Life After Galactica: The BSG Boardgame

It’s been a typical week on Galactica.

After a contentious election, I, Gaius Baltar, had won the presidency. We weathered some riots and a water shortage, which cost us some much-needed food and morale. Before we could catch our breath, a Cylon fleet jumped in right on top of us. Apollo climbed into a viper, but he and a nugget got shot down before they could do much. That left ten raiders bearing down on three defenseless civilian ships. A hidden Cylon revealed himself and blew two holes in Galactica before departing for the resurrection ship; Colonel Tigh was collateral damage and got sent to sickbay with more than a hangover. The basestar in our orbit launched missiles and got our FTL drive in a lucky shot, leaving us no chance to jump to safety. A heavy raider with a boarding party moved closer to our hangar bay; on top of all this we might soon have bulletheads marching through the old girl. The raiders got to a civilian ship; 4,000 people dead in one shot, knocking our total population to just 24,000. The basestar launched still more raiders-the sky was starting to look like a very unfriendly parking lot. Everyone was looking to me for leadership; I asked for their input. Should I order Starbuck into her viper to blow some toasters out of the sky? But I also had the skills to fix the FTL, should I do that instead? Or maybe I should fix communications so we could order our civilian ships to safety? Everyone urgently asked me to make repairs.

There’s a problem, though, I told them, smiling. I’m actually a Cylon.

In fact I had been from the start. I put two bullets into Starbuck, sending her to sick bay. Then I got my own goo bath on the resurrection ship and joined the winning team. Half an hour later the human race was down to a mere 12,000 souls, and Galactica went down in flames, leaving them to a grim fate.

This is the Battlestar Galactica board game.

The show may be gone, but with the game board, three to six players, and four to six hours, you’ve got all the excitement of an entire season’s worth of programming.

Pretty much everything you see in the show you can do in the game. Is someone acting suspicious? Toss them in the brig. Is that basestar (or two) getting too close for comfort? Throw a nuke at it. Disagree with the president? Hold an election.

Who do you want to be today?

The first step in starting the game is picking a character. You get a choice of ten characters from the show, and the main ones are all here: Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, Apollo, Starbuck, Tigh, Helo, Boomer, Baltar, Tom Zarek and Tyrol. Okay, maybe Zarek isn’t a main guy, more of a recurring, but he does add some needed shadiness to the political side of things.

The game draws mostly on the first season of the show, so if you were hoping to find Admiral Cain or Samuel Anders (Go C-Bucs!), you’ll be disappointed. But don’t fret, for a game that’s relatively new (it came out last fall) the fan base is very active. Download and print out a character expansion, and Cain, Anders, Gaeta, Dualla, Cally and lots more are available to you.

To start with, there are four different character classes: military and political leaders, pilots, and support. Yes, Tyrol is the only official support character-you don’t see Madame President going to the hangar deck to fix vipers, do you? Like the show, each character will play to a specific strength. If you want to fly around and blow things up, try being a pilot. If giving orders and formulating battle strategy is your thing, try being Adama or Tigh. Were you the kid in high school who volunteered for all those committees and was sworn enemies with the kid who took editorship of the yearbook? You might like being a politician. If you’re the compulsive type who does other people’s dishes, than Tyrol is your guy. It’s often wiser for the group to pick somewhat collectively. If you only have, say, four players, having three of them be pilots could lead to a very uneven game where you’re short on necessary skills.

Skill Cards, the game’s currency. Sorry, Apollo can’t use them to pay for hookers.

The first thing that makes your character unique is the skill draw. The game is built around skill cards that you use to accomplish your tasks; more on how those work later. According to your character, you get a certain number of Politics, Leadership, Piloting, Tactics, or Engineering cards per turn. Tyrol will obviously get more engineering cards. Roslin and Baltar get more politics cards, Starbuck and Apollo get piloting, and so on.

Each character also has special skills, things that they do especially well. Roslin has psychic visions that help her steer the fleet through crises. Starbuck’s expert piloting enables her to take extra actions when she’s in the cockpit of a viper. Baltar’s superior intellect allows him to draw an extra card to help cope with a specific crisis. Each character also has a special ability they can use once per game; in a tough spot, these can make the difference between survival and catastrophe. Boomer’s instincts can change the outcome of a crisis. Helo’s moral compass can change a potentially bad decision made by another player.

Starbuck’s character card. Frakking with Apollo’s head is NOT one of her special abilities.

But this is Galactica, and if there was one thing to remember about the show, it’s that nobody’s perfect. Everybody has a weakness as well. Starbuck’s insubordinate, so if someone decides she belongs in the brig, it’s easier to put her there. Roslin’s cancer forces her to lose skill cards when she activates locations. If Tigh gets down to his last skill card, he gets drunk and has to discard that one as well.

Leadership has its privileges…

It’s 4:20 on board Colonial One…

Now that everyone knows who they are, there’s one last thing to sort out – who’s running things. The game comes with an order of succession for two job titles, the Admiralty and the Presidency. Each comes with special abilities and privileges not afforded to the other players that can make a big difference in humanity’s success. The Admiral controls the two nuclear weapons the fleet has, your best option to get rid of a basestar quickly if you need to. The Admiral also chooses the destinations when the fleet jumps, which makes him responsible for how far and how fast the fleet goes. The President has mostly political powers, including access to a special deck of Quorum cards that give him special abilities. He can issue arrest orders, make speeches that improve morale, authorize deadly force if there’s a dire threat to the fleet, or ration food to make it go further.

It all sounds relatively simple so far, doesn’t it? All of you working together for the good of humanity…except you won’t be. Because you’re about to be dealt your loyalty cards.

Are you a frakkin’ skin job?

You are, in fact, human. Dr. Baltar invites you to celebrate with a lap dance.

If your card looks like the one above, breathe a deep sigh and smile. You’re working together for the good of humanity, and there’s nothing wrong with you.

Would being a Cylon be any fun if you couldn’t bust caps in some fools?

If your card looks like the one above, breathe a deep sigh and smile. You’re secretly a malevolent inhuman machine, and you’d like nothing better than to see the extermination of everyone around you. But keep a happy face on, because if they suspect you they’ll lock you up the first chance they get, which would be bad. Because you have LOTS of work to do.

There must be some way out of here…

If you’re human, your objective is simple. Keep advancing the jump clock in order to move the fleet a certain distance through space. Each time you jump, the Admiral looks at cards in the destination deck. It takes eight distance to get within reach of Kobol; one more jump takes you there, winning the game.

Some of the lovely destinations available to you. Be grateful there is no radioactive Earth card. But there could always be an expansion set…

At distance four, though, something else noteworthy happens. As in the show, someone who had been sure they were a human, might actually turn out to be Cylon. The game enters the sleeper phase, and each player gets dealt another loyalty card. So if you thought Cylons were the scourge of humanity, guess what? You could still turn out to be one.

Frak ‘em up.

If you’re a Cylon, the objective of course, is to wipe out humanity. There are a number of ways to achieve this. First, familiarize yourselves with the resource dials. Human players, will want to pay close attention to the dials too, because these are your EKG.

See this? When your morale meter gets this low, your game has turned into the episode where Dualla kills herself.

As the game progresses, various crises will pop up. Fail them, and as a consequence, your resource dials will steadily go down. Jump too early and leave civilians behind? Population dial goes down. Fail to hold a colonial democratic conference? Morale gets lower. Lose a civilian ship? Say goodbye to the food and fuel on board. If any of the dials reach zero, it’s game over.

As in the show, the civilian fleet is entirely dependent on Galactica for their defense. Without her, humanity is helpless. Damage six locations, Galactica goes down, and humanity with her.

On her most recent download, Boomer decided to try a new look. Chief does not appear pleased.

The last Cylon strategy involves getting a boarding party on the ship. Land a heavy raider with some centurions in the hangar bay, and move them deep enough into the ship, and BANG! Game Over. They vent the ship’s air into space, then turn Galactica’s guns on the rest of the fleet. Just like in the episode Valley of Darkness.

Action stations.

The game board is divided into multiple locations, each one designed to perform specific functions when your character occupies them. Want to shoot at enemy ships with Galactica’s guns? Head for weapons control. Need to launch vipers, or if you’re Tyrol, bang the dents out of them? Hangar Bay. Need to draw on the Quorum of Twelve to support your presidency? The President’s Office on board Colonial One gives you authority to do so. If you’re a pilot, you have the option to jump into a viper and head into space. But that’s only worth doing if you have something to shoot at.  Part of the strategy of the game is figuring out where to spend your time and what to do there.

Starbuck takes on eight raiders. Hotdog is probably off scoring rack time with Cally.

The game play works like this: on each player’s turn, they follow a series of steps. First off, they can move to a new location. Then they can perform an action. That action can be one of several things; if you’re in a specific location, you can activate it and do the specific action assigned to that spot. Or, if you have an action available to you on a skill card, you can play that. These parts of your turn are your real chance to do something proactive; because once you finish your action, you come to your crisis step, which is where things get interesting. By which I mean, the game screws with you royally.

If today is a day ending in ‘Y,’ there will be a crisis.

Below are some crisis cards.

The author would like to apologize for the crappy art layout above. But the feeling of being piled on by one crisis after another that it suggests is altogether accurate.

Every turn, something breaks or gets broken, and the fate of humanity hinges on whether you can get shit fixed again. Which, most of the time, means a skill check. Pass it, and the crisis will go away. Fail it, and suffer the consequences – which could be anything, including a loss on your resource dials. It’s possible to pass a crisis if the group collectively puts in enough cards of the appropriate colors (indicated by the colors on the left hand side of the cards) to meet the total at the top. But there are a couple of catches. First, the game kicks in two random skill cards from the aptly named ‘Destiny Deck.’ These cards can either hurt or help you to a random degree. Think of it as the Gods (or God for you monotheistic skin jobs) either showing favor or pissing down on you.

Still, if everyone is honest and helpful, it should be no problem, right? Er…wrong. First off, all the cards in a skill check are dealt face down. So you have no idea who is contributing what – and the games rules expressly forbid you from saying exactly how much you can help when you’re collectively working to resolve a skill check. All of which makes it easier for those duplicitous Cylons to throw in opposing cards and spike the skill check. Miss a skill check by only a couple of points due to sabotage and you not only suffer the consequences, you’ve wasted skill cards to boot.

Once you complete the crisis, look to the bottom left and right of the card. Bottom left is the Cylon activation indicator. Each little symbol there means something different, and triggers the Cylons to move or attack in some way. Once you complete the crisis, if there are enemy forces on the board, they’re going to be set in motion. Last step in your turn is the jump prep icon on the bottom right. Each time you see one of those, advance the jump clock and you’re that much closer to jumping. If you’re human, jumping is good; it gets you away from the Cylons (except for any Centurions on board – they come along for the ride).

Prepare to get hammered like a college freshman on Thirsty Thursday.

Sometimes on a crisis no skill check is required – because the Cylon fleet has found you. Draw a crisis card like the one above, and hoo boy. Set condition one throughout the ship, because it’s on. If the Cylons show up, you have two options: fight or flight. If you’re not able to jump, get some birds in the air, launch a nuke, do whatever it takes to destroy as many as you can.

After a refreshing goo bath, Baltar likes to settle in for a naked yoga class with some of the Eights.

If you’re a Cylon, your strategy is a bit trickier. Spike skill checks when you can, but avoid being obvious – if you’re the only pilot, the three piloting cards that lost the humans a skill check are a trail so obvious even You don’t want to help, of course, but prove obviously harmful and faster than you can say ‘skin job’ your fellow players will band together and throw you in the brig. And once you’re there, your ability to hurt them is REALLY cut down. Take your shots here and there, but the way you can be most effective is to throw sand in the gears. Encourage arguments, question other players’ decisions, and throw too many resources at a problem so they’re gone when the next problem shows up. Be subtle. If you’re Admiral or President, your opportunities to cause mayhem are far greater. And most of the character special abilities can be used for good or ill; for example, as Roslin your ability to choose between two crisis cards can easily be used to pick the worse of the two alternatives, because after all, no one gets to see those cards but you-they have to take your word that you’re picking the lesser of two evils. And when the timing is right – say, when there’s a basestar or two in sight, or enough people are in the brig or sickbay, reveal yourself and make the situation that much worse. Then settle into your new digs and steadily go make the humans’ lives as difficult as possible.

One of the most enjoyable things I’ve found about the game is how active the fan community is. There are several fan concocted variations on play already available out there. My friends and I actually use one that makes the centurion combat more intense, literally marching the figurines from location to location. In order to stop them, you have to get a gun from the armory and physically be in the same location as a toaster in order to take a shot at it. And to make matters worse, if you’re still there when it gets activated, he’ll shoot back at you and possibly knock you into sick bay.

So far, out of six games I’ve been in, it’s broken down to three victories for each side. But on the whole, the game is much more daunting to win as a human-there’s almost no room for mistakes. Would it feel like Galactica any other way?

For info on the game, go to:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=18

For fan expansions, discussion boards, and all things great and awesome go to:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111