Board Game Review: Battle Star Galactica – Part 1

Ok first of if you haven’t seen this series, then shame on you!  Extra points for the original show but we’ll accept the most recent remake of the show.  Battle Star Galactica is a 3-6 player Co-Op\Traitor resource management\combat game made by those grand geeks over at Fantasy Flight.  Average game play takes about 2 hours or more in reality.  And of course it is completely licensed from the BSG television remake.

First things first, the components of the game are pristine and super high quality.  The box itself is made of the thick textured cardstock that FFG is known for producing in other games like Arkham Horror.  There is a game board with the Galactica on it as well as Colonial One, a few cylon locations, Supply Dials for the humans made with super high quality cardstock, a location for the “Fate Deck,” Raptors and Vipers, Damaged Ships area, FTL jump track, cylon boarding party tracker, and notations for the skill decks.  There are a good number of small plastic Vipers, Raptors, cylon Raiders, cylon Heavy Raiders, and cardboard Basestars made of the same card stock as the rest of the game.  There are the skill cards in the small card style FFG is known for, Quarom deck, Crisis deck, cylon crisis deck, jump location cards, Kobal card, loyalty cards, fleet ship tokens, character cards, character icons, nuke tokens, and a few other small damage and pilot icons.  Finally there is a nice 8-sided die that comes with the game.  Now there’s a die you don’t see often in games.

Set up is pretty straightforward.  There is a consistent set up with a couple of launched vipers and a few fleet ships following in Galactica’s wake.  After all the cards are shuffled, everyone is dealt a loyalty card (which will dictate if the player is a traitor, sympathizer, or not a cylon), and must pick their character.  Now the character selection is a unique process requiring every player to progressively pick from the character types with the most available characters.  For instance, there are Political Leaders, Pilots, Engineering, and Military Leaders.  If player one chooses a political leader than player two must pick from the remaining categories and so on until there is an equal number of character types again.  The only exception is the Engineering type.  These types of characters may be chosen at any time.  After characters are chosen and placed in starting locations the presidency and admiralship are given to the respective political and military leaders based on a chart in the rules.  Play then begins with player one and proceeds clockwise in a normal fashion.

A note about character selection: each character has different special abilities that come into play, one that can be used only once per game, and others that stay in play.  In addition to their special rules, characters each have access to only specific types of skill cards (i.e. engineering, piloting, etc), and the cards and type become very important later in the game, especially engineering as it’s the only skill that can repair damaged locations on Galactica.  This is the first opportunity players have to work together and cooperation can put the group a step closer to success or failure.  The challenge here is to not let the knowledge that someone at some point will be betraying the group influence your choices, because from the start you all are on the same side…most likely.

Now the roles of President and Admiral require a little more attention.  Both character types have access to special abilities.  The titles of President and Admiral both pass initially down a specific line of succession depending on what players are in use.  That being said there are a number of opportunities players have to strip the titles from those that have them and give them to others.  This can be because the individual is believed to be a cylon and you want to take the power away from them, the player receiving the titles is trying to consolidate power since they are a cylon, or perhaps because you are a cylon and want to cast doubt on a certain other player by making it appear as they are trying to take control.  The Admiral title comes with two Nuke tokens allowing you to, during your action phase, launch a powerful attack at a cylon ship.  The President however has access to the Quorum deck.  These cards allow the president during their action phase to try to positively influence Galactica’s condition and that of her crew.  Often this takes the form of adding to the quickly depleting resources.

Okay well that concludes the first part of the review, we’ll continue later with part two of the review.  So tune in for the rest of this awesome slice of traitory goodness!