Game design: Board Game analyze Battle Star Galactica!

Game analyze: Battle Star Galactica.

The Best and the worst sides of the game

The best thing about this game is the build-up. The game has a tense and fun build-up towards the end. The game will always take away recourses but they never really gives them back to you. So the further in the game the closer to total devastation you get. You try everything to hold on to the thin chance of surviving. You also start thinking twice about who is on your side and who isn’t

The game builds-up because of the way it uses and takes away the resources. You start with quite a lot of resources but they fast start to dwindle. This makes you feel that you know that you’re heading straight for destruction but you might just make it to safety in time.

This brings me also to the worst part of the game, the climax. The great build-up of the game ends in a rather oh well sense. This is due to how the game gives and takes away resources.

As I stated before you are always losing resources. Mostly the only way of gaining a resource is by losing another. So after sitting and playing the game for around 4-5 hours and then suddenly losing because you drew a card saying you lost some resource or because of a dice-roll, that is something you as a player can’t do anything about, makes you feel like you have been punished for playing the game.

The core game system

The core game system is built up by a lot of different but important things. The game is for 3 to 6 players where the players have to escape the evil robots called Cylons. There are Cylon players that are hidden to the rest of the players whose goal is to destroy for the human players.

All players start the game with a character card, a loyalty card and skill cards. The loyalty card tells you if you are a human player or if you are a Cylon. Cylons play with the board to try to destroy for the human players. It is up to you if you wish to do this open so other people know if you are a Cylon or hidden.

At the begging of a turn the player will pick up x amount of skill cards. The amount of skill cards they pick up will be stated on the character card that they have in front of them. For most of the character cards it will state 5 cards per player. Then they can move anywhere on Galactica or the other human spaceships on the board. Cylon players who are shown to the players that he/she is a cylon may only move on the cylon ships. Then they may use the action which is stated on the place they have traveled to or use a skill card that has an action on it. They may also use any actions that the character might have on their character card. If you play as a pilot you may also use your action to attack ships that are attacking Galactica. You do not have to move every time you are also allowed to do your action before moving.

After the player has done its move and/or action there is time for a crisis. You draw a crisis card from the crisis deck and read what it does.

Each card is different but it will most likely always make the player choose between two different things. If it is a card where a skill check is needed then the card will always state what happens if the players pass it and what happens if they fail it. For example:

Pass: nothing.

Fail: Lose one fuel.

There are also cards where players will have to make the decision for the group. For example:

The player choose one of the following.

Kill a player or lose all your skill cards and a fuel.

If the card that the player drew was a card where a skill check was needed then a skill check is initiated. What happens now is that on the crisis card it states a number and a color scheme of the different skill cards (blue, red, green, purple and yellow). The skill cards color that is on the crisis cards will work as a positive and the cards not showing with its color as a negative. It is up to the players to put down skill cards to get the number shown on the crisis card if they want to pass the crisis.

The skill check starts with two cards being drawn from the destiny deck to the skill check pile with its face turned down. Then the player on the left of the player whose turn it was starts to put skill cards in the pile face down. It is up the player how many cards they want to put down. There are some skill cards that do different things in a skill check though all skill cards have a number ranging from 0-6 on them witch determents their strength in a skill check.  When all players have done their turn in the skill check the skill check cards are shuffled and then turned faced up one card at a time.

Then the turn is finished and it is the next players turn.

To win the game the players have to jump x times and then move to the end of the jump preparation bar. To jump players will have to make it to the 3 last points of the preparation bar. When you get to the end of the preparation bar and choose to jump the admiral will pick up 2 cards from the destination deck and resolve one. On this card at the bottom there is a number ranging from 0-3. When the players have collected enough cards to make 8 together they will have to move the jump preparation bar to the end and then they survived and escaped from the cylons and won the game.  The bar moves up thanks to the crisis cards. Some of the crisis cards have an indication at the bottom of them that shows if the jump preparation is moved up or not. The crisis card also shows what the cylons will do. Move towards Galactica and/or attack it. It can also say if they spawn a space ship.

There are 3 ways that the players can lose the game.

First one is to get one of the resources of either fuel, moral, population or food to 0. These resources show the players in what condition the ship and its crew is in.

The second way of losing is that Galactica gets destroyed by taking too much damaged. When Galactica is damaged you draw a damage token and on this token it states what location got damage and that location is not available for players until they have repaired it. When Galactica has 4 of the tokens at the same time it is destroyed and all players die.

The third way to lose is by the boarding party. Boarding parties start on the boarding bar when crisis cards have spawn boarding ships and they have made it to Galactica without being destroyed. They have a bar that indicated how close they are to killing all humans. When this reaches the end the game is lost.

The most interesting system.

For me the most interesting system is how well made they made the build-up with the dwindling resources. You start with a lot of resources and a lot of different ones. When you start the game you feel that you can spend them easily then later in the game you need to save on the ones you have used a lot and are close to being 0. When you get even further in the game you are sitting there with nearly nothing in all the resources and you start to panic because you don’t know which one you are going to lose. Each skill check where you might lose a vital resource is more important.

This is something that Battle Star Galactica has done really well.

Target group

The game is mainly for people who are interested in the original franchise and have watched the series after that it’s for players who in general like advanced board games and political and social ones.

On the box it states that the age group is 10+ but I would say that it should probably be a bit higher due to how complex the gameplay is and that it’s a lot to think and do. It’s not an easy game to understand and learn how to play.

Summary

It’s hard for me to say if I liked the game or not. Every time we sat down and played I really enjoyed it and had a great time with the game though due to a more or less negative climax I always sat at the end of the game thinking to myself “was this worth 4 hours of my life?”.

I would probably play the game again but still think the same in the end though I would guess that the climax can change and how much I enjoy the end depending from match to match.

But otherwise the game is well made with only a few problems. Like how the boarding party was more or less useless and how the game end mostly with a random dice roll.

The skill cards and skill check system was really neat and made you question your own decision you made earlier. Skill cards added to a new form of resource that I didn’t realize the first time we played.