Flashback Friday - Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game - Love it or Hate It? Do you Still Play It?

I'm not a huge fan of traitor games to begin with. Galactica was one that I played a few times but it never super wowed me. It's too goddamn long, and each round is essentially just the previous round again. There's only so many times you can say "that's what a Cylon would say" and have it stay interesting.

I much preferred Dark Moon, but it has an issue as well, in that it's just not that interesting once the aliens are revealed. It doesn't get much play in my group and will probably be heading to the sell pile.

I hated Dead of Winter, which was the go-to traitor game for a while there.

Ultimately this is just a genre of game I don't really care for. I just got a new co-op that has an optional traitor mode and it's unlikely I'll ever use it.

I wanted to like it, because it's obviously a slick design. But we tried three times and every game was just kind of "meh." The only thing that encouraged us to play the 2nd and 3rd time was me, insisting that the game had something that we might be just missing. But by the third try, I gave up and traded it.

I've had some of my best gaming experiences with BSG. My wife and I participated in an annual Geekway game for three or four years, and we also had other enjoyable plays (and my plays predated me knowing her). I'm sure some will argue that the game itself has been surpassed or whatever, but this one of my first and still one of my best experiences playing a game where you actually played the theme rather than just read about it in flavor text.

The expansions are a mess. I have all three sets but have only played with a few options from the first two, and while I appreciate the opportunity to flex just about every option in the game, collectively they represent the worst of late-aughts/early-tens FFG design and expansion philosophy, with later expansions even correcting/invalidating parts of earlier expansions. I'd be more inclined to dig into the expansions at least on occasion if I didn't have to figure out how everything interrelates.

You're probably wondering whether I still play it, after all that. I haven't played it since May 2017, but I'd pretty much always play if anyone wanted to.

A couple of my old session reports, back when I did them:
boardgamegeek.com/thread/392147/saul-tig...cuckold-failed-cylon
boardgamegeek.com/thread/359298/you-sunk-my-battlestar

I got the BSG base set based on strong word of mouth here at the Fort, despite never watching the modern version of the show. The base game was so good that I ended up watching and enjoying the first three seasons, until season three started sucking. I didn't bother watching the final season, and I have likewise avoided playing with the expansions. I haven't played in years, because the only local players who still want to play are desperate to junk up the game with all the expansion crap.

Aside from the player count scaling problem, I thought that the base set was great, and we played it a lot for the first two years. Eventually I got a little burned out because certain regular players only wanted to play the same characters every time. For example, we had a married couple that always wanted to play Adama and Roslin, so they often controlled the game. Except when one of them was playing a traitor, and the other one of them could tell. Another regular player always wanted to play either Boomer or one of the two guys who was banging her, because he had a thing for Asian women. So I often ended up playing Apollo or Starbuck.

The strong point of the game was always that the feel of the game was so close to the atmosphere in the series. I haven't found other traitor games that I enjoyed as much because of that. Perhaps atypically, I watched the show after playing the game a bunch of times.

This still gets back to the table once a year to great enjoyment.

I still love this game, even if I seldom play it. Some of the best times I’ve ever had around a table were playing this.

This is the only game I regret selling. Phenomenal game and still the best traitor design due to its strong fidelity.

The issue I had with the game for a bit was that it could be really hot and cold. Some sessions were a breeze, others were intense and close.

About the time I gave my copy away I played someone else's and it was really a super high quality session. I was a Cylon, everyone knew it, no one could say for sure, and I hadn't done a thing to sabotage what was already a very difficult play of the game. Their suspicions took their minds off of their business, and that resulted in them letting the fuel run out when they didn't have to. All I had to do was sit there and look clearly not-guilty, further compounding their suspicions. Really an interesting session, that made me put this game back in the top-shelf category.

As with those above I'll agree -- the base game is fully sufficient and should be the best-practices way to play. Keep it clean and you'll enjoy it more. Avoid the player count that has the Sympathizer thing going on.

Still great. Play it maybe once a year. At this point, though, I don't really want any of the expansion bloat stuff. Just give me the original game... maybe with new characters included from the other expansions (that still work with the base rules).

It’s still one of the best games for larger groups ever made. I’d always play it.

Waaaaahhhhhhh - now you've upset me for the weekend ... and maybe the month. This is my favourite game, bar none, and don't get to play it anymore (one play in over four years) because the most people I can get who will play it is four (me included) and I refuse to play with less than five as that is the only completely underwhelming (even poor) aspect of the game - you need five people for it to work perfectly, while six can work with expansions.

With people who are very familiar with the series, and sometimes those who haven't even seen it, this game is just supersonic as the theme and people make it one of the best gaming experiences you can have. At our small club, when there were boardgamers around, I think there were four or five copies of it within the year. By about the sixth game it had been renamed by some people as 'Kill Toaster Tom'.

Conversely this game is absolutely a horror if you play with the wrong people - usually dry, pattern searching, mechanic pining eurogamers. I had one game at a predominantly euro-friendly club that I just couldn't wait for it to end fast enough - one guy just read all his cards (constantly) and said hardly anything, another person just didn't get it and was as silent, and one guy (a mate I play with in a euro group) just got anti everytime I suggested he may be a cylon. I cringe whenever I remember back to it.

I enjoyed the expansions as it gave more theme to us fans of the show - Pegasus had New Caprica, the mechanics were not quite there but it was fun (I remember turning cylon as Ellen and launching Galactica with still most of the humans on the planet) and it provided Pegasus, Exodus provided the Cylon board plus new types of loyalty plus the Boxing, Daybreak I didn't play much (coincided when our player numbers dropped) but it did provide a different arc for the game.

Now to go find some anti-depressant medication - thanks Uba.

The first time I played Battlestar Galactica was even before my wife I began playing Pandemic and really dove into the hobby. The other three players were all a little loopy from some major med school test. They figured out I was a Cylon because I was reading the rules for revealing myself. They spaced me and lost two turns later because the game is still hard.

That was the last time I played Battlestar Galactica.