Battlestar Galactica: Lessons in Paranoia

This past Saturday I got together with four friends to enjoy “Andrew’s Third Annual Bachelor Party” – an excuse to get together for a day long orgy of junk food and board games, while temporarily escaping wives and children.  In attendance were myself, Bill, Brian, Dave, and Metin.  While we have played some crunchy strategy games in the past, after hearing the Gamers With Jobs podcast flog the Battlestar Galactica board game we decided to pick up a copy and give it a whirl.

Battlestar Galactia – which (thankfully) requires no knowledge of the television series to play – is a cooperative game with two overarching themes:  survival and negotiation.  Players take on the role of human cast members from the TV show and are tasked with overcoming a series of obstacles in order to survive long enough to make their way to the planet Kobol.  The twist is that one or two players are secretly working against the humans (as Cylons), and are trying to actively deplete player resources (population, fuel, food, morale) so that reaching Kobol is impossible.

The mechanics are extremely simple, which makes the game easy to approach and quick to learn.  Players have a hand of color-coded skill cards, and they (secretly) play these cards during the once-per-turn skill checks to help (or hinder) meeting the goal.  Playing matching cards adds their strength to the skill check, while mismatches subtract from the total.  It’s dead simple.  Likewise, space combat is handled by moving allies and enemies around using very simple rules, rolling a single die per ship, and resolving the result using a small table.

Where Battlestar Galactica excels is in creating an atmosphere in which the human players are unsure of who they can trust.  Absolutely everything in the game must be kept secret, from contribution to skill checks, to the types of special cards that you have, to whether or not you are really a human.  While players are allowed to speculate on each others’ loyalty, and can try to defend themselves from accusations, it is against the rules to hold up cards to conclusively prove that you are what you say you are.

At the start of the game players are randomly dealt out “loyalty cards” which tell them if they are human or cylon.  It is possible that, to start, there may be zero, one, or two traitors since not all of the cards are dealt out.  Then, at the halfway point of the game, another round of loyalty cards are handed out.  At this point there will be at least one cylon, and probably two.  It is highly probable that a player who was previously an honest human working towards helping everyone else get home is suddenly a cylon, and must reverse his course of action.

One human’s tale

Of the two games that we played on Saturday I was the only player to be a human the entire time.  In some ways this could be seen to simplify things – I never had to try to try to be overly subtle with my moves, and could always unabashedly help without fear – however being a human when you know there are cylons out there is nerve-wracking, and I was constantly paranoid….. often of everyone all at once.  Even when I thought that I had a good idea of who was working with me and who was working against me, I was never one hundred percent sure, and little things would often cause me to start viewing someone differently.

During the first game we had no secret cylons until the half way point… although we didn’t know it at the time, obviously.  When the second round of loyalty cards were dealt out one of the freshly minted cylons – Brian – gave himself away almost immediately, contributing bad cards to a skill check in a manner that was glaringly obvious even though it was done in secret.  We threw him in the brig almost immediately (which is another skill check), and he was forced to reveal himself.  The second cylon was more difficult to suss out, however I had a fairly decent notion that it was Bill, and in fact had been accusing him as such from the start of the game (when he wasn’t a cylon) due to his sustained indifference to committing more than a single card to skill checks.  Just as we were about to throw him in the brig as well he revealed himself, and then the race to the finish was on.  The first game ended up in a Cylon victory, as they managed to run the humans out of morale.

The second game was much more measured, and we all had a much better grip on the rules and mechanics.  None of this stopped the paranoia, of course.  This time there were two cylons working against us from the start, but they were very subtle and played a long burn.  My suspicions fell on Bill again early when, as part of a skill resolution, he chose to send his own character to the Brig as an act of good will, but then tried to have us bust him out as soon as the second loyalty cards were dealt out.  Metin was also under heavy suspicion due to a power play he made early on, wresting the presidency away from Bill.  As the game wore on I also began to suspect that Dave was a traitor, until finally Bill (who is one of Dave’s long time friends) caught him making a very guilty face at a bad time.  We chucked him in the brig and he revealed himself.  Meanwhile Bill was still rotting in the Brig, with Metin using his character’s special skill to keep him there and Brian and I going in circle about who the other cylon was.  As we approached our final destination Metin finally revealed himself as being a cylon all along, and Brian and I had to scramble to get Bill out of the slammer.  With very few turns to go, and a massive enemy fleet surrounding Galactica, the humans finally managed to get close enough to Kobol to make the final jump and win the game.

Our two games of Battlestar Galactica played out incredibly different, but one thing was constant to my experience:  paranoia.  It was unsettling knowing that there was a traitor in the midst, and not having any idea who it was.  Furthermore, it was difficult to defend myself from accusations of being the traitor – although I didn’t have it nearly half as bad as someone like Bill, being trapped in the Brig with no way to prove his innocence.

BSG is a wildly fun game that is a welcome change of pace from the hardcore strategy boardgames that I usually play.  I can’t wait to give it another whirl… and maybe even try my hand at being a cylon.

For another point of view, try Bill’s site:  Battlestar Galactica:  Great game or best game?