This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game
Expansion: Pegasus Expansion
Designer: Corey Konieczka / Daniel Clark, Corey Konieczka & Tim Uren
Year: 2008/2009
Country: U.S.A.
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is one of the baseline games everyone keeps referencing in my particular community of play but I’d never played it before. Fortunately a friend offered to teach us how to play it, including the expansion Pegasus.
The design idea Battlestar Galactica is probably best known for is that it’s a cooperative game in which one or more players are secretly traitors, cylon androids disguised as humans. The story of the game follows the tv series, with the remnants of humanity trying to escape their robot children and find a mythical home planet. The regular human players win if they collectively make it to safety, while the cylon players win if they manage to sabotage the escaping fleet.
After each player finishes their turn, they draw a crisis card which typically gives a good and a bad outcome. The players collectively have to come up with enough cards from their hands to reach a target number to get the good outcome. The twist is that ordinarily you might only have a rough idea of what the other players are contributing, and if they’re cylons pretending to be humans, they might play bad cards into the pot on purpose. Since the process is secret, you don’t know who put in what cards.
Trying to figure out who are the traitors by analyzing each others’ gameplay choices is a key part of the experience. If you think you’ve managed to suss out a cylon, you can throw them into the brig or even out of the airlock. If this happens, the cylon player’s character moves to the cylon fleet.
In our game, particularly the last hour was pretty intense as we made accusations against each other and tried to hide our true loyalties. There was a lot of drama round the final revelations as the two cylon players started to act openly against the rest of us.
I played the pilot Starbuck and got to engage with the dogfight system, almost like a minigame. Cylon base stars and smaller vessels kept appearing and my task was to fly around shooting them out of the sky. The execution of the theme was excellent, the system providing many events which mirrored the tv show very well. In the end of our game, we’d already thought the humans had lost, but managed one last jump by the skin of our teeth, taking us to victory.
The different characters, including the ones in the Pegasus expansion, felt appropriate to the source material, so that their characteristics and abilities allowed the player to do cool things.
I quite liked the game, particularly once the traitor game truly got going. Engaging with Battlestar Galactica was nostalgic at this point, and I’m curious to try the sort-of successor of this game, Unfathomable.