Battlestar Galactica

The show. No, The Show! Seriously, I hold Battlestar Galactica close to my heart. Not only it's the best sci-fi tv series ever (never been a fan of Star Trek) but it is also a pretty well-known board game. Some really smart people sat down and thought about how to put the concept of BSG into a board game and still make it fun to play. And I dare say that they succeeded... To a point. I mean, 85% of the time, I won't turn down a round of BSG, but there is such thing as too much of it.

If anyone is unfamiliar with the premise of the show, well, the story goes like this: there are humans and cylons - evil robot. Robots destroy the planets where the humans live and they kill almost all humanity, except for a small fleet of spaceships that escapes. The cylons are chasing them, and unknown to humans, they infiltrated their ships as well. There are two kinds of robot: metal robot-looking ones and those who look exactly like humans. Sometimes they even think they are human, but they can be activated by the cylons and sabotage things on the ships, ultimately leading the humanity to its demise.

it takes up a bit of space

In the game itself, every player chooses a character from the show to play as and then receives a loyalty card that determines whether he is human or a hidden cylon. The goal of humans is to reach a safe planet by jumping about 8 times with FTL (faster than light) engine. The cylons' goal is to prevent humans from doing that either by destroying Galactica or by helping in depleting one of four resources - population, food, fuel and morale). Every round, a crisis card is drawn which represents a problem that the crew of Galactica must deal with. While humans usually want to solve the crisis so that it either has no effect or even a positive one, cylons secretly try to sabotage their efforts so that the crisis yields a negative result. Each player has a number of action cards of different colours, each of these cards has a number and some kind of action. These cards are used either during the player's turn to carry out its action or during the crisis. Every crisis has some colours and a number attached to it which means that to solve the crisis with a positive result, players must accumulate cards of said colour(s) of total value of at least the crisis' number. Each player puts a number of cards he'd like to add to solve the crisis without showing other players what cards is he or she using. This is the moment for the cylons who can add cards of different colours and thus prevent solving the crisis, as the value of different colour cards is subtracted from the total value of needed cards.

Phew.

So while everyone acts as human, there are those who try to prevent their efforts from happening. This is the main feature of the game - the interpersonal deception and ulteriour motives... Just like in the show.

Boomer is in the brig, that's where she belongs

Of course there is more to the game than just solving the crises. Sometimes the cylon fleet jumps (teleports) its ship in the vicinity of Galactica and a spaceship battle ensues with raiders and vipers flying around. Some of the crises are special so that they can be solved by either an Admiral or a President - titles assigned to players based on the characters they play. But most of the time, it is adding cards to a pile and then hoping that cylons don't affect the result much.

And that is probably the weakest point of the game. It is kinda repetitive (just like the show's 3rd season). Sometimes it can stretch to more hours than you'd like and if the cylons' aren't particularly active, nothing much happens. Cylons have more fun because it's always more entertaining to harm then to help... umm, at least in this game. They have to keep harming the fleet secretly or other players will recognize them as cylons and throw them either into a brig (or with the Pegasus expansion, into the airlock chamber and then into the space). Cylons can later decide to show themselves and harm the fleet in a big way and then play in a bit different style - not affecting the solving of the crises as much but sending Cylon ships at the fleet from a safe place in the cylon mothership.

No Cylons anywhere and the fuel is in red already

As you can probably see, Cylons have more varied gameplay which ultimately results in everyone wishing they could be a cylon while they receive the loyalty card, however, I know people that don't like playing for Cylons because they feel the revealed Cylon gameplay consists of adding one card to crises and once in a while performing an evil Cylon action. Also the game is kind of demanding on the individual decision, so the newcomers will always feel a bit lost when playing with people who know what's going on and will be commanded by other players. And perhaps the worst thing is that the game is almost incomprehensible for anyone who doesn't know the show. Everything in the game is a reference to the TV series and those who don't know it will be lost - this comes from my experience.

Of course, those who do know the show will have a good time playing Battlestar Galactica Board Game. After all, the game has two expansions at this moment which shows that even though the TV series is over, the fan base is still here and wants to play.