Battlestar Galactica - The Board Game

This is a combination of a session report and a review, most of it copied from my post in the Fantasy Flight games section of these forums. I'll tell how my first game went, including a summary of the game and some important rules, then talk about my impressions of the game:

I played my first game of Battlestar Galactica. Took a while to get the game in the mail (amazon). My girlfriend and I have been watching the series on netflix and really enjoying. Always waiting to find out what happened next. So naturally, we were really into the theme of the game. I think that helped somewhat, but I also enjoyed the game from a board game fan perspective. It's just a great game. And I lost, so it's saying something that I still had a great time.

For those who don't know the show, the basic premise goes like this. Humanity, a space faring race, lives on 12 planets known as the 12 colonies of Kobol. We invented robotic servants, the Cylons, to do work, fight wars, serve us, etc. The Cylons rebelled. A bloody war ended with an armistice and the Cylons left our solar system to find a home of their own. 40 years went by without one word or communication from the Cylons. Suddenly, they launch a surprise nuclear and space attack, destroying the interplanetary fleet, laying nuclear waste to all human planets, and reducing the human species from billions to 50,000 in a single day. The Galactica, last of the fleet's battlestars, escapes the solar system with a small fleet of ships containing the survivors of the human race. The show is about their attempt to stay ahead of the Cylons who would hunt them down and to find a new home, the mythical planet Earth.

The Board Game -
My girlfriend Nicole and I took the game over to my local game store's (I'm living in Berkeley for the summer) board game night to find some more players. Several people jumped at the chance to play with us. We ended up playing a five player game with myself and Nicole who were new to the game and three more experienced players. One guy said he'd probably played it like 20 times. It was kind of interesting playing with strangers because of the traitor mechanic. You're never really sure if you can trust them and you don't know what it looks like when they're lying. One problem that I had playing with experienced players is that they tended to ignore flavor text and theme stuff a lot, which is something I enjoy taking the time to play with.

Anyway, the game - The goal for the fleet is to get to Kobol. You have to acquire several jump icons to prepare the fleet for a faster than light jump. Each jump takes you 1, 2, or 3 distance (by drawing a location card). When you reach a total of 8 or more and jump the fleet one more time, the humans win. Along the way, humans have a limited supply of food, fuel, morale, and population. The Cylons (evil robots created by humans that now look like humans) can win in a few ways. If the fleet runs out of any of the four resources, Galactica is boarded and taken over, or Galactica is damaged enough, the Cylons win.

The most interesting aspect of the game is the traitor mechanic. Everyone chooses a human character and theoretically, is going to help the humans win. It is, after all, a cooperative game. However, at the beginning of the game, each player gets a card that says "You are a Cylon" or "You are not a Cylon." The tricky thing is that you don't know for sure whether anyone will be a Cylon in the beginning or not. Everyone might be human, there might be one cylon, or even two in a 5 or 6 player game. The reason you don't know is that only half the loyalty cards are dealt out in the beginning. The other half are dealt out in the middle of the game, the "sleeper" phase. If you were human for the first half, you could get a "you are a cylon" card in the sleeper phase, which means you were sleeper cylon agent, programmed to think you were human. Now you switch sides, but again, all the loyalty cards are secret so no one knows. This makes for lots of fun.

Nicole went first and chose a pilot, her favorite character, Lee "Apollo" Adama. I went next and took her father, Commander Adama. The other three chose Gaius Baltar, President Laura Roslin, and Boomer, another pilot. Your character choice has a huge impact because it changes which of the five types of cards you draw. Each character also has a unique power they can use all the time, a once per game super ability, and a drawback that hurts them. I was the admiral and Roslin was the president. These titles grant you some extra powers and responsibilities. As admiral, I control our two nuclear warheads and choose the new location each time the fleet jumps. The president can draw and use special quorum cards to help everyone. The titles can change hands throughout the game but in this game they never did. On each character's turn, you can move, take one action, and then you flip over a crisis card, which the group deals with together. Often, there is a skill check, which everyone contributes cards to face down. The secret aspect allows cylon players to muck things up. The crisis card also determines whether the fleet gets one step closer to jumping and what any cylon ships will do.

As the first couple of rounds went really smoothly, we started to think there were no cylons in the fleet. Nicole was piloting a viper and shooting down cylon raiders left and right. I was issuing orders to other players to give them bonus actions, the president was acquiring extra cards, we were scouting ahead, and generally just trouncing all the crises the game threw at us. The one problem was the location cards. Every time we jumped, I got stuck with two crappy choices to pick from and we ended up jumping 5 times to get the 8 distance required before you can jump to win. Normally that can be done in 3 or 4 jumps. This gave the cylons, when they finally did show up, a lot more time to mess with us.

So, halfway through the game, another set of loyalty cards get dealt out. We're pretty sure that there are two cylons in the fleet, but it's possible that one person got two "you are a cylon" cards. Who knows? Accusations start flying and then Baltar uses his special power to look at Boomer's loyalty cards (She has three because her drawback makes her more likely to be a cylon). Baltar declares Boomer a Cylon and we pretty quickly toss her in the bring. I suppose Baltar could have been a lying cylon, but he seemed trustworthy. We were right, the cylon revealed, and went off to do bad cylon things. By contrast, it took us a looong time to find the second cylon. Guess who it was? NICOLE! My girlfriend betrayed us, staying hidden and sneaky. She was really dastardly actually. Her strategy was to do very little to hurt us, but to just pretend she didn't have helpful card she needed. Talking to her after, I found out there were about 5 times she could have solved a problem for the group but convinced us she was unable to help. I don't know why we didn't notice.

Still, we were doing well, down to just Baltar, Roslin, and Adama vs. the two cylons, we had jumped the required 8 distance. One more jump and we win. Then all hell broke loose. The cylons managed to make us fail check after check. Then they played their super crises (each cylon gets one). The first one launched a bunch of ships against galactica. Then we got a random crises that activated those ships and launched more. Then Nicole's super crises activated pretty much every ship on the board. We were boarded multiple time, had half of Galactica on fire, and were running out of useful cards. In little over one round we had gone from doing fantastic to getting our butts kicked by swarms of cylons.

Our biggest problem then was that we had no pilots. Both our pilots turned out to be cylons. We tried to send our other vipers out to fight for us, but they got shot to hell. We did manage to kill the boarding parties, but that was just in time to stand by helplessly and watch the cylon raiders shoot down a half-dozen civilian ships, killing the entire population of the fleet. Sadly, the human species was no more. Victory to Cylon-Boomer and Cylon-Apollo.

I really liked this game, and I would like to recommend it to anyone who likes board games, especially if you like the idea of a cooperative board game. I will say that it's a bit complicated. You probably need to play it once just to learn it, which is kinda a problem. Having seen the show isn't a big factor, but it does make learning the game a little easier. Also, because of the superb presentation and high quality of the game itself - the theme of the show is included perfectly - being a fan of the show increases the fun of the game. Nicole, who is not a huge board game fan, enjoyed it more than she otherwise would have because she liked the show and understood the characters.

The mechanics of the game are actually pretty simple. The only complicated part is that there are a ton of options on any given turn. Most of those options are obviously not helpful at any one time. For instance, going to weapons control to shoot down cylon ships is irrelevant when no cylon ships are on the board. However, until you become familiar with all the spaces on the board, you don't know if you're missing something important. That being said, playing with someone who has played before helps.

The best thing about the game was the traitor mechanic. In our game we discovered one of the cylons right away and were able to toss him in the brig. But that second cylon, damn it was hard to figure out! You could tell from our gameplay how worried we were too. A lot of our cooperation stopped because we were worried about helping a friend who was secretly a cylon. For example, there is one card, executive order, which both I, Apollo, and Roslin have a good chance to draw. This card allows you to use up your one action to grant someone else two actions, very efficient. In the beginning of the game we were playing them all the time to maximize our potential for drawing extra cards, shooting down cylon ships, etc. Once we were sure there was a cylon out there but couldn't find him/her, NO ONE played an executive order. We were all afraid of giving two free actions to the cylon, who would use them to screw us. We lost at least a half dozen actions without the cylon player having to do anything but stay hidden. Accusations flew back and forth about everyone, myself included.

A good time had by all. I highly recommend the game and when I get back to Chicago in August I will definitely be bringing it by to play.

btw, it took us about 2 hours and 45 minutes, but the experience players told me it usually takes closer to 2 hours. Our game went long because we had to jump so many more times than usual.