Battlestar Galactica Game Review

 Battlestar Galactica is a cooperative game that supports from three to six (optionally expandable to seven) players, in which one or two of them, depending on the number of participants, turn out to be "traitors" and play against their comrades.

 The average playing time is about 2.5-3 hours. I would immediately like to dispel the myth about the need to watch the series before sitting down at the gaming table. This is completely optional, and you won't lose anything fundamental, since the game is completely self-sufficient.

PLOT AND MECHANICS

 The task of the human players is to lead the fleet, led by the "Galaxy", to a certain distance without losing either the cruiser itself or any of the key resources - Population, Food, Fuel and Morale. The task of "traitor" players is quite the opposite. The plot of the game, without being sly, repeats the television one. Cylon robots, created by man, revolted, destroyed most of the people, forcing those who remained alive to seek salvation by fleeing. The remnants of humanity on their spaceships, united around the last hope - the cruiser "Galaxy", are trying to break away from the pursuit of the Cylon fleet and find a new home with the prosaic name "Earth". The case of rescue is complicated by the fact that the Cylons have managed to create 12 models of humanoid robots and introduced them into the glorious ranks of the human race. And so "who is who" makes up the lion's share of the intrigue of both the series and the game.

 At the beginning and in the middle of the game, each participant secretly receives a so-called loyalty card from the others, which determines whether your character is a Cylon or a human. The game has a lot of characters, each of which is endowed with its own special skills, as well as unique positive and negative properties.

 It is not difficult to guess, it may happen that in the first part of the game, not a single cylon will appear on the field, and in the second phase, the player who honestly saved all this time will learn that he was made and programmed for a completely different matter. Such collisions perfectly diversify the personal game in each game. By the way, the developers, taking everything into account, quite accidentally managed to foresee a strong role potential in the game. Whether you use it or not is up to you, but it is there.

 Each participant's move consists of two phases - movement and action. In the first case, you can move to a location on a ship, in space or on a special track of Cylons that have opened to the world, in the second - to activate the properties of the location or play the text of one skill card. At the end of the turn, except for specially stipulated cases, a so-called crisis should be drawn from a special deck — a task that must be solved or failed by all participants. The crisis system is the heart of the game; they initiate the fleet's problems, but also propel it to victory. Most crises offer to solve the problem by scoring a certain number of points with skill cards. There are a total of five such types of cards in the basic box, of different colors for convenience. Characters have their own set of two or three different types. In the event of a crisis, the participants secretly lay out their cards from each other; only those whose types are shown on the crisis map are considered positive, the others are negative. Then the sum is calculated and the result is announced.

HUMAN HUMAN WHO?

 Like any cooperative game, BSG involves constant communication between the participants in the process. Making a plan of action, finding tactical tricks, analyzing the nearest moves - the game provides all these possibilities. Now consider that among the players there is a person who participates in this discussion, but only his goals are completely different.

 BSG has two unique positions - Admiral and President. The former decides which route the Galaxy will take to victory, the latter has exclusive rights to use Quorum cards that can facilitate the salvation of humanity.

 What is the Admiral's motivation for suggesting a crisis: the desire to save scarce cards of a certain skill for a more serious problem, or the goal of reducing a key resource? Can you trust the intuition of a player who has arrested another character based on circumstantial evidence alone? Should you support your neighbor who plans to re-elect the current president? Which of the two players who are furiously accusing each other of betrayal is right, or is it possible that the real Cylon is the one watching it all with a hidden smile? Withdraw fighter jets to cover the civilian courts or take the latter to a safe sector for the time being? Sacrificing fuel to save the population, or abandoning people, but leaving kerosene reserves for a long jump? There can be dozens of such questions per game session, and each time you will have to make a choice, because if you just wash your hands, the game will make this choice for you, and most often not in your favor. Some conclusions when calculating the hidden enemy can be made based on the simplest deduction, for example, calculating who put a card of a negative color in this or that crisis. Others are based on the study of the player's behavior at the table (skills acquired in poker battles will prove to be very relevant), others are based on the analysis of game actions. And, of course, you should not forget about banal intuition, the only question is: will it fail at a crucial moment? However, even if you are not a particular fan of talking, arguing and persuading, there will be a place on board - balanced decisions, calmness and a rare but timely word are worth a lot.

 This is what the game for humanity looks like - continuous choices, searching for a way out of another critical situation, paranoia and painful doubts about which of those sitting at the table you can trust.

HIDDEN THREAT

 And what about the cylons lurking under the mass of virtuous people? Playing as a hater of humanity is no less intense and interesting. On the one hand, you are out of panic and paranoia - being the bearer of a Secret, so far hidden from everyone, is a lot of fun. On the other hand, there is a constant search for the right solution alone, a minute-by-minute analysis of your actions, and the feeling of a cornered beast when a loop of well-founded suspicions tightens around you. There are a lot of action options, and this game is advantageously different from similar boxes. In particular, in Shadows over Camelot, another co-op game with a "traitor", the latter has to do as little as possible to win, and when he is revealed, the game takes on a distinctly mathematical flavor. In "Galaxy", a cylon has to crawl out of his skin to bring the hour of complete destruction of humanity closer. Provoke conflicts within the crew and silently enjoy the raised panic, waves of arrests, mutual insults and insults. To take a risk is to fail crises, to make silly moves and honest eyes, or, on the contrary, to contribute in every possible way to the passage of problems, to emphasize one's merits, to prove one's humanity in order to strike one blow at the right moment. And how not to miss this moment? When to take off the mask? Moreover, even after showing his true nature, the Cylon player does not leave the game: you still have to finish off the miserable people, and this may not be easy, because BSG, after discovering all the Cylons, easily turns into some kind of military headquarters game. Paranoia gives way to gut feeling, panic to cold analysis and development of a set of tactical actions. The same thing happens if, according to the game conditions, there are two Cylons, and on the opposite side of the conflict. And how such a confrontation will end is often unclear until the last move.

CONCLUSIONS

 Of course, like any challenging game, BSG has its flaws. This also applies to game balance. In particular, with an even number of participants in the basic version, you need to use the rule of a person who sympathizes with the Cylons, the essence of which is that if there are a lot of resources at a certain moment, she will play for the Cylons, and if there are not enough - for the people. Such a situation is easily calculated, and experienced players are forced to sacrifice one of the resources in order for the "sympathizer" to join humanity.

 Despite the not so significant amount of text, the game remains very language-dependent until all participants know the meaning of all the skill cards by heart. True, it is not a problem to get a translation of all the cards in the game, but constantly searching for the right text can slow down the gameplay a lot.

 BSG is not a game that you only need to play once to understand and get involved. Several parties will go only to get acquainted with the possibilities provided by the basic box. The open architecture allows you to find more and more options for action, connections and tricks (in this, by the way, it reminds, oddly enough, Dominion), but it requires more and more game sessions. It is not easy for beginners to enter the company of the mother of players for this reason - the illusion is created that everyone knows what to do except you. It is treated only with subsequent games, if, of course, the desire remains.

 In general, "Galaxy" is a very "game-addicted" game. It only takes one of the participants to lose interest in what is happening at the table, as it instantly affects the atmosphere and course of the game. Due to the high degree of conflict given by the game mechanics, playing with children, pregnant women and vulnerable young people is not recommended.

 Battlestar Galactica is a very interesting and challenging game. It is not difficult to understand its rules, but it is not easy to learn to win in it. The frenetic dynamics, when enemy fighters are swarming around the ship, and every wrong decision can turn out to be the last, is replaced by a deceptive splendor, when the external enemies are no longer there, and the internal ones have not yet been revealed. At such moments, one gets the impression that the game has too ragged a rhythm and clearly sags. However, this is an illusion - BSG, unlike games where all possible actions are indicated in the instructions or become obvious after a couple of games, provides the player with wide opportunities that are not written in the rules and are not always visible at first glance. This is a game for reaction, for finding new ways, for communication, one of those rare games, after which there is something to discuss, something to rejoice and be sad about. And if you have a good team, then BSG will bring a lot of fun.

PEGASUS SUPPLEMENT

 It is not surprising that gradually the basic box of "Galaxy" ceased to suit many players. Crises are boring, victory strategies have been successfully tested, and parties begin to lose their uniqueness, becoming more formulaic and predictable. Developers and publishers were clearly not going to give up such a successful "chicken". And in 2009, the first addition to the game - Pegasus (Pegasus) was released. What new did this heavy box bring to the game?

 In addition to the expected new crises, characters and skill cards (in particular, a new skill was introduced - betrayal, characteristic brown color), the game has grown with several interesting mechanics. There was an additional field with the locations of the cruiser "Pegasus" - a ship with stunning firepower, the ability to accelerate the progress to victory and, most importantly, the possibility of executing an objectionable character. Resolved on the same principle as the passage of crisis, Strata was designed to raise the stakes dramatically. Finally, it became possible to get rid of the obvious cylon, aimlessly eating rations at the guardhouse, and find a mechanism of pressure on the wayward and suspicious. In addition, a separate map with the locations of New Caprica was proposed as an alternative ending. So-called cylon leaders appeared in the game - individual characters with their own unique abilities, who are originally cylons. And to support the intrigue, each such player received a hidden goal, for which he could be both a supporter and an opponent of humanity.

 Unfortunately, whether the addition was not tested enough, or the developers did not expect the degree of dexterity of the previous "galactic guides", many new products turned out to be not quite successful. The players quickly developed a lot of tactics, often not very good from the point of view of the role-playing game, but very effective and somewhat elegant from the point of view of achieving victory. Betrayal cards, necessary to complicate the passage of crises and feed fears, turned out to be too weak, the game as the Cylon leaders is very boring and uninteresting, and the characters themselves and the secret objectives actually appeared poorly balanced. The plot with New Caprica turned out to be ambiguous: on the one hand, the finale becomes extremely saturated and dynamic, on the other hand, it is excessively straightforward and without alternatives regarding the necessary actions to achieve an acceptable result.

 However, one of the most annoying problems was solved by "Pegasus" with a bang: instead of a meaningless "human sympathizer", a "cylon sympathizer" was introduced into the game, which along with a loyalty card received a secret goal card assigned to Cylon leaders. The question "Whose side is this creature on?" pushed the game - with an even number of participants, it became much more interesting to play. In general, despite a number of shortcomings, the addition coped with its task - component updates and fresh mechanics breathed new life into this wonderful game.

EXODUS SUPPLEMENT

 And so, after another year, the authors decided to continue the topic. The second addition to BSG, called Exodus, is coming soon. What are the developers ready to offer to shake up the community again?

 This is a new solution for those who are bored without external threats: the "Base Ship" field location will allow you to accumulate an external threat and bring it to the field with "Galaxy" much more often than it happened in the base version. The new mechanics of neutral characters scattered around the locations of the human fleet, which carry both useful and very unpleasant consequences, until the death of the character. Now visiting the locations will become a very intense attraction, which cannot but please, because before, for example, getting into the infirmary was only a minor obstacle. In addition, the authors decided to develop a role-playing vein, accidentally discovered by players in the base box. This time, personal experiences are introduced, which can be fatal at the end of the game. There will be an opportunity to get a card of a personal goal, the fulfillment of which will probably put the player himself under attack, and ignoring it will lead to the victory of humanity. Even more paranoia and struggle - this is the slogan of "Exit". Also, the developers have given up on developing the Cylon leader line until at least the next expansion.

 Of course, there will be new characters, and, all things considered, the so-called "dual" utility personalities, whose special properties are equally useful for both the human player and the Cylon player, are finally coming into vogue. New crises and fresh skills, along with updated fighters and a unique position of air wing commander, will make up the cardboard and plastic filling "Exit". Well, as an alternative ending, an epic battle with the main forces of the Cylon fleet will be offered.

 All this will probably be more than enough until next year, and then, how do we know if the final part - "Earth" - is waiting for us, with a real intra-Cylon struggle, personalization of all Cylons, not just the leaders, etc. After all, the flight continues!