confess that Eclipse is one of my most­loved and least­ played titles of all. I admire its epic pow­
er but shun the
enormous effort.
How cool would
it be to cast
this game in a
handy mold!
Beyond the
Sun as an eas­
ier­to­access Eclipse? Is that possible?
The basic mechanism of Beyond the Sun is worker placement with only one worker that you place on the action spaces of the technology board. Initially, only four meager standard actions are available to you; all the others need to be brought into play through technology cards, which means you have to explore them. This research action is pivotal and is carried out in two steps. The precon­ dition for activating a new card is that you have already researched its previous technologies. If this is the case, then you draw two new cards, put one of them on the board and place one of your research­ er cubes on top. The new technology card provides immediate bonuses and/or action spaces, but is automatically avail­
able only to the player who brought the card into play; all the other play­ ers need to activate the card on their own. This mecha­ nism makes for a double variance: First, there are dif­ ferent technologies on display in every game; and second, the players have different actions to choose from during the game.
The actions
are divided into two groups: spacefar­ ing and supply of fresh material. If you carry out spacefaring actions, you place spaceships on the exploration board, move them to the planets laid out there, and are then able to colonize these; that means take them in possession and get resources and points for them. As usual, the rule of force is what‘s applied in the galaxy: You need to have enough space­ ships in order to be able to hog a planet. Battles resulting in a loss of spaceships don‘t take place, though; instead, the game is only about relative majorities.
Fresh supply improves your stock of new material in the form of ore crystals and resource cubes. The latter are par­ ticularly necessary, since you take all the researcher and spaceship cubes from your own player board, and the more of these you place on the other boards, the more difficult it becomes to bring new cubes into play. This resource management is reminiscent of Through the Ages, where you also have to balance out your limited supply of cubes.
In the end, each player earns victory points for the technology levels he reach­ es, for colonized planets, and for a num­ ber of objectives, such as ”Research a lev­ el­4 technology,“ which also triggers the end of the game, after up to two hours.
When you set up Beyond the Sun for the first time, you might feel a certain amount of disillusionment. Even though
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Photos: Becker, Rüscher