Three things that I must say before I start:

1. I hadn't followed the show when I played on Thursday at the convention.

2. I've since watched the pilot. I'm watching it with my wife now for the second time, thinking it's something she might want to watch also, so I need to check before I delve into the journey of watching however many seasons I'll need to get the full story.

3. Memory from six days ago, I’ll do my best!

Thought those needed to be said. Not sure why though...

I was sitting in a room filled with hundreds of tables and what seemed to be thousands of other board gamers, had just finished reading the instructions and was starting to punch out the bits from my own copy when a guy who I talked to earlier about the game ran over and told me that four other guys were starting a game in the adjoining room and that they needed a sixth. I enthusiastically stowed my stuff into my giant FFG bag, grabbed my backpack and moved in that direction. Introductions rolled by and I immediately failed to catalog anything remotely related to a name, so I'll just go with the names from the board game.

Gaius sat to my left, and from there clockwise it was Saul Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Admiral Adama, Starbuck and finally me, playing Tom Sarek. Tom's special abilities seemed criminal, which was confirmed quickly when I read his negative attribute, which was called "Convicted Criminal". Alright then, we'll see how that goes. Amazingly, I fully expected that fate would make me a Cylon, or at minimum a sympathizer, but alas, it was never to be. In fact, I was President!

I was immediately impressed with the game play. Everyone quickly got down to business and began moving about the right paths to get their respective jobs done to defend ourselves as best we could from what can best be described as a constant and more than slightly unnerving threat of annihilation by the Cylons. As if that wasn't bad enough, those 12 units of population we started with were a downright unruly bunch, breaking into riots, challenging authority, and eating a bunch. Instant resource busts on two of the four resources, food and morale, that we had to keep from reaching zero! Seeing as those units of population were the third of the four resources we had to keep at least SOME of to win the game, we repaid their misbehavior by leaving them behind frequently when we made panicked FTL (faster-than-light) jumps to escape Cylon raiders, heavy raiders and basestars. I haven't played too many board games compared to most here on the BGG, but I will say that I think that that mechanic, along with the cool-as-all-get-out skill check mechanic, make this an incredibly neat and interesting game. It just helps to know that the person initiating the conversation around taking the risk to the fleet by jumping early is doing it for the right reasons!

Halfway through our journey back to earth and hopefully, victory, the remaining set of cards in the loyalty deck (the deck that contains cards that tell you whether or not you are a Cylon) were dealt out. Obviously not having been dealt a card indicating that I was a Cylon, we all stopped for a few moments. If memory serves me right Gaius received the card saying he was a sympathizer, but since we had already drained a few of our resources down, he just went to the brig location and had to wait a turn to get out. At about two hours in I felt the call of nature, and told the crew that I'd be right back, real quickly.

In what couldn't have been 5 minutes, I returned to see Gaius pointing at Admiral Adama. Gaius said he had used his once a game ability to look at all of one player's loyalty cards, and had seen that Adama was a Cylon. "He's a frakking toaster", he said. Adama's response seemed weak and lacking in passion.

"No he's not, he's frakkin' lying, he's the toaster."

So, we all agreed to immediately lock the Admiral in the brig, and I helped the case along by reducing the difficulty check by 2 points. Yeah, I know, I had "friends" in the fleet who helped me frame him, lie about him, whatever you want to call it, but I knew Gaius wasn't a Cylon so I knew he was telling it like it was in regards to Adama's loyalty. Gaius had made a false reference to the rules when he revealed the sympathizer loyalty card he had been dealt earlier, which led me to believe that he wasn't a Cylon player. I was right.

We were getting hammered by Cylons, running through our action cards like fiends trying every trick in our respective areas of expertise to keep the dream alive, and the we were losing just as many skill checks against crisis cards as we were winning. The destiny deck was doing a good job assisting the Cylons with shutting down our checks on the crisis cards, considering that one of their kind was in the brig already and could only play one card against those checks, but we pulled out some critical checks by playing some actions that made the votes go our way. We were able to make one more jump, and it was at that point that Starbuck decided to reveal them self as a Cylon and damage the hell out of our beloved Galactica. Adama killed the weak charade and boosted an attack role from a basestar on the Galactica moments later.

Gaius, Tigh, Chief Tyrol and myself pulled out the stops, but the odds were going against us at that point. Our risk modeling, the thought process we used when deciding earlier to sacrifice some population to jump out of tight spots, wasn’t very well thought out, this being everyone’s first game, so when we dropped into what would have been our final system a quick scan of the resource meters at the top of the board revealed a grim situation. Morale resources were down to one or two units, population was our only decent resource and it was at less than half capacity, and I had already failed multiple attempts at doing anything beneficial with my quorum cards. Fuel was dwindling also. Looking back I think Tigh had already decided the situation was hopeless, so he utilized his special ability to take the presidency away from me, effecively making him both Admiral and President. If memory serves me correctly I don't think he achieved much with the quorum cards either. I'm telling you, the civilian politic portion of our game had been brutal, and it didn't let up, even in the end. Chief Tyrol kept busy repairing locations and ships like an intergalactic grease monkey. We were quickly spiraling towards the end of the line, one way or another.

A pack of Cylon raiders hit the zone around the Galactica with two civilian ships in it, and everyone realized that the end was upon us. The first ship was flipped to reveal a heavy population loss and a morale loss that put the morale dial on zero. Over three hours in, which seemed to be much shorter that it really was, pieces were quickly picked up, thanks were exchanged, and I had to hit the road for the evening. It wasn't until halfway through the drive that night that I realized that I had missed the opportunity to play my "unconventional tactics" once per game action during those last few turns in the end, which would have allowed me to sacrifice a point of population for one point in any other resource type. I'd like to think that Tom Zarek will end up being the type of guy who, in this case, took the point of population but never came through on the rest of his bargain. His ship made one more FTL jump right at the last moment and continued the adventure somewhere else. I guess I'll have to watch more of the series and find out what this Tom guy is like.

This one was a ton of fun. Can't wait to play again!