Customer Reviews

Battlestar Galactica

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is one of the rare games that successfully marries theme (a licensed theme, no less) and gameplay.

Players each choose a character from the cast of the television series. Each player, on his or her turn:

1. Draws skill cards (which double as action cards),
2. Optionally moves to location on Galactica (or Colonial One, or, as a pilot, through the space around Galactica),
3. Activates a location or plays an action on a card (or, as a pilot in a Viper, moves again or fires at Cyclon raiders and basestars in order to protect the human fleet),
4. Draws and resolves a Crisis Card.

Most crisis cards depict a distressing event (with art and text from the television series), be it a food shortage or a lost scouting party, and offer a choice and/or a skill check to be made to minimize the damage to Galactica or her resources. Skill checks are resolved by players secretly contributing positive (matching color/type) or negative (incorrect color/type) skill cards. In addition, many of these crisis cards also activate enemy ships or move the Galactica closer to making its next jump.

But all that would just make for a typical cooperative game. Each player also receives a secret loyalty card that indicates whether they are a treacherous Cylon (skinjob) or a human. The humans attempt to survive the journey to Kobol (by making jumps that total at least eight units, plus one additional jump to end the game) whereas the Cylons do their best to sabatoge the human effort, either covertly (which involves a great deal of bluffing and secretly tipping the scales via secretly played cards) or overtly (by revealing themselves as Cylons and just hammering at the Galactica with all the tools a revealed Cylon has). Furthermore, halfway through the game another set of loyalty cards is dealt, such that there are a total of two Cyclon players (in a five player game; the number of Cylons and sympathizers varies based on the number of players). In this way, the game captures the feeling of paranoia that characterizes the source material.

With accusations flying about and choices constantly being made, BSG is a strong interactive game that really shines. Admittedly, it does run a little long (three to four hours for the first game and around half that once everyone knows how to play), but once the first few rounds have passed, the pace of the game really picks up, as do player involvement and suspicion. BSG is, without a doubt, the reviewer's favorite cooperative board game (compared to Shadows Over Camelot, Arkham Horror, Last Night on Earth, Pandemic, and A Touch of Evil, as well as faux-cooperative games such as Cutthroat Caverns) and, moreover, one of his favorite board games, period. BSG should be well received amongst fans of American-style board games as well as fans of Battlestar Galactica television series.

P.S.: Prospective owners need not worry about the game spoiling the series for those who haven't seen the show. The game makes only oblique references to the events of the series (and even those are limited to the first two seasons). In fact, the greatest spoilers may very well be the line of succession for each of the positions of Admiral (that rank being a minor spoiler in and of itself) and President.

This is a serious board game that is one of the best uses of theme I've ever seen. The gameplay is deep and fun socially (as you may be trying to hide your allegiance) and gives the players a great sense of urgency and purpose. You see, most of the time the players are cooperating to accomplish a very challenging survival goal. Very impressive, overall.

There are two downsides that you should know about.

1. It's one of those "major commitment" games. Everyone needs to commit to 3-4 hours of play. Especially when there is someone playing for the first time.

2. Being the secret Cylon is not always as fun as being on the other side, especially when you are working together SO HARD to survive and then you suddenly switch to the other side.

In short
If you are a fan of the show and have a group of people that like playing intense, epic, and long board games, this is a perfect game.

This is a rare boardgame that's lots of fun and is also true to the show. Most movie/tv tie-ins are cheap attempts to cash in, but this really feels like playing a character on Battlestar Galactica.

It's mostly a cooperative game, but depending on how many people are playing, one or more players are secretly Cylons or Cylon sympathizers that are working against the human crew. This makes it fun to play again and again, because you never know who is going to be the Cylon next time.

It's very well made and will last for many years. The instructions are very clear with lots of examples that made it easy to learn, plus you can go to [...] or the publisher's website ([....]for tips and updates.

Fantasy Flight Games's Battlestar Galactica is the board game representation of the cult hit television series. And when I say, "representation", I mean it. This game is the perfect marriage of theme with board game. Those who are aspiring board game designer who need inspiration for who to make their games more thematic: look no further than BSG.

Battlestar Galactica was designed by some of the usual suspects at FFG: Corey Konieczka, Eric M. Lang, Jeff Tidball and Mark O'Connor. The game accomodates between three to five players and takes about 2 to 3.5 hours to play.

The goal of BSG is different depending upon which side you are on: human or cylon. The humans must make one faster-than-light (FTL) jump after they have travelled 8 parsecs; the cylons must prevent this from happening by either destroying the Galactica or eroding the Galactica's resources.

At game set-up, players secretly receive a loyalty card.

There are two types of loyalty cards: human and cylon. These cards remain secret throughout the game. Players may never willingly reveal secret information. After the Galactica has jumped a sum of 4 or more parsecs, a second (and last) set of loyalty cards are dealt out. If you have a cylon card, you are a cylon. Thus, players who start the game as humans could quite likely end the game as a cylon!

The humans need to negotiate crises after each turn. Failure to negotiate a crisis usually costs the Galactica some resources. Should a resource fall to 0, the game is over and all cylons are winners.

The resource dial is turned to show the new value when a crisis is failed.

In order to negotiate a crisis, all players will secretly skill play cards from their hands. All crisis cards and all skill cards are color coded. If the skill cards match the crisis' color, the skill card aids in the negotiation of that crisis; if the color, however, does not match, the skill card makes the crisis that much more difficult.

Two random cards are also added to the crisis resolution so that no one knows for sure if the crisis was sabotaged by the cylons!

Players assume the role of one of the main characters on board the Galactica.

Each character has a skill set appropriate to their character. This is the amount of skill cards they will draw during their turns. The characters also have some special abilities and a special weakness that really rounds out who the character is.

Players will move around the board during their turns in order to obtain more skill cards or to "put out fires". Parts of Galactica may have been damaged which requires a player to repair. Cylon raiders or basestars may be in the vicinity requiring the Galactica to make a military response.

Colonial One gives the President some quorum cards which are quite powerful.

The game continues until the Galactica has made jumped after reaching the 8 parsec marker, when the Galactica is destroyed or when any resource reachs zero.

Battlestar Galactica is a gamer's game. It's rich in theme. The game is one of bluffing, intuitition and some deduction. There are ample opportunities for resource management. This is a competitive AND cooperative game. The game is enjoyable to those who are not familiar with the television--although if you like the show, you will almost certainly love this game!

The quality of the components is high. The box is high quality cardboard with linen. The bits are thick cardboard or durable plastic. The cards are high gloss with full color pictures on them. The only complaint I have with the nuts and bolts of the game is the storage compartments: there are none! You will have to find some creative way of storing your BSG game if you want your bits to be organized.

I recommend this game to anyone who likes RPG's and is reluctant to try board games. I recommend it to anyone who likes the TV show and likes board games in general. Also, if you like mind games, BSG is a game you ought to try!

I origionaly played the game with a goup of friends who followed the show religiously. Not knowing anything about Battlestar Galactica, I jumpped right in and immersed myself in the game. I had a blast even though the Humans lost.

Every week the humans lost and every week we would be slighly depressed, but every week we went back and had a blast. Now that I'm deployed in Afghanisan, I ordered the game to share it with all my friends and we have so much fun playing.

The rules are easy to follow, every game is different, and you will learn to distrust everyone. Best friends start acusing each other of being Cylons and order delves into chaos pretty quickly.

Like I said, this is a fun game wether or not you have ever watched Battlestar Galactica. I recommend it though it does take a few hours to play, I garentee you'll be having so much fun you'll forget about the time.

Anyways, thats just my two cents.

I was extremely skeptical of this when I received it as a gift last Christmas. I am a big BSG fan, but I didn't really think it would work as a board game. Even then, can a board game even come close to matching the spirit of BSG? It turns out that it can and did, and is very fun to play. I tried it out with two friends, one who was a fellow BSG fan and another who had never watched the show before. Both really took to it (though I got a lot of questions from my one friend about "What is a Cylon again?"), and we had a great time.

That being said, this is a very heady game, not to be played casually. Seriously, we took about 4 hours to get through one game of this. Later plays have been shorter and longer, but plan to be there for at least 3-3.5 hours, even if you're ready for the complex rules. You really have to pay attention to the rules, and keep the booklet handy, but it still is a heck of a lot of fun and gets you paranoid about who you can trust and who you cannot among your friends. That being said, it does ask you to get 'into' character more than any other boardgame I have done before, and is kind of like a mashup between a boardgame and a role-playing game.

I may have been wary of this before, but now I enjoy it and recommend it for anyone with a cluster of BSG fans or boardgame/RPG lovers, because this will be a lot of fun for everyone.

This is one fun game to play with a group of people. The game itself, is a bit more complicated than the average board games. At first, it seemed that we were just going through the manuals endlessly. It took us an entire game to figure out the game play. But once you get a hang of it, it was great fun.

Overall, it's a game about decisions and deceptions. What makes this game interesting is that nobody can prove that he or she is not a cylone because game rule prohibits you from doing so. Because of that, cylone accusations often flies left and right during the game until the real cylone is revealed.

The minimum players for the game is 3, but I think you'll need 4 player to get a semi decent game play. You really want to have 5 or 6 players to get the most fun out of the game.

There is a game called "werewolves," or, alternately, "mafia" - the way it works, one person is secretly a killer, and chooses someone to die every night, and the other non-mafia/wolf players need to figure out who the killer is, and then kill them.

This board game is very similar to that mechanic (one to two ppl are hidden cylons) BUT - unlike werewolves / mafia, wherein a person who was killed may have to sit out the WHOLE rest of the game, in this game no one dies. Even if you are an outed Cylon, you still have a part to play in the game.

So, having said that, this game is excellent. All the players interact with each other to stave off crises that effect the ship. Everyone, face down, throws down cards which effect the crisis. The cylons will throw down cards that hurt, but you don't know who threw what card (plus two cards are randomly mixed in), so you do not know who the cylons are.

Example of play:

My turn: the galactica ship has taken heavy damage from a cylon basestar (4/6 - @ 6 game over) - including the warp drive, therefore we cannot jump away from the ships attacking us, and I, as Admiral Adama, cannot repair the warp myself. ON my action turn I use a card that gives another play a free move and action interrupt that takes place instead of my action. I give this power to the engineer, who moves to the warp drive, and repairs it - the card he uses to repair it grants him another action, which he uses to engage the now repaired warp drive (known as FTL [faster than light] in this game), and he gets our badly damaged butts out of there. It was highly dramatic, and we all crowed with success when we did it.

NOW - imagine that the engineer player was secretly a cylon - and took that extra action I gave him to declare he was a cylon, and to hurt the team?

Thats the dynamic at play. You work with your teammates and try to save the ship, and to get home, but you do not know who is a cylon or not.

Fantastic, fantastic game. I cannot wait to play again. Best with 4-6 ppl, games take anywhere from 1-3 hours (usually in the middle.).

Thumbs up.

Battlestar Galactica is the board game that put me firmly in the camp of the "board game gamer."
When I got this game for myself last Xmas, I was daunted by the long rulebook and the many cards, parts and pieces. It all seemed like too much effort...crisis cards...super crisis cards...Raiders...Heavy Raiders...etcetera. There are many small ships to keep track of and many cardboard pieces which don't always hold up so well after multiple games.
But don't let that stop you. This game is worth the effort.
Since I am a big fan of the "Battlestar Galactica" TV show, I didn't give up on the game and I played the it at a local gaming convention. And I had a blast!
The Battlestar Galactica board game is complex and time consuming and deals with some adult themes, so I wouldn't recommend it for kids (especially those with short attention spans).
The goal of the game is for the Human fleet to reach the planet Kobol by making FTL (faster than light) "jumps" through hazardous territory. The Cylons want to prevent this from happening by destroying the Battlestar Galactica or running the Humans out of their four main resources (food, fuel, morale and population) through military attacks and exploiting the mandatory crisis posed to the fleet each turn.
Yes, you'll need at least three hours (give or take) for a game of BSG, but the time spent is worth it, if you ask me.
Yes, making the switch to this kind of complex, adult oriented game isn't easy at first for people who play Parker Brothers board games regularly.
Yes, you will have more fun playing BSG with three or more people. But there are two player and solo rules on the game's web site. I've had fun playing by myself, which (to me) is the sign of a good board game.
Yes, you may get the chance to play as a Cylon and attempt to destroy humanity. Any character being played can be a Cylon, not just the ones who turned out to be such in the TV show. The element of paranoia between the players is a significant element of the game--one which increases with the number of players in the game.
No, everything in the game does not follow the logic set down by the TV show. For example, no character can fly Raptors in the game (Raptors are risked in various card based situations, they don't enter into combat), not even Boomer and Helo who are characters in the TV show who only fly Raptors.
No, it's not easy to be the Humans once a Cylon player is revealed. But that's the point. Human players have to work together to find out which player is a hidden Cylon--while resolving a new crisis every turn, plus Cylon fleet attacks--and then work even harder to fight off the revealed Cylon's determined efforts to destroy humanity.
Yes, each of the main Human (and one Cylon) characters from the first season of the TV show is represented in the game. My favorites are Baltar and Tigh, though Adama and Roslin are great in larger games. And the allure of jumping into a Viper and blasting Cylon Raiders as Apollo or Starbuck is strong.
Yes, Fantasy Flight Games is due to release the Pegasus expansion (in Fall 2009) to the Battlestar Galactica board game, which carries the game through the beginning of season 3 of the TV series.
Whether you like the TV show or hate it, I hope you try and enjoy the Battlestar Galactica board game if what I've written above sounds at all interesting to you.

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (BSGBG) is a fun and socially engaging game. For those familiar with BSG, it recreates the first leg of the exodus (post-destruction of the 12 Colonies to New Caprica) (the first expansion takes it beyond that). [For those not familiar with the series, it is about a race of humans fleeing from a "race" of robots (called Cylons) that humanity originally created but the Cylons decided to turn on them and wipe them out. The remnants of humanity are now fleeing, seeking a new home. The Cylons have infiltrated the remnants with human-looking Cylons in an attempt to make sure the remnant is doomed to extinction.]

How the game plays is that each player plays as one of the main characters from the series. Each character has a series of skills (ex. piloting/engineering/etc.) where he/she gets cards from as well as a special abilities unique to that character. Then each player is dealt a loyalty card which is kept secret (it will say either you are a Cylon or not a Cylon). Then the President of the Colonies as well as the Admiral of the Fleet are determined (based on an order of succession). (The President gets special ability cards via the Quorum deck while the Admiral gets to determine jump location and command of the nuclear weapons about the Battlestar Galactica.) Each player's turn works along these lines:
1) get new skill cards (based on the skills printed on the char. card that he/she is playing)
2) perform an action (ex. fire Galactica's guns, launch fighter, get the ship ready to jump, etc.)
3) draw a crisis card

It is at the crisis cards that tension builds, since almost every crisis card runs along the lines of "unless you have skill cards in total value of X (of 1 or more colors), something bad will happen". This is where folks will say how many skill cards (which all have a numeric value between 1 and 5) they are contributing to the crisis. Everyone then throws in their cards plus 2 additional ones from a "destiny deck". The combined deck is shuffled and then flipped over. The skill cards with the colors on the crisis card add positively while any other colors contribute negatively. (ex. A crisis card requires 15 using yellow and green. Well, 7 cards are thrown in (including the destiny cards), there is a green 3, a yellow 5, a red 2, a blue 5, a green 1, and two yellow 2s. The total then is 3+5+1+2+2-2-5=6 so the check fails and the bad result on the crisis card happens.) If a check fails though, the question becomes "did it fail because of two bad cards from the destiny deck or is there one or more Cylons throwing in bad cards?" If there are 3 or more bad cards, you know there is a Cylon amongst you (since the destiny deck only contributes 2 cards). This is where the fun truly begins as folks will start trying to figure out who is the Cylon (or Cylons) in their midst. Other crisis cards are more direct and simple: play some civilian ships (which Galactica has to protect) along with some Cylon ships or the player makes a choice (ex. President chooses: -1 morale or -1 population) (if either value reaches zero, the human players lose).

The tension also builds since the Galactica must make various jumps at which point the current Admiral of the Fleet draws two location cards and determines which one the fleet is jumping to. The Admiral only reveals the destination card and not the one he/she didn't choose. Some of the locations are bad (ex. lose morale/populations) and some are good (ex. gain morale). If the location has some bad effects, the players will probably ask "Is our beloved Admiral actually a Cylon???" to which the Admiral will respond "But this was the best option! The other destination would've dropped us in the middle of a Cylon fleet!" (of course whether or not the Admiral is lying is another question....).

The fleet jumps a number of times and at the half-way point of their journey, new loyalty cards are dealt to players (so, people who at the start of the game thought they were human, find out that they are actually Cylons and covertly switch sides) (if you are hidden Cylon (undetected), you always remain a Cylon). Humans do have options of throwing suspected Cylons in to the brig or removing them from office (President/Admiral) (and in the Pegasus expansion, executing them). Cylons have the option of revealing themselves at which point, they switch and start overtly playing Cylon (which allows them to coordinate attacks on the fleet amongst other things).

The game continues until either the Galactica is destroyed, Galactica gets to New Caprica, or one of the resources (ex. morale) is depleted. Humans win if Galactica get to New Caprica, Cylons win in any other event.

Some thoughts: 1) The game plays best with those who are willing to get in to the game. Like most social games (ex. Werewolf, Mafia, BSGBG), the players make the game. If people treat it in the same way like they play Clue, it won't be as much fun. The idea is to make it an "experience" and it will be memorable. For example, I remember one of my first plays of this game where I (a hidden Cylon) was able to convince the humans into making me both President and Admiral as well, as convine a pair of players that the other person in that pair was a Cylon so that pair always worked at odds to each other. (Needless to say, I led the Cylons to a commanding victory.) It gives people an opportunity to role-play their characters from the show.

2) While not required, it is highly recommended that players be familiar with the storyline. It will make the game a LOT more fun. (NOTE: Whether or not a person was a Cylon in the show is immaterial to this game.)

3) The game can be fairly long (especially if you throw in the expansions). Expect a good 3 hours if you are playing with 6 people, but it is well worth that time.

Bottom line: If you liked the series, looking for a fun social game, and your gaming group doesn't mind spending an evening playing this, this could very well be the game for you. It is for me!