Battlestar Galactica - The Board Game: A Five-Play Review

The latest addition to my burgeoning game collection, Battlestar Galactica came highly recommended to my by several other gamer friends. After several plays with varying numbers of players and groups, there are things that I enjoy about the game, and things that aren't so great.

A brief summary of the game:

The humans are trying to travel to a location called Kobol, and the Cylons, their robotic enemies, are trying to thwart them by any means necessary. Players are assigned secret roles at the game's beginning and again at the game's midpoint, which determines which side they are playing for. Distance travelled and staying alive are the objectives for the human side, but the Cylons can take them down by eliminating any one of a number of necessities such as food, fuel, morale, population, by boarding the ship and destroying it from within, or by destroying the ship from outside attacks. Human players also have to combat other crises every turn which affect their resources.

First, the positive. It is a unique game, in that it is mostly co-operative, but incorporates an element of Mafia where one or two players' objectives could be different from the group or change to be different over the course of the game. It's Pandemic meets Mafia, and the air of suspicion instantly present from the start until all Cylons are revealed is something I haven't experienced playing any other board game.

The game is well designed, in that there is an impending sense of danger at all times, and a clear, Cylon-free board can turn around into a disaster zone in an instant. Being a fan of the show, I think the creators of the game did a very nice job representing the same sensations found throughout the series.

Now the negative. It's really, really hard to win if you're a human. Even though in most scenarios, the Cylons are going to be outnumbered, they have a great deal more power in that they can decide to focus on a particular resource to eradicate the humans. In the games we've played, it's been almost impossible to come back after a Blue, Cylon ships appear and attack regular crisis card doubled with a revealed Cylon's super crisis.

Secondly, while the game box says the game plays 3-6 players, ignore it. It should read "5-6 players, unless you want someone to be bored." Only with five or six are there two Cylons in the game. Of the five games I have played, one has been with four players, two with five and two with six. All except one (potentially tainted) game has gone in favor of the Cylons, and it was likely only due to the fact that no Cylon role cards were dealt out until the midpoint of the game, giving the humans a huge head start. With four players, only one Cylon role card is dealt, and from what I was told and witnessed, it's simply not fun to play this game on a team by yourself, even though she did win (grumble grumble).

Third, it's a long, long game. Our games have averaged about 3 hours each, so it's quite a comittment to start a game, especially knowing the Cylons have a large advantage. Perhaps the game will balance while we continue to discover other strategies for the humans, but we have begun to crank the resources up for the humans. The last game was +2 for population and fuel, and +1 for morale and food, and the Cylons still won. Hopefully, more tweaking will find the right balance for our game group.

Despite the bad, I still really enjoy this game. It's just the right mixture of luck, deceipt, using your cards right, manipulation, and socialization to make it worthwhile. It will likely be a go-to staple for our group for quite a while, or until we've thrown it off the roof in frustration.

-Andrew