I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was rather cool toward this show, despite lots of recommendations by friends. Just now I realized (well, remembered) it’s my default reaction to any movie or series that I perceive to have gotten too much marketing, or too much praise, etc.. I tend to avoid them.

It’s certainly possible I’ll start watching the show and forget these doubts. Hopefully my expectations won’t have grown to unattainable heights by then.

I think one of the greatest parts of the show is that we occasionally pause it to discuss some concept or situation that has arisen. We don’t even always agree on who or what is right in the situation.

I like BSG a lot for its mechanics and for me its more the style of the game than its theme. It does help a bit now that I am watching the show but I liked it a lot even before I was.

Now that I’ve played, I gather that some of the difficulty for the Humans is distrusting and second-guessing your fellow players, which I completely missed.

All in all I don’t know what I think of the game yet. I’m also in the position of having the flavor mean zilch to me since I’ve never seen a single episode of the show. Similar to how I viewed the new Star Trek movie, does it still hold up as enjoyable if you replaced all the characters with unknowns? I don’t know (Star Trek warranted a big shrug and mild regret of having paid theater prices to see it).

I fully look forward to playing it again – correctly.

After the game, Dan supposedly read in the instructions that he put too many cylon cards into the game (ya think!?). Trying to leave that negative first experience behind me, I still feel the game is lacking something. I’d much rather play Race for the Galaxy, which Scott introduced to us last week.

I agree that a game should be hard (they always suffered in the show), but players should have a very good chance of success if they play well. With BSG, you can work great as a team, and still fail miserably. Luck should have an effect, but never majorly determine outcomes in a strategy game, IMHO of course.

Maybe we’ll give it another try next week with 5 people and find out whether or not there are too many potential cylons, resulting in loss of fun for me.

Flavor is just flavor not an exact representation. Riots is just meant to be a no-win scenario where you need to choose which pair of resources you’re going to lose or the less of two evils if you prefer.

No, we’re both wrong… and, we’re both right. Mainly the error is mine, as I did not make my point as clearly as I could have.

For those unfamiliar with the decks, there’s a picture at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/430657

Since each character draws from more than one deck, your hand could consist of, for example:
Yellow 1 (Consolidate Power), Green 1 (Executive Order), Green 2 (Executive Order), Green 5 (Leadership), and Purple 5 (Strategic Planning).

5 cards, and between them are three numerical values, three colors, and four powers, and every card has something in common with at least one other card. What’s the best play for a skill challenge in the colors yellow/green/purple?

That’s a rhetorical question – we’d obviously need to know more of the board situation and the crisis at hand to answer that. I’m really just pointing out how complexity they put into the decision – which IIRC is a blind decision made without knowing what the rest of the group has already contributed to the challenge.

I am glad to hear, though, that the game is less overwhelming the more you play it. I kinda figured it’d have to, but it scared me off before I could get to that stage.

Actually, the numbers on the cards are low for one of the two types of cards and high for the other. Two cards can never have the same number unless they are the same type of card. This actually is part of the balance in that the cards with higher numbers are often the cards that are only good in specific situations (though some of this is certainly subjective).

During out first game everything did seem pretty complicated and a bit overwhelming but after about three plays everything felt very simple.

I can however agree that some of the flavor gets devoured by the way the cards play out. Sometimes is hard to see what success even means. The choice cards are easier though even some of those are a bit odd. For example the Riots card is a choice to either lose 1 moral and one food or 1 fuel and one population. In our last game Pat commented that apparently the second choice was to burn up the people that were rioting using our fuel… which if this WERE the case you would think it should cost a bit of moral as well…

Still… I love the game and the humans are winning more often now. I however still suck at being a Cylon.

They went to so much trouble trying to make it flavorful, but much of the flavor gets lost because on each play, instead of focusing on the in-character event, you’re focusing on the many permutations of card plays and special abilities relevant to it.

And then there were things where the flavor was completely disconnected. Case in point: The Olympic Carrier card you showed. Reverse-engineering what that card should be based on how it played out on the show (because it felt like on the show the characters made the hard decision and did the best possible thing), I’d say success should be -1 population and -2 morale, and failure should be more like -3 population, -1 morale, and a cylon attack. I realize the numbers are pretty subjective, but that episode was a classic no-win scenario. The corresponding card should reflect that.

Between the high complexity, the randomness that prevented long-term strategy, and a few cards that just thumbed their noses at the scenes they were trying to emulate, the game had too many flaws to make it worth my buying.

Yet I can’t deny it gets good ratings. I wonder how much of that is hype and fandom. I suspect a slightly easier version would have scored just as high on BGG, while also been faster to pick up and playable by a wider audience.

Not to say I didn’t have fun playing it, it’s just that I kept thinking “this could have been so much more fun if they’d trimmed it down”. I find I say that about a lot of Fantasy Flight’s big games. (On paper, I love Arkham Horror. In practice, I rarely play it any more.)

It was a four player game and the Cylon ended up getting even more unlucky than me in the other human victory. Kind of too bad really. We have had some close ones as the humans and honestly having the fleet pull one of those out of the fire would have been more satisfying.

One of the more amusing moments of the game was when President Baltar revealed himself as a Cylon and Admiral President Adama (William not Lee) ended up with almost the entire Quorum deck in hand (course I was playing Adama so it was personally interesting to me).

I definitely want to try it, both because I am a fan of both shows and the game sounds good.
However, in our group we only have three players, so it may not be as rewarding…