Battlestar Galactica

How to Play the Battlestar Galactica Board Game

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Playing Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica is a deduction, bluffing, and negotiation board game based on the Sci-Fi television series which ran from 2004 to 2009. In this Fantasy Flight game, 3 to 6 players take on the roles of characters from the TV series and try to deduce who the Cylon is while shepherding the remaining humans across the galaxy in a search for the legendary planet Earth.

Battlestar Galactica Series Information

Battlestar Galactica originally was a television program and tv movie from the late 1970s, in that era when everyone was rushing out science fiction shows after the success of Star Wars. While the original series was cheesy in a lot of ways, Battlestar Galactica had its moments and continued to have a fan following. When the Scifi network aired its re-imagining, the new, grittier Battlestar Galactica was a hit with fans and critics alike. Besides long production delays and the annoying propensity to put out half-a-season on DVD or Blu-ray, Battlestar Galactica received rave reviews.

Battlestar Galactica Set-Up

The board game uses a card-based approach to set up and resolve conflict. In fact, the main confusion is going to be the wide range of cards used to play the game: leadership cards, crisis cards, super crisis cards, and skill cards all play a pivotal role in game resolution. In all, setup involves 228 game cards, 48 tokens, 32 plastic ships, and 10 character sheets. Like all games I've ever encountered from Fantasy Flight Games, the production value is high. It's an involved board game and your group will need to invest at least 3 hours to set up and play. 4 hours isn't unheard of.

Paranoia is a big part of the Battlestar Galactica board game, just as it was in the show. This imbues every action, every gesture, every word with additional meaning (or perceived meaning), because everyone is trying to deduce who the Cylons are. For those groups who enjoy hamming it up or who also roleplay, the Battlestar Galactica offers the chance to get in some roleplaying moments in the midst of a board game.

Battlestar Galactica Instructions

When it's time to play, you'll need to determine who plays which character. You can play Starbuck, Admiral Adama, Tom Zarek, Galen the Engineer, The President, and so on. Depending on the character you play, your game experience is going to be wildly different. Like the show, some characters intrigue and work behind the scenes, while others spend all their time fighting Cylons and making trips to the sick bay. Luckily, there is an auction component to character assignment, though even this can get tainted by the Cylons.

By the way, players are assigned whether they are human or Cylon. A big part of the game is figuring out who the Cylon or Cylons among your group are and dispatching with them. If you play a Cylon, your experience sabotaging the human effort is going to be quite different.

Battlestar Galactica Game Rules

Most of the rules of Battlestar Galactica are self-explanatory, because you'll draw cards and do what the card says. The human fleet has limited resources in fuel, food, and each crisis card threatens to take away more of these precious resources. Once any of the basic resources reaches zero, the human side loses the game.

Loyalty cards are an important part of the rules. At the beginning of the game, each player draws a loyalty card. This simply tells you if you are a Cylon or not. You'll have a second time during the game that the loyalty cards are drawn, so even if you appear to be human the first half of the game, things can get complicated in the second half.

To get to Kobal, you'll need to enter warp and pass eight other planets. After you've successfully completed four jumps (halfway through the game), everyone is once again given a loyalty card.

Battlestar Galactica Strategy

Battlestar Galactica: The Boardgame is a cooperative game. You and the other human characters are going to have to work together to win the game--which is in keeping with the tv show. One of our gaming group is known for being willful and ignorant when playing cooperative games, so if you have such a person in your game, you better hope they're the Cylon.

Of course, a game where some of the characters are secret agents working against the remainder of the players is only going to be semi-cooperative. If you have board game players who tend to be uncooperative at cooperative board games, that makes deducing who is the Cylon and who just doesn't get it a whole lot harder. If a player in Battlestar Galactica continually takes action that defy group logic or works against victory for the human, you can assume they are the Cylons. If a player is likely to do that anyway, it becomes a nightmare to figure out.

The Battlestar Galactica game involves a lot of randomness. If you have players in leadership positions get the Cylon designation, it's going to hamper your attempts to survive until they are replaced. Also, cards are drawn for crises, so if you continue to draw the Cylon raid cards (which is possible), you'll have a hard time stemming the tide and saving the human race.

This is more in the way of a challenge, though. Cooperative games tend to have a lot of random events to maintain a challenge, and Battlestar Galactica is no different.

My Battlestar Galactica Board Game Review

In my experience playing the game, the Cylons and humans have about an even chance of winning. Every game I've ever played ended with a close victory by either side. That's important for a game that takes this long to play. If you get extremely unlucky, you'll have multiple Cylons among your top leaders and have to withstand raid after raid. This can produce the feeling of inevitable defeat, but that's good for a game based on Battlestar Galactica.

Game experiences are going to be radically different, because the skills, strengths, and weaknesses of each of the 10 characters. If you didn't like the game the first time around, you'll have a different experience with a different type of character. Play Battlestar Galactica several times before making a judgment on its level of difficulty and entertainment value.