Mechanical Review: Battlestar Galactica
A couple of weeks ago a wrote a post about the Traitor mechanic in games. It was pretty good. Feel free to catch up here.
Quite the ride, huh? I mentioned at the end that I would do a follow up at some point, talking about the bigger games and how well they deal with the problem of creating a game around the traitor mechanic.
My main point was that the traitor mechanic was a game onto itself - anything else the game consists of tends to be so much fluff. Enter Battlestar Galactica, a colossal game - as Penny Arcade have pointed out, even set-up is a bit of a task - that uses the traitor mechanic as only one of several pieces in an oblique puzzle. Let's begin!
One Board, big. The board has spinny wheely doo-hickeys built in to keep track of your resources as they dwindle - Population, Fuel, Food and Morale.
Player boards and stand-up card pieces. Each details a different major player from the first series. No one is assumed to be a Cylon based on their role in the show, but nicely Gaius takes 2 Cylon cards at the beginning of the game, increasing his chances somewhat. All the character abilities and weaknesses are nicely thematic.
Cards. Disaster cards, which happen at the end of each player's turn, skill cards, which give abilities and are used in skill checks, and other various cards for The President, for using the FTL drives, and the dreaded Cylon cards for determining traitors to the human race.
Ships and basestars: nice plastic ships and nice-ish cardboard pop-outs depicting raiders, Vipers, Raptors and the Cylon basestars. The components are generally pretty great.
I have to start here. It might not be the only device, but it is the main one. As in the TV show of the same name (you've heard of it?!) some of the players around the table may be Cylons, an evil band of robots that look exactly like humans in every way other than when they have sex their spines glow red. That was dramatic license? Fine, they are completely indistinguishable. In a smaller game there will be one Cylon, and in the larger, two. Critically, there are two rounds of Cylon cards dealt in the game, at the beginning and the mid-point, so you never know when you might begin hearing an odd re-imagining of "All along the Watchtower" through the walls.
There are two stage to being a Cylon traitor, a unrevealed and a revealed stage. Where BSG really shines is the number of devices that the Cylon player can use to hinder the human players without arousing (much) suspicion. Conversely though, and impressively, there are usually tell-tale signs that a player is not quite all he seems. So let's have a look at the ways an unrevealed Cylon can affect the game.
- Skill checks. Skill checks form the basis of the traitor mechanic. A skill check consists of a target number, say 13, and a few card types that can contribute to that number - maybe Engineering cards and Pilot cards. Each player can then add cards, facedown, to the skill check. Engineering and Pilot cards count towards the goal; any others away from it. As these cards are always added anonymously (save some card effects), this phase is ripe for treachery. Failure to pass a skill check results in bad affects, often to do with your precious supply levels.
- Lacklustre use of abilities. Every character has a few special abilities that can really help to turn the game to the human's advantage. Any player "forgetting" to use these powers should come under instant suspicion.
- Lacklustre use of skill cards... Skill cards can be used to pass skill checks but they also have practical abilities on them; things to make the ship run smoother or kill more Raiders. These are kept secret and a good Cylon player will never use them if he/she can help it.
- Admiral/president. Some of the players will have been given special abilities by being the Admiral or the President. An unrevealed Cylon who is given these roles would thank their mechanical lucky stars, particularly the Admiral. The Admiral chooses the location card each time the fleet jumps, and can take the ship mere inches in the right direction while causing all kinds of havoc with the supplies.
So this is all pretty impressive. Once you know how the game works, you will see all sorts of small ways to sow descent and paranoia into your fellow meat-boxes.
One final nugget about the traitor mechanic - the fact that there are two rounds of Cylon cards is a little stroke of genius. Not only is it thematically consistent (many Cylons don't know they're Cylons) but also, as my friend Steve often points out, it means that in the first round, there is an incentive to not do quite as well as you could, not knowing whether you will ultimately end up a Cylon. This muddies the water even more, making a real Cylon that much harder to spot.
So that's the really good out of the way. BSG, to my mind, has two problems. The first is a mechanics problem, and that to me makes it much more important. The traitor mechanic is excellently implemented, but this is to the detriment of the other aspects of the game, the main one being the day to day running of the ship.
It's... boring. That is, it feels very arbitrary, especially at the beginning of the game. There is an efficiency that you can develop - prioritising repair, politics or space combat - but none of it feels particularly urgent or engaging, and the space combat in particular is unsatisfying. Rolling one die 8 times to see how many fighters are destroyed is not scintillating combat. With the standard ships so weak, it feels a lot like rolling dice to brush ants off a sandwich.
The base-stars liven this up a bit, with tokens being used to record damage on these hulking machines, but there is another issue that is oft, correctly, targeted at this game. Because ships are added only when an assault card is drawn from the disaster deck, and they are always removed when the ship jumps, it is possible for there to be large swaths of the game when it seems like there is not that much to do.
This problem is heightened by the fact that this situation almost requires that the Cylon reveal themselves - because as a revealed Cylon, you are given more power to affect the disasters and even given a 'Super Disaster' which is usually pretty bad. But it's a shame that the Cylon might reveal themselves due to general inactivity.
I find this particularly annoying as it must have come up in playtesting. It couldn't really have been missed. It feels like someone at some point would have pointed out that this situation arises every now and then, and someone else decided it wasn't worth fixing. Possibly because it's thematic, which is a cruddy reason to have poor mechanics.
A few paragraphs ago I said that BSG had two problems. The second is it's playtime, which stands in my experiences at 2 hours at a minimum, which is a little much. It makes it inaccessible to new players, particular if they draw a Cylon card and spend the game wondering just what in hell they are supposed to be doing without revealing themselves.
All this being said, I've had some great experiences with BSG. Of the two problems, the first is uncommon and somewhat necessary to the experience, and the second is only small fry. The traitor mechanic - which is why the game was designed, and what is really important - is solid, probably the best I've seen. It's attached to a bit of a lumbering giant of a game, but thematically, it can't really be faulted.
Quick note: I've been reliably informed the expansions fix most all all of the issues I've mentioned above... I intend to research that at the earliest opportunity...