I purchased this last night and was on the phone calling friends even before I got home. I was a little slow going with having to flip back to the book alot but it was awsome. We had to stop part mid-way though becuase of the hour. But I'm very excited to give it another go.

Great game!!!

-J

JawaNasty said:

I know what you mean. I played it for the first time on Wednesday and was on the phone during a break in the game to reserve my copy for when my FLGS gets it back in stock. We're big BSG fans in my house, so I have a good feeling that this will be hitting the table fairly regularly come December.

We played our first game last night as well and here is how it went...

It ended up being just a three player game. The first half of the game went pretty well for the humans since at the beginning nobody had been dealt a “You are a Cylon” loyalty card. With the three of us working together we were able to handle most crises well enough. At the mid-point of the game “the Sleeper Phase” all of us had to take another loyalty card and then things went downhill…

Jeff was playing Gaius Baltar, Chris took “Chief” Galen Tyrol and I picked last and took Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. In hindsight with only three players I probably would have been better served if I had taken Apollo instead. Using the line of succession chart the game started with Gaius Baltar as President and “Starbuck” as Admiral. I played most of the first couple of turn suspecting that “Chief” Tyrol was a Cylon but after several turns of play, when nothing odd was happening we all pretty much realized that none of us were Cylons. The that #@&% Sleeper Phase hit…

President Baltar was able to use his special ability or a card draw, I don’t remember which, to look at one of “Chief” Tyrol’s loyalty cards. He then claimed Tyrol was a Cylon. A little later he used a card to have Tyrol thrown in the Brig. A little later still Tyrol was able to use a procedure to look at one of my loyalty cards, I was definitely human, but he then accused me of being a Cylon. This convinced me Tyrol was indeed a Cylon and that President Baltar and I were going to have to work together… I was wrong. President Baltar was the Cylon.

Apparently Tyrol didn’t know which of us was a Cylon and his logic was to accuse me to see what Baltar’s reaction would be. Unfortunately that made me certain that Tyrol and not Baltar was the Cylon. A turn or two later Balter openly declared himself a Cylon , reduced the fleet’s already hurting morale by one and then repositioned to the Cylon Resurrection Ship (the implication being he did something hurt morale and then was either killed or committed suicide to get back to his Cylon buddies. Under his direction and some lucky card draws, the Cylons were able to mount a huge assault as we tried to get Tyrol out of the brig. It was just much of a blow. The Cylons had found the fleet and swarmed us with raiders and as civilian ships died the counters for morale and population both dropped too low so the Cylons won.

We were only two jumps away from escaping too.

All in all it was a fun game the guessing, accusations and general feeling of paranoia are captured well. From what I have read on several game forums the game seems to play best with either 4 or 6 player. We had only three (the minimum) but it was still a good game. We didn’t get started until about 7:00 PM and the game lasted until about 11:30 PM so with three novice players we managed to play it to a conclusion in 4 ½ hours. I think that if we had all know the rules going in we could have done it in three.

My group played this for the first time on Friday night. Very cool. What really impressed me was twofold: 1) BSG fans at the table were excited to have the character abilities tied so tightly to their show personas, in terms of mechanics, and 2) the non-BSG fans (one active hater) loved the game as well.

Hat's off to the folks involved in this game's development!

"...but he then accused me of being a Cylon".

I know you said he was looking for a reaction, but - I'm sorry - could this be the worst possible move? At that point Tyrol knows Gaius is the Cylon, but instead make it look like he is the Cylon and gets you to trust Gaius. I've thought about what you should say/not say when you look at someone's Loyalty cards. It seems like there is very little value to lie, if you are human.

He only saw one of my loyalty cards so he might have still believed that I could be the Cylon. But after the game I secretly though it was a pretty bone-headed maneuver. I couldn't see any possible gain in the false claim and I thought surely he should have realized that it would rouse my own suspisions.

game sure sounds great... so many titles so little money/time

So you want to tell me - BUY it?!

I bought the game last week and my first game had five people in it. We had Laura Roslyn, Saul Tigh, Boomer, Cheif and Helo. That made Tigh and Roslyn Admiral and President. We managed to get to the sleeper agent phase without any cylons being reveled but while we could kill raiders and base stars we could not for the life of us get rid of that nasty set of boarders.

Fun game once you get the flow of things.

In our game we got some pretty horrible crissis card draws... At the end we had jumped once, but when the cylons attacked our 5 civilian ships, by the time we tallied all of the casualties up, we were at like -6 population.. Deffinately not one of my favorites, but still worth playing and teaching. It's going to be huge at origins, let alone gencon......

My gaming group played a couple of games so far and I must say we've all been very impressed. Once you get playing the game suddenly takes on much more depth than it originaly seems to offer. The fact that having a Cylon in a position of power (admiral or president) is very scary and can cause witch hunts to begin at the drop of a hat. There was one awesome game where I ended up as a Cylon and the admiral of the fleet. By not playing cards into a crisis which was obviously sabotaged I easily convinced the human players that I wasn't a Cylon. I then jumped us to the worst locations possible eventualy depriving them of the fuel needed to make the final jump to Earth and those fools never even suspected me. Muha ha ha ha ha.

Overall though it gets two thumbs up from everybody whose played it so far. The little touches are nice (like only being able to use the port hanger deck) and the game itself feels very polished. The best thing, IMHO, is how easy it is to pick up. We had a couple of young people in our group when we first started playing and the rukes were simple enough for us all to have a pretty good idea what is going on by the third or fourth turn.

Kahadras

Tough game. We played our first time with four players. Two of the players were Boomer and Baltar so extra loyalty cards were mixed in. I made a mistake and actually included no "You Are A Cylon" card (and felt like an idiot when the game ended and my error was discovered). Even without a Cylon the game was very difficult and the humans just managed to make it.The flying accusations and players thrown in the brig at the worst possible times was almost enough to allow a Cylon victory.

UhOh said:

That's the spirit

*Evil Cylon grin*

Finaly my first game came!
It was me and 4 of my coworkers at the office, none of us had played the game before and only I had seen the show. Due to time limits we didn't have the chanse to watsh any of the show before the game either. So I had to exaplin not only the rules but the story as well. Unforionaly I didn't have any "inspirational speach" cards to play so they all looked like big bored questionmarks when I was done... Allso the first couple of turns where a mess with many of them not realy getting in to it and didn't know what to do. In short I screwed up on the introduction

But after a few turns the game worked it's magic on them and before the end they where all enjoying it and there will be more games at the office. Thanks FFG and Corey for a great game

Now to the game itself. I was Roslyn and started as president. The others where Boomer, Starbuck, Helo and Bill Adama. No one was cylon from the start, but a few suspected me, I guess I had a devilish grin on my face just for the fact I finaly got to play. After the initial setup we had a couple of cylon attack crisis and had the board covered with cylons. But not that many civilians and plenty of vipers. And with 3 characters with piloting skills they where keept at bay until we jumped the first time. I was then thrown in the brig by a crisis choice by one of thous who though I was cylon. I got out on my first try though as I had the Admiral on my side. Shortly there after I was forced to give away the president title by a crisis card. I handed it to Boomer as I didn't think she was cylon and I didn't want to give the Admiral even more power.

Our new president soon got suspected by several players and threats of brigging started to fly. She responded by brigging thous who threatened her, it was hilarious! After the sleeper phase I got a cylon card, and President Boomer got the other one. Boomer was less then covert in her attempts to sabotage and it was very soon obvious that she was cylon. I took advantage of the situation and tryed to brig her by activating the admirals quaters and at the same time I deliberatley sabotaged my own skillcheck as I didn't realy want to brig my fellow cylon, I was laughing so hard when the check failed... on the inside that is as I was still trying to look human.

Soon after a crisis striped our cylon president of the title and it ended up with the admiral. Under his command the humans did realy well despite our atempts to sabotage. And I think we cylons revealed to late (allready at distance 8) to finish the jobb.

All in all a very fun experiance allthough we missade a lot of rules and character abilities. Next time will be even better I'm sure!

we had our first game last night. probably wasn't the best idea since we were all pretty tired but it seemed to go well. It was a 3 player, abd gaius was the cylon (no surprises). We also were playing with adama and starbuck. The humans won, using the nukes to good effect and jumping a lot before the drive was completely fired up.

the main question that came up was, can someone be admiral and president at the same time?

Absolutely.

Good luck if that player is a (unrevealed) Cylon...

5 player game, I picked first and chose my favourite character from the show.....Baltar, I was also President. First 3 crisis cards were all big cylon attacks that did not move the jump prep track once. We lost a lot of population. next jump was quite with no attacks but lots of food shortage cards.

Starbuck player challenged me for presidancy for no real reason and was soundly beaten, so I extracted revenge by asking Tigh to put her in the brig which was accomplished easily, no big shock there. When she was released on the promise of good behaivour she then attempted to win presidentacy again and really drove my suspisions into overdrive.

Then came a crisis card that deplete our food and everyone threw in all their good cards to avoid defeat but Tigh declined to play all his cards and the crisis was lost and game over. All of us revealed human cards except....Tigh, **** he jumped too quickly to brig Starbuck.....

I was really impressed with how quickly we picked up the game considering its apparent depth and I'm sure next time the humans will not shoot them in the foot so often.

Played my first game on Boxing Day. I tried to suck as many family members as possible into the game but ended up with only 3 players including myself. A couple of rookie mistakes made by all players but everyone had a great time playing. Unfortunately, Galactica was on the wrong end of a rather unlucky and brutal series of crisis cards.

I started off as Gaius, while the other players selected Bill Adama and Boomer. The game started off badly for Galactica as a few assault/besiege crisis cards were drawn, even with Boomer's ability to review the top crisis card after her turn. Coupled with some pitiful rolling, several vipers were quickly damaged and/or destroyed. We were quickly swarmed by two basestars and pretty much every raider included with the game with no vipers in space and a damaged hangar. I forced an FTL jump to be able to take a chance and recover while fixing the hangar... only to have the next two crisis cards be assault cards.

To make matters worse, we then found out there was a cylon already in our midst thanks to the player being overly aggresive combined with two negative destiny cards. Being a three-player game, I used Baltar's skill to check the loyalty card of Bill Adama and found out he was the toaster! Adama revealed on the following turn and just happened to have the massive assault super crisis card... Swarmed by every raider and heavy raider, with every viper damaged or destroyed , Boomer and Gaius were sitting ducks. We eventually lost due to a centurion boarding having only made one ( -3 forced) jump for a distance of 1 and only two jump preps made for the next jump. It seems the toasters had made an unholy alliance with the crisis cards!

I know inexperience had a lot to do with our rapid demise, but we still had a lot of fun. I can still remember the great emotional flip-flop I experienced when I forced the jump. A huge weight was lifted as I saw the piles of clyons removed from the board... only to be crushed with the flip of the next crisis card and realizing the cylons had been waiting to ambush us at our jump destination.

Just played my first game last week and it was brutal! It was a three player game and we barely made it halfway to the sleeper agent phase before the fleet starved to death. Even with Starbuck making quick work of the toasters in the initial set up attack, we were terribly unlucky with the crisis cards!

I say terribly unlucky, but my wife (aka Starbuck) believes it had more to do with shoddy shuffling of the crisis deck on my part prior to setup. Every single crisis we drew resulted in a loss of at least 1 food! Even the one time the basestar successfully damaged Galactica, the damage token resolved was -1 food.

Then again, after losing immediately after our first jump, we went ahead and dealt out the remainder of the loyalty cards (we all had Not a Cylon cards) just to see how it would have turned out. As it happens, I was a Cylon sleeper agent all along. Therefore, I try to tell myself that technically, I won!

You know, a funny thing happened the other night....

We set up a four player game (believe it or not, my eight year old daughter plays, and does fairly well) and everyone pretty much knew there were no cylons in play the first round. There were too many Moots that passed by a landslide (even with destiny cards having hefty minuses to our checks).

The second round came, and so did the accusations. So here comes the funny part....

My daughter got to messing around with the wrong stack of cards and everyone ended up beihg human (with no cylon cards). We were so busy messing with each other, that the cylons won. It's funny what the human ego will do to ya, especially in the wake of an honest mistake.

My first game last night was a three player epic. The first half went smooth, assuming there was no cylons. The humans were one jump away when back to back crisis cards brought nearly every basestar and raider on the board. After an attack damaged the launching bay, the cylon chose that moment to reveal, putting me in the brig (the only one with engineering cards.) It took three turns for my ally to get enough cards to get me out of the brig. IN that time the raiders took out all the vipers and decimated the human fleet. If we could have held on we could have activated the FTL the next turn for a chance to jump away and win.

Turned out the Tigh was a cylon from the beginning, but actually helped the humans because it was our first game. He wanted to see how it went.

Wibble said:

Ha! In my first game, we made the mistake of throwing ourselves behind Adama, who through luck of the crisis cards, ended up being Admrial, President, Vice President, and Chosen of the Propechy (or whatever). We're like, okay, we're set as long as Adama isn't a Cylon. So, we're doing rather well, and it's the turn before Adama's. The current player mentions that he's not really sure what to do, and Adama's player says that he has some Quroum cards that are really useful right now. So, he gets EOed, and plays Arrest Order, and throws me in the brig. Then he plays Arrest Order, and throws someone else in the Brig. And then it's his turn, and he draws the only card in the discard pile (Arrest Order) plays Arrest Order on a third human. Thankfully, we had one human left, managed to steal the presidency from Adama, and use an Arrest Order on him (that card should really be removed from the game after it's used...), stripping him of his Admiral title, and ALMOST broke everyone out. But then we lost, because the other Cylon (revealed a while ago) hit us with too many crises. We didn't know the "Revealed Cylons can't be EOed" errata, and Adama kept using them on him from the Brig.

All in all though, it was a fun first game

We are about to have our first BSG-game next weekend.

Any newbie hints for me?

I'm very tempted to purchase this game next week and give it a go. I love BSG.

I actually never saw the show before I played the game. I'm a fan of a game called Lupus In Tabula (Are You a Werewolf?) and the intrigue of BSG just thrilled me. The game was so good we're now watching the series. We're in Season 4 now, before it got into the mid season hiatus.

A great game for a great series.