Battlestar Galactica – A lifetime inspiration
First of all, let me say how much I love the show. I fell in love with it when I first watched the mini-series movie on DVD back then when it came out. From the scene where the humans meet the “new” cylons after a long time, to the start of the war, it was all brilliant. The entire dark and grim atmosphere of the show, and the characters and acting is what made it one of my favourite movies. When I found out that they have continued it into a series, I lost my mind. Later during season 1, the hope that they will find the lost colony of Kobol during the first season, literally translates into you and you cheer them on on their hard journey from that point on.
And that’s what I really like about Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. The game literally translates everything that is happening to the Galactica in the show: water and fuel supply crises, cylons masked as humans that threaten their existence from within, and the great and epic battles with the enemies’ Basestars, every aspect of the show shines the same in the game as well, giving you the feel as if you are really on board the Galactica during the hardest of her days. The traitor/cooperative game mechanism are really great fit for the theme of the show, and vice versa.
In the game, or at least the base game (not the expansions), the players are trying to get the Galactica to the lost colony of Kobol, just as they are trying to reach the same place in the season 1 of the series. They will want to jump the Galactica enough times in order to reach the planet, and each turn that they don’t jump brings more and more danger to the fleet, as the Cylons bear down on the Galactica with their mighty Basestars and Raiders.
At the end of each player’s turn, besides playing his own actions, that player gets to draw an event card. And here is where the game literally shines. The event that the player draws has either bad or really bad outcome if the players fail the check, and the players are required to surpass a value by discarding their own action cards of different colors, which are also valuable throughout the entire game, since it is the only way to play actions.
It’s a really exciting mechanism because this is when the traitor (the cylon pretending to be human) can really make a mess for the loyal human players. He can put a card that doesn’t match the colors needed for the check to succeed, and the game can hide that a certain player did this by putting it’s own cards from the fate deck, while none of the players know which card is that deck, into the face down pile. After that, the active player reveals the cards, and sees if they managed to successfully brave the events and continue on their journey, or the fate (or perhaps the cylon?) has decided to make things worse for them.
That’s why, Battlestar Galactica, both the show and the game are still a huge inspiration for me and keep my love for sci-fi after all of those years. Now that I mentioned, perhaps I will rewatch the whole series after our Kickstarter for Galactic Warlords ends… 🙂
Cheers and keep on playing!
– Milan
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