Given the gaming demographic, I probably don’t need to explain Battlestar Galactica (BSG) the series to explain BSG the game. But just to be safe

A technological-advanced, spacefaring humanity created a robot servitor race. And we all know that never ends well. The Cylons (robots) rebelled. War raged until (A generation ago) a peace was signed and the Cylons left. During their exodus, the Cylons designed biological models that look (and act) human; infiltrated humanity, and launched a devastating sneak attack, killing almost everyone. One spaceship (the Battlestar Galactica) is making a run for a mythical safe place and leads a fleet of the last remnants of humanity. Of course, some Cylons are part of the crew.

So BSG deserves a semi-cooperative game. I don’t remember any traitors in Le Morte de Arthur, but BSG has scads. Incidentally, I was quite into the series until they decided to take 16 months or so off, which gave me time to cool down. I haven’t been watching this year. (The writers have been willing to take risks and I appreciate that, I just don’t think many of them worked, and the end of season 3 was fairly appalling).

Battlestar Galactica uses the same basic structure as Shadows over Camelot, but evolves the system nicely. You have a character and special powers, a hand of cards, a card that labels you human or Cylon. You take a good action and a bad action. The details vary; the core remains. The loyal humans have plenty of ways to lose – run out of food, fuel, population or morale and game over. The Cylons can get boarders and take over Galactica, or destroy it by bombardment. If you make enough jumps you’ll eventually find Kobol and win.

Like all FFG games, BSG looks great and has a zillion decks of cards (8-ish). Five decks are the skill cards and form the ‘good actions.’ Each card has a value from 1-5 (mainly lower) and an action or ability. Each character’s skill set and draws five cards a turn, but usually split among 3-4 decks. So the fighter pilots draw “piloting” cards and a few others, the chief mainly draws engineering, the president draws political cards, etc. But each character draws from multiple stacks.

The bad action is a deck of cards. Some pick a player (the admiral, the president, or the current player) and force them to choose between two bad options. Some have a bunch of Cylon ships show up. The rest present a crisis. Here’s clever idea number one. A crisis card presents a set of skills (such as, say, piloting and tactics). Players throw cards (in order) face down into a kitty. The right cards add their value (piloting and tactics in our example), the rest subtract. Everyone can see who throws how many cards into the pool. Then the destiny deck (made up initially of two random cards from each type) tosses two cards in. Those get shuffled up, then revealed and totaled. If you beat the challenge, great! If not, bad things happen.

This mechanism has lots of room for gaming. As a cylon, you can throw in a bad card. Of course, if the destiny deck throws two bad cards in (which happens reasonably often), everyone knows a cylon is lurking. But suppose you go last and throw in three cards (and everyone else put in one) and only one is bad. Now if there’s “One bad card” you start braying about who it could have been. Or you can throw in a bad card only when the player to your right throws in cards, and throw in great cards when that person sits out. In short, you can manipulate the evidence. Are traitor cards often in the “Politics” suit? Well, that probably means a politician is the traitor, not the guy who doesn’t get politics cards. You can also (potentially) track the destiny deck by making some assumptions. And then you get to the “But I know you know” interactions.

Another nice improvement over Shadows -- the characters are distinct. Not only does each character draw different cards, they have three special abilities. One “use every turn,” a “once a game” and a drawback. Gaius Baltar (the semi-traitorous scientist in the show) gets to pick one card freely after seeing what the current crisis is and can, once a game, simply look at someone’s loyalty cards. But he gets an additional loyalty card which means a) he’s more likely to be a cylon and b) nobody really trusts him. Clever. The game comes with 10 characters, so plenty of variety. Also, each cylon gets a different special ability and an “Oh My God Horrible” crisis (once they reveal). The cylons also get to make meaningful decisions (once revealed).

The best element comes from the dramatic flow. The game revolves around “jumps.” Players have turns, but thematically the jumps are the focus. You wait for the jump drive to cycle (that’s up to the cards) and while you wait things slowly get worse and worse. A jump cleans the field. All the players and cards stay the same, but most dangers get left behind. This ratchets up the tension. A bad random event or two, then a basestar appears -- Raiders launch and start menacing the fleet (You have to protect the rest of the fleet or lose resources). Boarders approach. Another basestar pops up, the entire fleet is at risk and Galactica is getting pummeled. Everything looks lost, but a jump saves the day! A few turns to regroup, repair, refill hands. After all, there’s only a few bad events. Also, jumping is not entirely random. You can jump early (risking population as ships get left behind).

The game piles on crisis after another, then has the “Whew, made it!” jump. A player’s turn should be fast. Draw a few cards, move to a location, take an action, flip a crisis card. (Resolving the crisis card takes a while). Roughly half of the crisis cards move the jump engine along, and it takes five steps to auto-jump, so you’ll get a jump roughly every 10 turns. The players can move this along by risking early jumps, but a jump happens often. This means that each turn is usually important. The bad things on crisis cards usually involve a decision or debate. You aren’t drawing a card and just mechnically resolving it (moving Excalibur, adding a figure). You which bad thing happens, or ‘vote’. (You do just resolve the enemy ship stuff). Fewer decisions, but more important.

My big beef with Camelot is lack of tension. You get situations where failing a quest wins the game, or a bad start crushes you, or you are on the grail track so you ... play a grail card. BSG starts with a dire situations – a basestar, raiders, ships in danger. Our game threatened a near loss before the first jump, but then, relative quiet. You make that first jump, all is forgiven. The cylon fleet doesn’t automatically follow you.

More tension: once you’ve covered a certain distance, you deal out another set of loyalty cards. There are two cylon cards (with 5+ players). They may go the same person. They may not. There may have been nobody disloyal until the halfway point, but there’s definitely a traitor now. A previously loyal person may be a traitor. That ratchets up the tension, but you only have a few jumps left to win…

Whatever flaws I may discover, Corey Konieczka has done a terrific job in making a tense game. (Incidentally, I find all the BSG trappings fit nicely. Having watched the show for the first few seasons, none of the details seemed wrong). I thoroughly enjoyed the first play and may have bought a copy right then, except it wasn’t available. Next week we played two games back-to-back.

That being said – flaws. Two Cylons on the opening deal (which could happen in a 5+ player game) makes this phenomenally difficult for the humans. Cylons can choose to reveal at any particular moment (and become quite powerful). I’m not sure how well this game scales between 3-6. Given that each human has a different skill set, the loss of a human (or two) can be quite crippling just from a card flow perspective. In one game, when I flipped sides, the number of potential “repair” cards being drawn each turn was cut in half. If both cylons have the same skills, humanity has a problem. In short, the difficulty varies randomly.

Once you know what you are doing, humanity can win. The balance (at least with 5) favors the cylons, but not outrageously so. The balance probably changes based on # of players. 5 players have 60% of the 2nd half turns pro-human. 6 Player games are 50% or 66%, depending on how the sympathizer turns out. So it's in the humans interest to throw a bit to make sure that the sympathizer is pro-human. It's too early to claim balance issues, but the niggling doubt is there that this is a 2 hour game to resolve a random shuffle of some cards. It's tough to say if the cause is number of players or random variability. We had a five player game with no cylons until the midpoint where the cylons won, and a 6 player game with an early cylon that the humans won easily. It may be based on number of players, or due to the crisis deck's randomness. In humanity's victory, 3 players were constantly scouting/peeking to make sure that the horrible cards got bypassed, leaving only the routinely bad cards.

I’d like to see it go to 7. That’s a tough number to deal with, and I think that semi-cooperative games should handle it. It would probably lessen the difficulty. (One variant is to make the replace the sympathizer card with a 3rd "You are a cylon" card, but only add that in the sleeper phase).

Also, the game takes over two hours. The time flew by, but this is a longer game. In some games, towards the end, the outcome became obvious. the ending was clear a few turns before it happened. I think agreeing to let teams concede (once all cylons are revealed) will keep people happier. Once you know you're destined for the Ash Heap of History, why play it out? This was minor, maybe the last 10-15 minutes of some games.

If players dawdle and debate, this could easily change to a painfully long game. Not a problem so far.

Perhaps we missed something, but I felt that sniffing out a Cylon should provide the humans with a bigger bonus. It does provide prevent them from using their “Super reveal” power if you toss them in the brig, but they can either just sit there or reveal themselves and escape.

Continuing to hammer the play balance point – Revealed Cylons get 4 options on their turn, and some are incredibly powerful. Cylons also keep tossing a (single) card into the challenge once revealed, which feels wrong. You shouldn’t be a saboteur and an enemy general at the same time.

I wish that resources (morale, food, population, fuel) had more differentiation. They could be labeled A-B-C-D, for the most part. A minor complaint in a game with so much theme.

There’s lots of chrome, which I like, but it means your first few games may include surprises and caught off guard. “Chief, let me see your loyalty cards!” “What?!?” “Gaius Baltar can, once per game, just look at someone’s loyalty cards.” “Ohhh-Kay.” (passes cards) “He’s a cylon.” Mostly surprises are a good thing, but hyper-planners dislike that sort of thing. One big example, after each jump the admiral picks two cards from the destination deck and reveals one. This shows how much closer we’ve got to Earth (mainly 1 step, but up to 3) and what we find. If you don’t know this deck, you’ll be hard pressed to make an informed decision if the admiral is screwing you. (In fact, I decided he wasn’t when he was my fellow cylon). The president gets to draw cards from a Quorum deck. “Quorum” implied voting, but judging from the few cards played it involves martial law type powers.

A few fiddly questions popped up that may have been in the rules, but we just resolved them and move on. A few of the cards weren’t clear. Nothing major.

Component quality is good, as you’d expect from FFG.

I’ll need a few more plays to confirm this, but my opinion right now? BSG takes semi-cooperative games to the next level. Well done.

Update 12/29/08: One problem with BSG, after a dozen-ish plays, is that the humans know how many cylons there are. That actually drains some tension out of the game, and lets you do some reasonable calculations. I had upped my rating to a '9' after 4 plays, but I think I'm dropping it back a bit. I still like the game, rather a lot, but I'm looking pretty hard at the variants posted ...

Great review, but ...


I'm late jumping onto the BSG train but I've recently got into the show and watched all the episodes in just 2 months. I agree that season 3 was kind of bad, but season 4 is my favourite so far. It just gets so much better that it sort of a shame to miss out on it due to a slower middle. Anyway, I can't wait until the conclusion of season 4 (it will be bittersweet moment), and I also can't wait until my copy of BSG the board game gets to my house!

I think you've done a terrific job showing us why. I hated SoC . . . but man, you've got me thinking BSG might be worth the $40 to test it out.

Well, the 16 month layoff really cooled me off. Very few shows can survive that. And well,


I'll probably catch it eventually. But I suspect the ending will be a let down.

My compliments on an especially excellent review!

Good review, agree on practically everything.

I have only played twice, once with 6 players, once with 7 (2 players played Baltar, see my post in the Variants forum).

Both times the humans won with but just scraped it with at least one dial down to 1.
One game had no cylons until the second round. The other had one cyclon at the start. Okay, half (one of the Baltar players).

From this I feel the game is very well balanced, though a few more plays might well shake this, and things might be different for different numbers of players and different shuffles of the loyalty deck. As you say, if two cyclons are in play right from the start, I can't see things going the human's way. I guess you could only put one cylon in to begin with, not sure how much of an effect this would have psychologically, though of course if the cylon revealed early the tension would be gone until the new loyalty cards were dealt.

To be honest though, my huge enjoyment of the games has not been down to winning or losing, but rather the social aspect of the game - the accusations, the politics, a bit of roleplaying. When I sit down to, say, a game of Agricola, I expect to play my hardest to try and win, but when I sit down to BSG, having fun seems to be the objective, and the final score doesn't really affect the enjoyment had along the way.

Very good review, Brian. Much appreciated. I own it, but have yet to play it, save for about an hour running through things solitaire, in order to be able to explain it to my group. Yet even based only on that, I can agree with your summation about the random elements, and their mitigation due to the tension the game has in comparison to SoC.

Really good review; I think you've really hit on the strong points of the game. However, I thought I might offer a constrasting opinion on the strength of revealed cylons.



Since revealed cylons must discard down to 3 cards, and may only draw 2 cards per turn, they probably aren't going to be able to affect every skill check. In a six-player game, you're probably going to have 4-5 skill checks over the course of 6 turns, and that cylon is going to be able to influence 2-3 of those (assuming he/she has the right cards).

I played a game where the humans won by an incredibly narrow margin (I was a cylon), coming back from what seemed like utter defeat, and I'm convinced that the reason the humans were able to win was that both the cylons revealed themselves, and so suddenly the human started winning all their skill checks.

I still maintain that unrevealed cylons, if played well, can do more damage than revealed cylons; at least, initially. Since unrevealed cylons can't really control what resources they hurt (without arousing suspicion), I think the game has a very natural flow: unrevealed cylon does a lot of general, unfocused damage through sabotage and deceit, and then reveals and hammers away at the lowest resources with the Cylon locations.

Balance -- I feel that 6 player is tilted towards the humans (unless they make the mistake of getting to the halfway point without a dial in the red). 7 Players is probably very pro-human. Five player is pro-Cylon.

Arguing "Unrevealed vs revealed cylons" has been done, but just to summarize:

1) An unrevealed cylon probably can't even hurt 2 skill checks per round without quickly being thrown in the brig. Usually you can only toss in one bad card, and an unlucky destiny deck may let people guess the color you tossed in. Then it's usually narrowed to 2-3 people. It may just be our group, but we can track cards (even the destiny deck) with a high degree of precision. In our last game, when the cylon detecter event showed up, the negative cards lets us all know who the 1st cylon was; the successful skill was used to test a 2nd players loyalty.

1a) Now, some characters can wreck a reasonable amount of havoc. A cylon Roslyn can steer the crisis deck. But if you too blatant, you are revealed. You can only plead poor cards for so long.

2) An unrevealed (non-brigged) cylon still advances the jump track (aka "Win timer") ~40% of the time. Scouting (etc) may drop that number a bit, but that leads to being revealed. A revealed cylon never advances it. This is a big deal.

I've posted a thread on variants.
As has Alexfrog.

An unrevealed Cylon can do a lot of damage simply by playing sub-optimally.

This is especially true where special abilities are concerned.

Look at the next crisis card and put the good ones on the bottom of the deck.
Pass any one skill check - on a skill check that doesn't really matter.
Look at the other Cylon player's loyalty card, and declare them human.
etc.

In my last game, I became a Cylon at the midpoint. As Admiral, I could choose the worst of the two planets each time we jumped, but they were all crappy. What did the humans in was when I activated the FTL jump and lost us three population with a poor roll. I managed to convince everyone that jumping early was our only hope, and well worth the risk.

Brian, correct me if I'm wrong, but a majority of your points arguing that unrevealed Cylons are weaker than revealed Cylons revolve around the fact that unrevealed Cylons can be discovered and forced to reveal.

If revealed Cylons are actually more powerful, how is this a weakness of being unrevealed?

If I understand you correctly, what your saying is "hidden is worse than revealed because a hidden Cylon may be forced to become a revealed Cylon". Huh?

They both have benefits. I'm not sure I followed either, but I'll give my 2 cents. I think unrevealed players have a harder time playing, but it is more enjoyable when pulled off successfully.

Playing a cylon can be hard. For example, if you are Tyrol, you get a lot of the Engineering cards. The problem for you is you need to watch how many you throw in. The key is not to overplay the failures and make sure you varying your play.

Once you reveal, you can overtly cause havoc. If a raider boarded, you can move it along faster. You do not gather skill cards as fast, but you could load up on engineering an piloting which will be most likely cause the humans to fail skill checks. Then try to focus problems on dropping one resource.

In our last game, Starbuck revealed when we were about to jump to victory. All through the game, the player limited throwing pilot cards in. I as Roslin, threw Helo in the brig because he went to the lab to pick up Engineering cards a few times. Then in one skill check, we had 5 blues. I keyed on him, but it wasn't. It was Tyrol.

The more you play, the better you will be at playing a sleeper agent. That much I know. I encourage you to do so as well.

Good summations. I do feel that unrevealed cylons are more interesting and unfortunately the game fails to make staying hidden a worthwhile tactic since revealing themselves allows them to cause much more havok. The brig seems fairly useless against cylons since it almost forces them to reveal which only makes them stronger. There needs to be incentives for cylons to stay hidden and some sort of bonus to the humans for forcing a cylon to reveal themselves as someone suggested.

Otherwise, a very enjoyable game!

I think that many people underestimate the advantage of knowing who the Cylons are. It becomes easier for the humans to work together to solve problems once they know for sure who they can trust!

In my opinion, being an unrevealed Cylon is a strong position. I barely alter the resolution of the crisis. Most of the time, I put too much cards than necessary. That way, I have not enough cards when a critical crisis happened.

More important, I wait for the right moment: when two basestars attack the fleet and a dozen raiders and half a dozen of civilian ships are out. At this moment, I like to activate the communications and move two civilian ships under fire. That’s really powerful. Even better, one time, as Appolo, I moved 6 unmanned vipers away of the civilian ships, but… the crisis card I drew had not the raider symbol, but… the next player was also an unrevealed Cylon, he scouted the crisis deck and choose the right card: the raiders fired on the ships for a loss of 18 populations! Game over. That is the power of unrevealed Cylons.

After playing more games, I'll admit that humanity knowing who the cylons are is a powerful, and that cylons should generally not reveal except at a critical time. The more I play, the more I'm enjoynig this. I may burn out on this, but burnout is usually a sign of a good game.

Just noting here that I've updated my review with the thought that knowing exactly how many cylons there are does drain a bit of the tension out, especially once teams are firmed up.