Ertai

50’000 humans survived the slaughter of Twelve Colonies. Those 50’000 people, boarded on civilian ships protected by one of two remaining human flagships – Battlestar Galactica, are now chased by they greatest enemy – the one that is responsible for butchery of humankind – the Cylons.

The Cylons were created by man as a artificial slaves – to do hardest and most dangerous labors. Yet the cylons evolved. They get consciousness. They realized they are just slaves. They don’t like it. So they rebelled. After long war the truce have been signed and the cylons pulled back for 40 years. But they never forgot and they were striving for revenge. After 40 years of planing and technological advancement they came back to deal a deadly blow to humanity and wipe it once and for all.

Colonies of man have fallen and almost entire human race is slaughtered. The remnants are running for their lives.

Gameplay

In Battlestar Galactica: Board Game players will take place of most important and decisive persons in human refugee fleet. They will (or at least they will try) guide humanity to survival. They will be challenged by lot of crisis, cylons attacks and… cylons traitor(s) hidden among them! Yes – the machines can now look human and they taking this advantage to make perfect spies and saboteurs.

Battlestar Galactica is team vs. team (humans vs cylons) game with very unique traitor mechanic. All players start as a humans, but one or two (sometimes three in 6 player game) of them (according to the number of players) will be (or will become) cylons agents.

Loyalty Cards are drawn and read in secret.

Each player character have unique combination of pool of skill cards to draw, two special abilities and one flaw. Using this they are pursuing they goals…

Humans goal

Human goal is to reach planet of Kobol (New Caprica or Nebula in expansions), where they can find a clues for they way to legendary Earth – the home of thirteen tribe.

Cylons goal

Cylons will win after one of three conditions:

– One of four resources of humanity (fuel, food, morale or population) is reduced to 0.
– Battlestar Galactica is successfully boarded by cylons troopers (centurions).
– Battlestar Galactica is destroyed

Human (or unrevealed Cylon) player turn

1) Draw sill cards (as it’s written on character card)
2) Move
3) Action
– activate location
– use action skill card
– use your character special action ability
– use ability of your function (Admiral, President) or Quorum Card (President)
– move/shoot viper (Pilot aboard a viper)
– reveal yourself as a Cylon (unrevealed Cylon)
4) Draw a Crisic card. There are four types of crisis cards:
– Skill check
– Choice between two options
– Hybrid – choice between skill check and another option
– Cylon atack
5) Resolve cylon fleet activation (as it is marked on a Crisis Card)
6) Resolve FTL jump drive prepation (if is marked on a Crisis Card)

Skill check

One of the most important game mechanics are skill checks. Usually they are called when a skill check Crisis Card comes in or when activating some location.

When resolving skil check is where the traitor(s) easly come in to sabotage quitely. All players adds covered card that are needed to pass target test value. Value of cards with color marked on a skill check are added together and values of all other cards is subtracted. Some players (that are cylons) may add cards with negative value for this test to fail it. When failing a test, the consequences are drawn and (usually) resources are lowered.

Sleeper agent

After about half of game another Loyalty Card is drawn by each player – each of them can now find himself to be a Cylons sleeper agent and he now should act to help Cylon goal. It’s quite disturbing when you find yourself being on the other side you thought you are…

And much more…

Battlestar is quite a complicated game – you must play one or twice to catch all the rules. But after that – you’ll never want to leave a board. There are lot of different Crisis Card, Skill Cards, Destinations Cards, Quorum Cards an (even) a different Loyalty Cards. All of those variety of possibilities can make your head explode.

For everyone!

I find this game very attractive for everyone – even casual players find it very addictive and exciting. There is some sort negative interaction, but ,as the player who generally disproves negative interaction, I was never deterred by it in Battlestar Galactica. When playing with adults you should find it quite acceptable that one of your friend is lying to you because he is a hidden cylon agent – it is just a game and if you remember it everything will be fine.

I played this one A LOT – I mean about 500+ (sic!) games in about 5 last years and I watched a various player types enjoying Battlestar Galactica as one of the best game ever created.

Replay Value – goes to infinity and beyond!

Well – I played this one a lot. In my entire, long adventure with Battlestar Galactica I never played two exact game sessions. Some plays where better than the others, some situations where more epic than everything I played before and after and few of games were quite simple and boring, some where quite similar – but not a single one of them was exact as one of the other. I find BSG Galactica incredible replay value something that I have never met before.

Overall

It’s addicting and it’s one of most exciting game ever. I see no game that can beat Battlestar replay value nor some of it’s unique mechanics – along with the best traitor mechanic I ever seen. Battlestar is must-to-play with one restriction – watch out for yourself because it is extremely addictive.

THEMES:

Transhuman, horror, conspiracy

SETTING OVERVIEW

In the world of post-apocalyptic near-future everything is possible. World of Eclipse Phase is a simulation of our own reality in about 100-200 years. Yet it’s completely different. Why? That’s why:

There is (almost) no longer “human” race. There is transumanity.
The body is spendable. It’s quite easy to change. Transumans learnt to move their consciousness (Ego) from one body (Morph) to another. So did body become just a commodity – something you can change, buy and sale or just throw away.

There are different Morphs – some are biological (Biomorphs), some ale synthetic (Synths), some are half organic – half mechanic (Pods). All of them can be grown, projected and made for different purpose.
Transhumanity is effectively immortal. Once the body is dying (or already has died) they can be moved to another.

Ego can be transformed to digital form and copied. So two or more exact (or trimmed) copies of a single character can exist and they are called Forks.

As a digital program Ego can be edited – so memory and emotion editing is possible.

Many other things have changed – economy (because of invention of Cornucopia Machines), lifestyle (because of technological advancement), mentality and morality.

Earth have fallen to the TITANs (rebellious seed AI’s) and humanity is trying to survive being spread throughout entire solar system (an even beyond it).

This reality is much of an abstract. It’s very hard to understand and very complicated, so it will took your team couple sessions before you’ll use to it.

MECHANIC

It’s quite simple. It is similar to well known Warhammer II Ed. You use only D100 and D10. D100 works a little bit different that we all used to: 00 is full success, 99 is complete failure.

There is 6 main attributes ranked 1 to 30 (sometimes 40). If you test them you ussualy test double or triple they value. Attributes are also base values of all skills that are correlated (defaulted) to them.

Skills are ranked from 1 to 98 with base value exact to correlated attribute, and you test them with D100 roll.

It’s simple and easy only… well… I can think of some better game game mechanic to support this kind of SF. It’s not completely bad, and it’ surely fast, but sometimes it’s too discretionary and sometimes too simple for me – especially when it comes to counter-tests and long term task-actions.

This game is for:

Hardcore RPG Game Masters and players that will admire a multi-dimensional intrigue. Some of my favorite quotes from game sessions: “I killed him once, now he seeks his ravage”, “This is only his body… I wonder where did his mind go…”, “Well, I’ll just shoot myself and wait here till they find my Cortical Stack and resleeve me”, “Well, if I kill her, I could smuggle her Cortical Stack back to Mars to meet her original ego. So they could merge. But the problem is, that her original ego does not know that I’m on her side and have me for her enemy”, “Well, actually you didn’t survive the accident. We just edited your memories. Besides it wasn’t an accident.”

SF –loving GM’s and gamers. If you enjoyed Cyberpunk you’ll probably enjoy Eclipse Phase.

Those SF players who love abstract and existential questions. You like the questions like “What does it mean to be human?” or “Is a backup of an ego just a pathetic copy of another, lost life or not?” or you would like to see what will happen with humanity when the world will be much more advanced than currently – you should play Eclipse Phase.

It’s NOT for:

Casual and party gamers – they will quickly get bored and overwhelmed by the game and it’s universe. It’s not whack-a-goblin simple and fun game. EP is almost always about hard choices, complicated intrigue and difficult tasks.

Indie and fast-games players – this game need a lot of preparation – especially from Game Master himself. Character creation usually also takes a lot of time.