You know it, it happens to you, too. There's a reason you're on a site called Boardgame GEEK - because you're a geek. And part of being a geek is getting all into your stuff. But like me, you've been burned. You've bought the World of Warcraft keyboard or the Star Wars breakfast cereal or maybe watched the Lord of the Rings Saturday morning cartoon, and you've been a little disappointed. Like me, you've grown wary of tie-ins to your favorite stuff.
But boy, are you going to be happy with Battlestar Galactica.
BACKGROUND
(Very minor spoilers here, but nothing you wouldn’t get from the back of the DVD boxed set)
Alright, so maybe you don't watch Battlestar Galactica, and you need a little explaining to find out what the fuss is about. Of course you can Wiki it or whatever, but here's the basics: The Galactica is a battleship that guards what's left after some nasty robots all but wiped out the human race with a surprise nuclear attack. 40,000 humans remain, and they can barely stay civil with one another, let alone fight the Cylons. Admiral Adama is the military leader of the fleet, and was about to retire when the Cylons attacked. He bears a healthy hatred of the enemy and will do almost anything to win. His right hand man, Colonel Tigh, is even more vitriolic. The humans have a political leader, too - Laura Roslin, who was the Secretary of Education before the Cylons killed every person in the government, leaving her in charge even though she's something like 24th in the line of succession.
The rest of the cast is just great. There's Lee Adama, the Admiral's son, who is a crack pilot but barely speaks with his father. He has a love/hate relationship with Starbuck, another pilot who seems to always be one short step from the brig (who, by the way, was a male character in the original 1970s show, but is played by a very hot woman in the new version).
The big twist of the show is that the Cylons have evolved in the years since the humans first created them, and now some of them appear human. The first couple of seasons are full of paranoia, suspicion, and people getting shot out of airlocks or thrown in the brig whenever they act funny and are accused of being Cylons. Of course, some of them really are Cylons, but you don't ever quite know who is and who isn't.
And that's pretty much the premise of the game. A ship full of people who don't really get along, trying to get away from robots who want to kill them, and guessing who among them might be traitorous Cylons.
COMPONENTS
Let's just start with the obvious - the neat components. Battlestar is a Fantasy Flight game, so you know it's going to have good bits. In the box, you get a pretty cool board with the Galactica taking up most of it. Key locations on the ship are represented on the board, and you'll recognize most of them if you're a fan. There's the CIC, the Admiral's Quarters, the hangar bay, the brig. A separate area shows Colonial One, home of the civilian government. Another area details various locations for players who have been outed as Cylons.
One of the key elements of the game and a main feature of the board are the dials representing various resources that the good guys have to guard in order to stay alive. Fuel, food, water, and morale are tracked by these dials. If any of them get to zero, the Cylons win and the game is over.
There are a few molded plastic bits that represent various smaller fighter ships. The Colonials have Vipers and Raptors, and the Cylons have Raiders and Heavy Raiders. Sadly, the Cylon Basestars are only represented with large cardboard tokens rather than detailed plastic minis. The character pieces are also cardboard and stand up in plastic holders. Detail on the ships is pretty good, though the ships are a bit small.
Cards play a big role in the game, and there are several decks. Some of the decks are playing-card sized, while others are the smaller cards that are familiar to many a Eurogamer. The big cards are good enough, but the small ones are hard to shuffle, and you'll be running through them a lot, so that's a problem.
Overall the components are quite good. I think I would've liked a few more plastic bits, especially a few to represent the characters and the Cylon Basestars. But the art on all the pieces is nice, the pieces are sturdy, and so on.
GAMEPLAY
Battlestar Galactica is mostly a cooperative game, with the players trying to get the Galactica to Earth by making a series of faster-than-light jumps before the Cylons can stop them. Every cooperative game has some kind of programmed timing mechanism, and in BSG this mechanism is handled with a deck of Crisis Cards.
Crisis Cards come in a couple of varieties. The more common type is the card that has some kind of skill check on it - if the players can cooperate and pass the skill check, then maybe nothing bad will happen. But if they fail the check, then bad things happen. The other type of Crisis Card represents a major Cylon attack. When these are drawn, a number of Cylon Basestars, Raiders, and/or Heavy Raiders are placed on the board.
Most Crisis Cards have an icon that shows how the Cylons already on the board will behave. For example, if the Raider icon is shown, then all Cylon Raiders on the board will perform an action. The action performed depends on what's happening on the board. If a Colonial Viper is nearby, the Raider will attack that Viper. Otherwise, the Raider will move toward the nearest civilian ship, and attempt to destroy it, which will reduce one of the resources that the good guys have to protect. Heavy Raider icons move Cylon boarders to Galactica, and once on board, the Cylons will try to reach the bridge and blow it up. Basestar icons represent heavy attacks directly from the large Basestar against the Galactica.
Finally, Crisis Cards may or may not have an icon on them that allows the Galactica to prepare for an FTL jump. Since the object of the game is to make a certain number of jumps to get to Earth, this icon is very important to the Colonial players. When the icon is revealed, the ship moves one step along a track that will eventually let it jump. Jumps are great because when they occur, all the enemy ships are left behind, and all the Raiders, Basestars, and Heavy Raiders are cleared from the board. The players can decide to attempt a jump before the fleet is completely ready, but doing so risks population, and if you lose too much population, you lose the game.
On a player's turn, he first draws some skill cards that vary in type depending on his character's specialties. Then he moves his token to location on either the Galactica or Colonial One. Finally, he performs an action. The action might come from one of the skill cards, from a character's unique special skills, or from the location he occupies. Actions might include such things as:
- Moving some of the ship's Viper defenders to attack the Cylons
- Having an election and taking over the role of President
- Repairing a damaged location on the Galactica
- Drawing new or extra skill cards to use in the skill checks
Skill checks deserve some discussion as well. As I mentioned before, most of the Crisis Cards involve some kind of skill check. These have a target number which is known to all players. After the skill check is described, everyone discards skill cards that match the required type - for example, a Rescue Mission Crisis Card might involve Tactics and Piloting skill cards. Each skill card has a value, and the idea is for everyone to discard cards so that the target number is met. This is made more complicated because a couple of cards are thrown in at random, and if they don't match the required type of card (say, one of them is a Leadership card instead) it will count against the players. And then there's always the possibility of Cylon traitors aboard the ship...
THE CYLON TRAITOR
If you know anything about this game, you probably already know that there's at least one Cylon traitor on board. At the beginning of the game, a traitor deck is constructed with mostly "You Are Not A Cylon" cards, and a couple of "You ARE A Cylon" cards. Before the game starts, half of this deck is dealt out to the players, one card to each person. So you've got a 50/50 chance of somebody being a Cylon from the beginning of the game. If you wind up with a Cylon card, you pretend to be working with the humans, but you're secretly trying to hurt them. At first it's tough to do this, as the only way you can really hurt is to throw in cards that screw up Skill Checks. When Skill Checks are made, everyone discards their cards face down, so that nobody knows who discarded what. And remember, two random cards are added to the mix as well, also face down. This means that on any Skill Check there should be, at most, two "bad" cards, and that's only if the two random cards both happened to be against the humans. So if the humans start seeing three, or four, or more cards against them, they can be sure that somebody is sabotaging them. But who?
Here's one of the coolest bits of the game, and a place where they really managed to capture the spirit of the show. Halfway through the game, the other half of the traitor deck is dealt out. Now somebody's a Cylon for sure - but even better, somebody's likely just found out that whoops, sorry, they're a Cylon after all. Suddenly more sabotage cards start showing up, and players begin questioning one another's loyalty.
At any time, a Cylon player can reveal himself and escape from the ship. Everybody’s “You Are A Cylon” card has a special ability that you can perform once when you reveal yourself and run – such as “Send a character to the brig” or “Damage the Galactica.” From then on, they play as a revealed Cylon player. Doing so removes a lot of their ability to mess with the other players, but they now have access to Cylon-only actions, and the very cool Supercrisis Cards. These are like Crisis Cards on steroids - on one (my favorite), an entire Cylon fleet suddenly jumps in to sneak attack Galactica just as the power fails and the ready for jump track is reset to zero.
Being a Cylon is a lot of fun.
POLITICS
In the TV show, politics plays an important role. The civilian government is always at odds with the military, and themes such as freedom versus security are explored in very interesting ways. The board game simulates this with a couple of roles that are taken by characters throughout the game - the Admiral and the President.
The Admiral is really non-negotiable. The Admiral controls the nukes, and also gets to choose where the fleet jumps. When the FTL track reaches the end, and the fleet jumps, the Admiral secretly draws two destination cards and picks one. Some take the fleet closer to Earth, some have extra resources, and some are just plain bad. If the Admiral is a Cylon, it can be bad news for the players. Their best weapon, the nukes, won't be used well, and they will progress to Earth at a crawl. Unfortunately, the only way to get rid of the Admiral is to throw him in the brig.
The President controls the government and gets a special deck of cards with good stuff in it. Food or water rationing can implemented to raise the fleet's stocks of resources, a speech can be given that raises morale, or "brute force" can be authorized to destroy Cylon ships. The Presidency can be taken by another player with a skill check, so these cards can rotate around a bit. Of course, when someone seems to be overzealous about taking the Presidency, certain questions are usually raised...
FANBOY REACTIONS
If you are a fan, you're going to have so much fun playing this. From the outset, the Cylons are breathing hard down the Galactica's neck, and the ship is nowhere near ready to jump. That first jump is very tense as everyone shakes out the bugs, the pecking order is established, suspicions are raised, and maybe a person or two is thrown in the brig. It's so easy to jump right into TV-quote mode as you, playing Admiral Adama, shout to your buddy who's playing Chief Tyrol, "Jump, damn you, I don't care if the FRAKKIN civvie ships are in position or not!"
In every BSG episode (or all the best ones, anyway) there's a moment where the nukes are flying in toward the ship, and the Galactica jumps at just the last second. Then the scene switches to empty space, and the fleet appears at the other end of their jump. Everything is quiet - the DRADIS shows no contacts, the civilian ships are all accounted for, and everybody breathes a sigh of relief. Probably the best thing I can say about this game is that it recreates this moment really well. When the ship finally jumps and all the enemy ships are cleared from the board, and Galactica floats alone in space, you really feel like you're in the TV show.
GAMEBOY REACTIONS
But I would be remiss if I didn't at least try to approach this game from the point of view of someone who's not a big fan, or maybe has never even seen the show. Will your Eurogaming buddies enjoy the game, too?
The cooperative element of the game is nothing new, and is in fact getting more and more common with games like Pandemic and Shadows Over Camelot. The hidden traitor element is unique (as far as I know) to this game and Shadows Over Camelot, but I think BSG does it just a little better. Since traitors might not know they're traitors until halfway through the game, there's a fun shift that occurs at the mid-point. And the powers the traitors get when they reveal themselves are such fun, most Cylon players will be chomping at the bit to start openly playing the bad guy.
The real problem, I think, is going to be replayability. The novelty of playing Battlestar characters is going to wear off after a few plays, and then you're left with the core mechanic. A lot of the fun of playing is seeing those Crisis Cards for the first time - "Oh no, a water shortage! Whatever will we do?" That's fun the first few times, but eventually even hard-core fans get tired of repeats. I think the skill checks will get repetitive after a while, and the Crises will seem less like Crises and more like more of the same.
CONCLUSIONS
So does Battlestar get the job done? Does it capture the spirit of the TV show while at the same time providing a good game experience? I think it does both. During our plays at GenCon, those who had never seen the show had just as much fun as those of us who were big fans. It must be acknowledged that everybody, even the non-fans, had some idea what the show was about and that might have influenced them a little bit. But I'm happy to report that everybody enjoyed the game.
I would say that if you're a fan, pick up the game for sure, and give it a whirl. If you're not a fan, probably hold off and wait for one of your fanboy buddies to get it and join them for a game or two.
And in the meantime, practice your Colonel Tigh impression - "I'll shoot those FRRRRRRAKKIN' skin jobs outta the airlock, Bill!
Last edited on 2008-08-21 12:17:35 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Thu Aug 21, 2008 4:16 pm
