Beyond the Horizon

I was waiting for Beyond the Horizon because I like Beyond the Sun a great deal. That makes this an unusually sour surprise: rather than taking an excellent foundation somewhere new, it feels like a dry reproduction with a construction theme laid over the top and little conviction beneath it. There are production issues too, and both the rulebook and the iconography are unclear enough to invite consequential mistakes. Reassuring stuff for a game that needs careful reading.

The central structure plainly carries Beyond the Sun’s fingerprint: technology is the main axis, leaders add influence, and progress across the board is meant to create a chain of choices. But the technologies are more breakable here, so the careful sense of development loses its centre. The predecessor’s elegant pressure does not return; this is a system that has retained the parts and misplaced the discipline.

The tight space map has become open land exploration and construction, with players spreading out rather than being productively squeezed together. Interaction becomes a race for technologies and opportunities that can arrive with rather too much generosity. When one player picked up two level III technologies, without their prerequisites, from a random play as bonus actions, the game stopped looking like strategy and started looking like an incident.

It does not play badly, and someone who has never met Beyond the Sun may find plenty of promising material here. I cannot overlook how much looser, less fair, and more awkward it feels beside the game it copies. I would not recommend it: some people will enjoy it, but Beyond the Horizon is looking towards a horizon Beyond the Sun had already passed.