Battle Star Galactica Board Game Review

A tense moment in the game. Can you spot the Cylon sleeper agent?

Hmm. Two reviews in two posts.  I think I’m turning into Which magazine. Anyhoo, number one son and I spent the afternoon trying to get our heads around the Battlestar Galactica board game which I got as a Christmas present and seem to have opened early. But only so I could review it for you people of course.

The TV series is ace. From a fairly hack premise (robot slaves turn on their human masters) they created one of the best and most thoughtful dramas on telly. One thing that made the TV program so gripping was the way that any of the characters could in fact be a Cylon baddy; the robots being able to create versions of themselves that closely mimic humans. This twist both cuts down the cost of makeup and costumes and keeps the viewers on their toes as anyone could turn out nasty in the next episode.

The game has a tough act to follow and I reckon it makes it work. You don’t play to win as an individual, you play to make sure either the humans escape or the Cylons win. That means teamwork from the start, except of course for those players who are nominated as Cylon sleepers, who must do all they can to disrupt the human effort without being discovered.

The gameplay is pretty complicated, just like the TV show, with a lot of different kinds of crisis to deal with, battles to fight, Quorum card to play and all sorts of stuff. But by the end of a couple of hours we had figured out how the play works, and started to appreciate the cleverness of the design, which threads the events of episodes into a larger story arc. We are looking forward to having a proper go over the Christmas season.

Oh, and in our game William Adama was a Cylon sleeper and, not surprisingly, the humans lost.