Battlestar Galactica

One of the hot games on BGG at the moment is Battlestar Galactica. I've been ignoring it. If it doesn't come with a life-size miniature of the '80s Cassiopeia:




I'm not very interested. Nevertheless, that was what was on the table at CyberKev's place, so that was what we played. Adam gave a quick rules explanation, some of which I followed, but I figured there was so much writing on the board it would all become clear. That was almost true by the end of the game.

First of all, I would like to say OMGSTARBUCKSAGIRL! I hope those coffee people don't mind that they've named their chain after a hot little blonde girl, instead of a (presumably) hot little blonde boy:



Maybe he was the male equivalent of Cassiopeia in the '80s? Anyway, more cute girls is better. When we chose characters Phil took Starbuck so I couldn't have the other cute pilot - if we're playing characters I like to choose someone I don't mind looking at for several hours. If I wanted a female character I needed to be the president, and with my feeble understanding of the rules I figured it was best for the human race that I didn't do that. I took Gaius Baltar instead.

Of course, I was completely ignorant of the fact that Baltar is well-known for being of dubious loyalty. In fact, looking at Wikipedia, there's a lot about him I was completely ignorant of. It's interesting that in the '80s series Baltar was a shadowy, obviously evil guy, but the modern-day equivalent is that he's a womaniser. How times have changed! I wonder if he's evil enough to smoke?

At the start of the game each player receives a loyalty card, like in Shadows Over Camelot, except this card tells them whether they're a Cylon or not. The very clever mechanic that represents Baltar's dubious loyalty is that he receives two loyalty cards, and if either says he's a Cylon then he is, which gives him about a 50% chance of being one. I wasn't, but of course I was under suspicion.

To complete the list of roles selected - Trevor was the admiral, CyberKev was the president, Adam was the Adama pilot, and the Evil Count was the janitor or handyman or something. So, onto the game.

The first two things that happened to us were Cylon attacks, so we sent the pilots out to fight them. That didn't work very well - Starbuck got injured and Adama had to go get petrol for his Viper or something. However the Cylons weren't obviously hurting us either - I guess if combat was more effective it would be more of a fighting game than the sort of political cooperation game that it is.

I quite like the way cards are played to achieve cooperation or betrayal. Each player has a hand of skill cards of various colours - yellow is political, blue is engineering, and there are 3 other colours. As a minor politician I was drawing two yellow cards and some others each turn. At the end of your turn you have to take a crisis card which represents an obstacle to be overcome by the crew. The challenge specifies what colours can be used to defeat it, and what total value in those colours must be attained to succeed. Cards of the other colours count as negative. Two cards are drawn from a random pool and added to the contributions, then each player adds as many cards as they like without revealing what colours those cards are. When all the cards are collected, they're shuffled and the total calculated. Nice cooperative players like Baltar will have contributed the good colours, but wicked wicked Cylons might have put in the other colours. Given that there were only two random cards added to the pile, if there are more than two bad cards contributed, someone is a Cylon.

That didn't happen to us for quite a while. In fact we were a team of overachievers, regularly scoring 10 more than we needed. We figured either the Cylons were not revealed, i.e. the Cylon loyalty cards would come out in the second round of loyalty, or the Cylons were trying to be tricky. Either way, we were doing well.

Some of the crisis cards have an icon which means "progress on the hyperjump track". After you've revealed a few of those cards you have the option of warping the ship and actually making some progress towards Earth. If you decide to jump before you're not quite ready you might lose some of the colonist ships on the way which costs you population. Oh goodness, now I've got to explain that as well. The BSG (as opposed to the BGG, the BFG, or even the BBG) has a certain amount of fuel, food, population and morale. The crises that befall you whittle away those values, and if any of them fall to zero the Cylons win. The BSG is escorting a fleet of colonist ships containing, for example, ugly dirty people who don't get to be on the TV show. When the Cylons attack, and they have no Vipers to fight, they destroy colonist ships, each of which costs you some amount of fuel, food or population - so losing fights means you come closer to losing the game, and having no Vipers defending is pretty bad.

Anyway, when you hyperjump you leave behind all of the Cylons you were fighting. You may alos not be organised enough to get the word out to all of the ugly dirty people, so you may lose some population as well. We figured a few times that if we didn't jump the Cylons would destroy colonist ships anyway, so if jumped early and lost some population we'd still be better off. The show's not about those people anyway.

When you hyperjump you move a certain number of steps toward Earth. The Admiral draws two travel cards, each of which grants you a certain number of steps and a penalty, and of course the higher the number of steps the higher the penalty. Our Admiral was extremely cautious, meaning that after 3 jumps we'd only moved 4 steps of a required 8. Not only were we still a long way from home, but the game was taking a really long time and I was starting to doubt the loyalty of the Admiral.

After 4 steps, more loyalty cards are handed out. If you receive a Cylon in this batch, you suddenly discover you're a Cylon. By that time we knew there was a Cylon amongst us, and as the bad cards were red - pilot cards - we suspected Phil or Adam. Even worse, we discovered that the Evil Count von Handyman was a Cylon sympathiser and we had to throw him in the brig.

The game then entered a long political phase, during which the BSG seemed to be becalmed. Although the handyman was in the brig and was known not to be a Cylon, it was a political argument to try to get him released. We needed to pass a yellow-purple skill check, and someone kept throwing in red cards. We strongly suspected Adam(a), and wanted to throw him in the brig as well, but that was a purple-green skill check and red cards kept disrupting that as well. The Cylons were also out to get the Admiral, i.e. trying to depose Trevor so they could steer the ship themselves. Looking back I can see the beauty of the struggle, but at the time it just seemed to drag.

Madam President brought some sanity to the situation with an inquiry into the imprisonment of the handyman. When Adam(a) blatantly voted against releasing him from the brig, we knew we'd found a Cylon. Shortly afterwards, we figured out that Starbuck was a Cylon as well. BOTH of our pilots were bad guys. We began to think we were screwed, as there was nobody to fight the Cylons and they'd just pick off our colonist ships whenever they got the chance.

Still the game did not end. The interstellar wind picked up and we started moving again. The political machinations over the Admiralty had been resolved in our favour, and the Handyman had been appointed Acting Admiral. He certainly drove a lot faster and more recklessly than the previous guy. As the nuts and bolts started to fall off the BSG we jumped twice, and were in sight of home - just one more warp to win the game.

There still wasn't much hope though. The Cylons called all of their friends on the CB radio and told them where we were, and we were under attack with no defence. Adam(a) finally played a super-crisis which pushed us over the edge, and I think the last of our population died. The Cylons won!

Well, it might have been exciting, except by this time I was trying to sleep between turns. We'd been playing for 4 and a half hours or so, which is more than I care to spend on any game, especially after my bedtime! I can see how parts of the game are well-designed, and it all seems to work, but... I just don't care. I don't care for the theme, and I don't want to spend that long playing any game. If you like the TV series, and if you like long games, and if you like Ameritrash, then this is an EXCELLENT game for you. I won't be playing it again, but I hope you enjoy it.

THE SEVENTH GUEST

I just realised I'm a long way behind on session reports for The Gathering of Friendless. It's because I've been playing squash... of course... I play on Saturday morning, and I'm a useless lump of whining lard until Tuesday at least.

Anyway, Episode 3 of The Gathering of Friendless occurred a couple of weeks ago. The title of the episode was chosen because I was desperately trying to avoid having exactly 7 guests. Seven is the crappiest number for board-gaming. After you've played Shadows Over Camelot you're down to party-style games like Saboteur and The Great Dalmuti. They're fine games, but I prefer 3 or 4 player games on average. Sadly, 7 is a small enough number that it *seems* like there should be some better games to play, so people are reluctant to split into 2 tables. My theory is that with 6 players we could play, with 8 players I could convince people to split into 2 tables, but 7 is just very difficult so it's better avoided.

I took the approach of inviting 9 people and warning all of them that exactly 2 people not coming was unacceptable. They took me seriously, and 4 people didn't come along, leaving us with ... you do the maths... which is a fine number for games.

We started with Carcassonne in honour of the kid who'd visited the real place during the week. I realised that the game is much cleverer than I'd thought, and despite being flogged by CyberKev I increased my rating for it on BGG. All the tile types work together to contribute to the tension, and it's just such a clever game. I can't wait for the collectors' 3D edition (no, I haven't heard of such a thing. I made that up).

We then went on to Word Tower, because the ladies at the table like word games. For whatever reason, the ladies at the table were all at sea with this game, and it was a battle between CyberKev and I to rush to the win. CyberKev scored 4, I scored 5, Hubertus scored 1, and the ladies scored nothing at all. I believe male and female brains are different, and it seems this was a male-brain game.

We then tried out Tsuro, a very useful game which takes from 2 to 8 players. I've tried it with 2 and 5 and it was fine with both of those numbers. Scrabblette made the mistake of coming to attack me while sitting on my right. The second she approached I ran her off the board. A combination of experience and luck allowed me to see off the others well.

It was getting late, but we still had the stamina for Cartagena II. Actually, Jane didn't have the stamina. Jane had a nap. But the rest of us guessed what the rules were from the German and some discussion on BGG, and at least agreed on some rules to use in the absence of anything better. I figured out how to control the boat between the islands, and had 6 of my pirates in town before anyone else had 4.

I enjoyed the evening a lot. I played two games I'd bought but hadn't got to the table before, and we didn't have to play Shadows Over Camelot over and over and over.

The League of Feelthy English Kerniggets

Today's gaming adventure was a trip to the League of Extraordinary Gamers, the last major Euro-games meeting in Brisbane which I had not previously attended. It was an unusually varied meeting, with Warhammer, Magic, Ticket to Ride and Scrabble all being played at the same time. I wanted to game with the Scrabble ladies but they left before I got the chance. The kid and I started with a game of Settlers which I won by about a turn from the other adult player. My kid went for largest army at the expense of any economic development (and we had words about that afterwards), and the other kid who was only 7 just built roads and couldn't achieve longest road anyway. By the way, are you allowed to build one of your first settlements on a harbour? I allowed it for my adult opponent, but it seemed to give him a big advantage throughout the game. It seems wrong.

After that some of the other Eurogamers were organising a game of Shadows Over Camelot, and as it seemed that most potential opponents would be doing that, the kid and I joined in on that. Wow, talk about culture shock! They play TOTALLY differently to us. They (a) don't take black cards, (b) place siege engines, (c) ignore the Pict, Saxon and Black Knight quests, and (d) complete the sword and grail quests. When I've played, we (a) almost always take black cards, (b) never place siege engines until forced, (c) always do the Pict and Saxon quests, and (d) manage the grail quest rather than completing it. They have a definite plan to attack the game, and in the groups I've played with they'd be described as m-m-m-m-m-m-mad. sir.

As luck would have it, I (Sir Percival) was dealt the traitor. Sir Kay, the most vocal of the feelthy English kerniggets, said "OK, you have to do the Lancelot's Armour quest but before you complete it we'll accuse you of being the traitor because it's too dangerous to let the traitor get it." Um, decent plan, but I AM the traitor and I don't much want to do that. Of course, arguing with the plan would only raise suspicions so I simply mentioned "that's not how we play this game", and went along with it. So there I was, railroaded into the Armour quest and desperately trying to figure out how to lose it. Because they didn't draw black cards (except I did, because I had the power of seeing what was coming), there were no points accumulating on my quest. However I pretended I had no decent cards which forced King Arthur to feed me cards. He gave me a 4, I played it on the set of three, forcing him to feed me more of them. I was desperately trying to guess what he would feed me and trying to return the same thing to him. It's called hand management :-). I had a single 3 so I played it on the set of two. I picked up a 4 somehow, but didn't play it on the set of three because I wanted King Arthur to spoon-feed me. I quietly kept my Merlin card to myself, kept the special white very quiet, and did the least I could to be helpful. Several times King Arthur forgot to trade with me, and I forgot to remind him. Hehehe.

Finally, I was poised to fail at the quest. I needed to play a 3 to win it, and I didn't have one. Woohoo! Failure! But before I could admit defeat, Sir Kay accused me of being a traitor. Doncha hate that? It was a bit of a surprise to the guys that I was, they were expecting Sir Galahad maybe. But then I was relegated to taunting the loyal knights by stealing a card from one of them each time, and either playing a black card or placing a siege engine. Stealing a card was successful on a couple of occasions - I managed to steal a Fight card someone needed to fight siege engines. Playing black cards was not very successful - if I got a Pict or a Saxon nothing bad would happen. So I kept placing siege engines. The game wore on and everyone was getting low on life points. The grail had been drunk, various special white cards used up, and Sir Galahad used Clairvoyance to rearrange the top 5 cards of the deck. When someone was required to draw a card and it caused a siege engine to be placed, I knew the next 4 cards were at least as bad as that. So I could safely draw a card and at least get a siege engine.

After a very long time the loyal knights had 6 or so white swords, no black swords, and lots of siege engines. They were reduced to drawing black cards for the Progression of Evil. Then King Arthur drew "All loyal knights lose one life point". Five loyal knights died at once. Woohoo! Next turn was mine and I placed a siege engine to win the game. Woohoo! Sir Percival did several victory dances, none of which were elegant nor knightly, but after such a hard-fought battle with my reputation dragged through the mud, it was a-very nice to see the son-of-a-hamster elderberry-smelling feelthy English kerniggets go down. I said "WE'VE ALREADY GOT ONE!"

Anyway, then the kid and I headed off as I had other games to play (i.e. squash). We hope to get back to LXG some times, and hope that some of the guys from there can come along to Critical Mass etc. occasionally. I handed out my Settlers of Brisbane cards, so maybe some of those guys will be in touch.