Rochester Gamers Community

When I got there, Chris, Wade, Don, and Craig were just starting a game of Bohnanza and were kind enough to let me join.

I think all of us were new to this game, with Don and myself having played once before a long time ago, and I played one time before that that was so long ago I just now remembered it.

Not much to say here. People planted beans, people traded beans, people snickered and giggled whenever someone offered someone else a Stink Bean, etc. Chris won with 19, Wade was close behind with 18, Don was in the middle, I narrowly snatched not-last from Craig with 11 to his 10.

Then we ho-hummed around deciding what to play next and I suggested Battlestar Galactica and so it was, with Don, Wade, Craig and myself sitting down for some sci-fi/co-op with trader gaming action.

The reason I suggested BSG is that I'd only played it once before, and that was at a demo at GenCon last year that we didn't even finish. I remember not being overly impressed by it but I'd heard so many good things about that I decided to give it another chance.

I'm still pretty "meh" about it. But maybe this particular session was a fluke.

Craig was the cute female asian pilot chick, Don was the scar-faced admiral amidala dude, Wade was some jock i've never heard of who could reroll a die once every turn, and I was the dude who's played by the dude who had a role in the original series. My special abilities were to make it easier to get out of the brig, to make it easier to change presidents, and to sacrifice a population for any other resource.

For the first half of the game, it was readily apparent that none of us were cylons. Which was a good thing since we turned up 3 cylon attack cards in a row. The board had so many cylon ships we ran out of minis for some of them. As president, I played a quorum card called blah-blah-blah-brute-force that eased the pressure a little, and a few turns of lucky rolls combined with gratuitous usage of reroll type cards soon had us jumping for joy, and away from those toasters. There was a boarding party but Wade took care of them on his turn.

The rest of the first half went fairly smoothly. At one point, we intentionally failed a challenge so that our food resource would drop into the red. We did that so if anyone turned out to be a cylon sympathizer, they would be on our side.

We got to the sleeper agent phase and Don was revealed as a sympathizer which landed him in the Brig along with Craig who had to go there during the sleeper agent phase anyway because he was a woman (or something). When Don went to the brig his admiralship passed to Wade, and Wade's turn was next so he used some magic pixie dust to take presidenthood from me. At this point we knew that if wade was the cylon we were hosed, but as luck would have it, Craig independently came to the conclusion that we all knew he was a cylon and just came out and admitted it before Wade's turn was up. So we (Don & Me) figured we were ok.

The second half of the game went pretty smoothly. Craig did his best to stop us. We got low on food once and my character's once per game power came in handy. The only other really suspenseful moment was toward the end where the board was covered in cylons and again started to look crowded. It was Wade's turn and we had just jumped on Don's turn and pulled another jump icon. Wade's crisis card gave us two more jumps so we were good to go on my turn. That was when I reminded Wade and Don of my character's drawback -- I couldn't activate any space that had another character in it, and there was Don's Amidala all cozied up in that FTL control room sitting there grinning like some brain-damaged elephant. Wade's reaction to my reminder was great, but not something I can repeat in mixed company. I let the suspense build for just a second before I dropped an Executive Order on Don Amidala who promptly jumped us to the magic 8 spot for the human victory over the black & dekkers.

So the "meh" feeling came pretty close to the beginning. Very early on I saw that this game had a problem in that the cylon player could not stay hidden for long. The best moves were almost always obvious, and a player not taking the obvious move would be called out. You could try to influence the game through the skill checks, but a little bad luck and it wouldn't be long before the good players figured out who was poisoning the water hole. I've heard of games where the cylon player effectively stayed hidden and did all kinds of nasty stuff, but that was not this game. I think that for BSG to work, there has to be suspense over who the cylons are. In this playing, that suspense was not there.

Another "huh?" came when I realized that for almost half my turns my best move was to play an Exectuive Order and let someone else take my turn. Which leaves me with a grand total of zip to do. There was one time I decided not to play the XO just because I wanted to do something myself on my turn, but that was just once. I think in the whole game I:

• Played one Quorum card (once).
• Played an action card to draw two blue cards (once).
• Repaired some vipers (once).
• Used my once per game power (once).

And I honestly think that's it. All my other turns were XO's, and I was constantly drawing them. I never used my power to get someone out of the Brig or to change Presidents, and my "downside" only came into effect on the last turn and didn't really affect anything. Doing nothing is something I like to avoid in board games.

Those are my biggest issues with the game, but I have some other minor ones: It didn't seem like the revealed cylon player had very many interesting decisions, I didn't think the ship-to-ship combat was very original, and I thought the overall game was too busy for offering simplistic decisions. At least that's how it looked to me.

For me the best co-ops I've played are Pandemic and Don's Godzilla game. But I need to get a real playing of Knizia's Lord of the Rings game in too, for comparison. Maybe it's the presence of the traitor in BSG, combined with the fact that the best move is so frequently obvious that turns me off.

But I had fun anyway and while BSG won't be suggested by me for some time, I can see myself sitting up to it again sometime (as long as the only other game being played is, say, Red Dragon Inn or something).