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Another pleasant evening spent with my brother Joshua, another set of boardgames.

First off we played Galaxy Truckers, which we didn't have any fun playing because it was not the sort of game we wanted to play. So far Shut up and Sit Down are 0 for 2 with boardgame recommendations. Hmm...

But we did get to play the Battlestar Galactica boardgame including a few expansion bits which still remains my favourite board game I've ever played. However I'd only played vanilla BSG and not the Pegasus or Exodus expansions so this was a new experience for me. But I'm getting abit ahead of myself, let's talk vanilla BSG

PLAYERS; 3-6, best with 5
PLAYING TIME: about 2.5-3 hours.

BSG is inspired from this old classic boardgame called Shadows over Camelot in which players all take the role of King Arthur and his goodly knights and must work together to perform a bunch of noble deeds and win the game. There are a lot of ways to lose the game (too many invaders, too many catapults, too many failed quests, everyone dies) and only one way to win; fill a table with 12 swords and have at least 7 of them be white (ie goodly!). Players are required to work together and use their powers and cards to best effect to win the game.

Oh and one player is a Traitor who wins if all the Knights lose. Who has to try and subtly sabotage the entire game without being accused. If he gets accused correctly then the Knights will probably win but if he reveals himself at the opportune moment then that person must prepare to be hated by the entire table. It's one of the most effective boardgaming mechanics I've ever played with, you're always busy analysing more then just the game itself, you're playing this entirely new game called "whose the ****?" or "how do I make them think I'm not a ****?" it's brilliant.

BSG is a much more polished version of Shadows over Camelot (which I do heartily recommend for people who want to get into boardgames, it's awesome). In it 3-6 players all play as characters from the show and each character has a unique set of skills and abilities as well as a negative trait and are organised into certain roles, some are politicians (who excel at drawing a lot of skill cards and making skill checks easier) to Military Leaders (who excel at getting other people to do things better then they would normally do them) to Pilots (who can go into vipers and shoot cylons) to Support personnel (who fix shit).

The players must work together to keep the BSG from going under while it performs a certain amount of jumps and if they don't meet one of the many fail conditions along the way then they win. Each turn consists of a movement action where a player can go do a different part of the Galactica (each part does something interesting like shoot cylons or jump faster or draw cards) and an action like playing a Skill card or activating something else and finally you draw a Crisis card and play it out. The crisis cards usually require a skill check which requires all the players to secretly put in their skill cards and hopefully pass the requirement.

The game is a little spicier with the addition of Admiral and President. Depending on whose character is currently higher on the rank/political chain at the start of the game, that player will start as either one. The president gets cards from a specific Quorum deck and gets additional powers and the Admiral gets to nuke shit as well as decide destinations upon jumping. Additionally, certain Crisis cards require the President or the Admiral to make a decision, which can be extremely brutal or revealing.

In our game, Josh was president and I was Admiral. Josh played it cool and amiable for the most part, but I was doing brash daring ruthless moves the whole game. See the problem is when one player is acting suspiciously, and that player happens to have an important title like admiral or President (or the highly coveted Admiral President) it can be very awkward for them. It got to the point where I was chucked into the Brig for my misuse of my position and Josh was praised as a good president, a useful member of the team.

Guess who turned out to be the Cylon?

So that's basically vanilla BSG and it's an awful lot of fun, there's constant tension, suspicion, paranoia and the actual difficulty of the game even without cylons mucking things up is quite nice, you're all trying to defeat cylons and trying to avoid losing resources whenever possible because goddammit those numbers just never go up. This is my favourite boardgame I've ever played and I cannot recommend it enough

As I said earlier we played with a few expansion bits. There are two expansions, Exodus and Pegasus, and each one adds a bunch of characters and separate modules. We played with most of the Pegasus material, but only part of the Exodus additions (a module that fundamentally changes the way Cylon ships work which I wholly recommend, it makes that aspect of the game loads better). I cannot say too much about these but they seem like a good way to enjoy a fresher BSG experience should the main game start to feel a bit stale.