I'm sold. This game is a lot better than during its playtest days. Seems very balance .. almost every game we play is close.
Two games yesterday (4 players).. the first was awesome .. more what we wanted out of the game. We got a ton of cylon ships on the board .. Galactica took tons of damage (to the point where we almost died .. but got lucky and rolled a 3 on the last basestar attack). So it was an early struggle, but the humans recovered and won the game .. barely ... population was two .. morale was low ... there were civilian ships on the board and raiders and due to communications we knew that one of those ships had two pop on it! It was intense .. the lone cylon (Starbuck) had to reveal because it was pretty obvious in the late game who she really was and she was quite effective with cylon actions .. activating ships to pose a threat .. drawing crisis cards and getting lucky and getting an attack card to fill the board again. Was basically a roll away from winning!
Second game was weird .. quick and we lost (for the first time) to a Centurion!
Early on the heavy raiders got three quick activations (one to spawn it, two to move it in) .. we had a few people try to shoot it down with Weapons control . but no dice.
It got on board and the humans were doing well (since everyone was human before the sleeper agent phase) .. but we couldn't roll worth crap to kill the centurioun (and not everyone was trying .. the president was looking for .. so well we got a sympathizer .. we couldn't roll worth crap and the people with the tactics cards to give the +2 to a die roll was a cylon (or sympathizer) so several missed rolls and the centurion crept his way to the lose game spot.
2v2 in a four player game is rough .. it is hard (if not impossible in some cases) to pass crisises. Once the sleeper agent phase hit we lost all our crisises and quickly dropped from like 8 morale to 3 in just a few player turns.
But two games in under 3 hours .. great fun.
As a note ..we randomized character selection (while still maintaining class balance) .. thus getting some characters out there that normally wouldn't see play if we just picked them. (In our group Boomer, Roslin and Adama would probably always be picked as we feel they are the best pilot/political leader and military leader).
Great game .. the randomness of crisis cards and who is a cylon makes the game more replayable than I originally thought. And the game seems like it could easily be expanded ... add a few more characters .. add some more actions to each skill deck .. some new crisises. Quick and easy SMALL expansion.
