Cyclops. Cylon. Cyclon. (Battlestar Galactica, Zombie game prototype)

Just as one american guest Wagster, JayWowzer, slowly ends his visits to Canada, another comes along. Mvinarcik, a BGG user from Ohio( I think) joined us this week and brought along his copy of Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica is a cooperative game with a traitor similar to Shadows over Camelot. Players play the various characters from the show as they try to work together to defend Galactica from the incoming cylons, hunger, demoralization, infighting, etc. However, some of the characters might be cylons working against them... suspicion ensues.

In my opinion, the game works much better than SoC did. There is much more going on, and the system builds in possibilities for subterfuge on the part of the hidden cylons. We made a few errors in our first game which led to an easier than normal game (we accidentally had fewer cylons than the game called for), but even though we won the game by the skin of our teeth. The whole package is very thematic and appears to be an excellent adaptation of the source material into a game. My only complaint is that the game is long at 2-3 hours, and from what I read it's unlikely to get shorter. Not a big deal, but it will limit how often it gets out.

I played Tyrol the deck engineer, Luch played Helo, Mvinarcik played Laura Roslin and Kozure played Lee Adama. After Helo came back from the colonies, he quickly took the title of Admiral from Lee. Clearly drunk with power, Helo then proceeded to steal the title of president from Roslin. We were obviously suspicious of him. Of course, until then Roslin had been doing nothing but drawing Quorum cards and doing nothing with them. We were obviously suspicious of her, too.

When Roslin suggested it was dangerous for all this power to be in the hands of one man, I didn't know who to vote for. They were both suspect in my book.

Lee and Tyrol where both fairly obviously on the side of the humans, because they were working tirelessly to defend and repair the ship. In fact, I came to the conclusion that trying to play the game without Tyrol on the human's side would be significantly more difficult. Unfortunately, as we approached Kobol Lee decided he liked the cylons after all and switched sides. Perched far away on a cylon baseship, Cylon lovin' Lee did his best to take us down to no avail. We made the jumps we needed and made it home.

We had very little space combat, and no cylons boarded the ship. I suspect our game was atypical, or that there is a substantial variability in the way things swing from game to game. That's a good thing in my book.

I had a good time with this one. I look forward to playing again in the future.

We finished up with a play of a prototype zombie game that Kozure is working on. Since it's a prototype, I won't talk about it much.