Beauville surfaces are a class of complex surfaces defined by letting a finite group G act on a product of Riemann surfaces. These surfaces possess many attractive geometric properties several of which are dictated by properties of the group G. A particularly interesting subclass are the 'strongly real' Beauville surfaces that have an analogue of complex conjugation defined on them. In this survey we discuss these objects and in particular the groups that may be used to define them. En route we discuss several open problems, questions and conjectures and in places make some progress made on addressing these.