Thinking back on it, I can’t believe that I had owned this game for two months before I got round to playing it. All of those gaming opportunities lost! Battlestar Galactica is based on the re-imagined tv show, using ten of the more important characters from the first season. Each player picks a character, and draws a loyalty card that defines them as either human or cylon, which is just the start of a great traitor mechanic.

The objective is for the humans is to escape the cylons by making a series of faster than light jumps, represented by a jump track on the board, and a deck of cards that determine how far each jump travels. Every so often in the tv series, making a jump was crucial to escape from thousands of cylon raiders, and this happens quite often during the game, when Galactica on the board is surrounded by cylon ships that are threatening the civilian fleet.

The cylons win if the humans fail to make ftl jumps to safety, or Galactica is heavily damaged, or the cylons manage to board and capture Galactica. The human race also has a collection of finite resources including fuel and population, if any of those resources is reduced to 0 the humans lose. This puts the human players in the position of constantly tracking each of their loss conditions, and often having to choose between two bad options.

At the end of each player’s turn they draw a ‘crisis card’, which is essentially a dilemma that the players try to solve in their favour, while the cylons try to make them fail. The players put ‘skill’ cards secretly into a deck together with two random cards, shuffle them to retain secrecy, reveal them and compare the numerical values of the cards against the difficulty number of the crisis card to determine a pass or fail.

By resolving these crises secretly it creates a level of suspicion about the other players, as players can only make vague statements about how good the cards that they play are. The crisis resolution is therefore a mechanical element, but together with the traitor cards it adds an interactive bluffing and second guessing element, where players are trying to work out who is human and who is a cylon.

It really depends on what kind of players you have in your game. If they aren’t interested in the theme or the crisis resolution, and shooting down cylon raiders isn’t enough fun for them, Galactica can seem a little dry. If you have a bunch of friends who enjoy accusing each other, using subterfuge, transferring blame and getting into character with the theme, then Galactica is fantastic.

The cylon players can remain in secret, or reveal themselves during their individual turn. It is also possible for players to look at each others loyalty cards during the game if certain crisis cards are played, so the human players can effectively force a cylon player to reveal themselves, although once accused, a cylon player could still remain a ‘human’ and regain the other players trust somehow (as the card remains secret).

One player gets to be the President, who has access to a bunch of Quorum (vote) cards, one of which also allows the President to look at a loyalty card, while another allows the President to put a player in the brig. This can be good for hindering a cylon player, or if the President is a cylon they can put a human player in the brig. The brig generally plays an important part in most games of Galactica, both as a threat to ‘brig’ other players, and also to work out which players are cylons in disguise.

If the cylons reveal themselves they can access a few special locations, each of which allows them to mess with Galactica and the humans, and accelerate the chances of a cylon victory. Remaining secret is much more entertaining, but halfway through the game it is best to ‘reveal’ and get down to business. If the players realise who is cylon or human, it also changes the balance of the game as alliances change.

Most games of Galactica are down to the wire, won or lost when the humans are one or two jumps away from safety. Sometimes it is a white wash with the humans losing within an hour and a half, but it still makes for an interesting game regardless about whether or not the game ends early. Comparing one game to another it can seem as if it is too easy or hard for either the humans or the cylons to win, but it really depends on how canny the players are, and whether they can manipulate their opponents.

Galactica comes with a ton of components, lots of little plastic ships, vipers, raiders, raptors and heavy raiders, cardboard base stars, damage tokens, civilian ship tokens, and lots of little cards. As a fan of the tv show and the co-op slash traitor element of the game, I think Battlestar Galactica has near unlimited replayability.