Review:
Battlestar Galactica - The Board Game

Battlestar Galactica is board game designed by Corey Konieczka and published by Fantasy Flight Games based on the award-winning TV show produced by the SyFy channel. The game was originally released in autumn 2008 - the first printing sold out within months, and the game has been reprinted several times since. The game is designed for 3 to 6 players, and a full game takes about 3 hours (or possibly more for people who haven’t played it before). The game is currently ranked as the 17th highest rated game of all time at www.boardgamegeek.com. The question is - is the game really as good as people claim it is?

When you open the box you find a wealth of different high-quality components, including little plastic model vipers, raptors, raiders and heavy raiders, and two card cut-outs to represent Cylon basestars. There are several decks of large cards, and a plethora of smaller cards, all of which need to be sorted into the correct piles before you begin. There are also 10 large full-colour character cards and stand-up character pieces to go with each one.

Every player takes on the role of one of the characters from the show, and selects their preferred character card from the selection available. There are three political characters (Laura Roslin, Gaius Baltar and Tom Zarek), three officer characters (William Adama, Saul Tigh, and Helo), three pilot characters (Apollo, Starbuck and Boomer) and one support character (Galen Tyrol). Each character has a number of special abilities, and has access to a different selection of skill cards throughout the course of the game. The highest placed political character starts the game as the President (who draws from a special Quorum deck) and the highest placed officer starts the game as the Admiral (who gets two nuke tokens).

The aim of the game depends on which side you are on. Although every player is ostensibly human, everyone is dealt a card from the loyalty deck – this card may confirm you are human or tell you that you are really a Cylon, but you keep the card hidden and its contents cannot initially be revealed. If you are really human then your goal is to jump the fleet to the ultimate destination of Kobol. If you are really Cylon then your objective is to stop the humans from reaching this goal. Importantly, a second set of loyalty cards are distributed halfway through the game, leading to situations where some players may be ‘good’ for the first half of the game, and ‘bad’ for the second half of the game.