Game night went long because of a lot of people socializing. I managed to drag people through a 5-person Tiny Epic Galaxies: Beyond the Black game and a 4-person Oh My Goods game. I'll split Oh My Goods into another post since this one is going long.
I think they were pretty exhausted since both games are heavier than one would expect. Tiny Epic Galaxies in particular took 2+ hours since some players were new, some were very slow, and we used both mini expansions + the main expansion.
It doesn't help that one player was a smartass half the time (every 2nd or 3rd time you ask "does anyone want to follow" he would say the same "Well I WANT to follow and do bla bla bla action, but I don't have any culture" thing, delaying the game while we waited on him to finish talking). I think he finally toned that down. Another player also liked announcing every detail of his thought process while he pondered the dice. Maybe that helped him think through things, but it took a long time.
Despite those wrinkles, I think it's overall a positive expansion. Beyond the Black adds the ability to hire pilots and the ability to push your luck by exploring. Hiring pilots lets you burn otherwise useless dice to swap one of your normal ships for a fancy ship meeple. That ship then has a special power, like giving you an extra resource every time you land on a planet. Exploring lets you flip over circular cards and either take the latest one or push your luck. They give you resources, and have a chance of punishing you by making you lose resources. Both the cards and the pilots also give you a variety of little colored exploration badges as well as victory points. The exploration badges are totaled up at the end of the game, and the person with the highest in each category gets 2 victory points.
Each pilot has different ships they are compatible with, and each ship takes different dice combinations so you cannot just go for the most powerful pilot necessarily.
The new scoring map is nice for visually identifying when someone is about to hit 21 points. However, we kept forgetting to update it, and it is now a little awkward since when someone levels up their empire you have to calculate the difference between the two values printed on the mat and score THAT (e.g. early on you gain only 1 point per upgrade, but later you gain 2 or 3 points).
There was a lot of management because I was basically acting as the table manager enforcing turn order, checking if people needed to follow if needed, pausing action, etc.
The new mini expansion just lets you burn two dice to put a drone on your pilot, max one per pilot. The drone gives you an instant victory point and doubles the pilot's exploration badges at the end of the game.
One last note, exploring has a chance of sucking your ship into a danger track that will leave it stuck there. However, once you finish exploring your ship ends up in "unexplored space" which provides an always-accessible culture source.
