Battlestar Galactica: Exodus Expansion
“We make our own laws, now. Our own justice…we’re not a civilization anymore. We are a gang.”
–Lee Adama
The battered remnants of humanity continue the search for a safe place to call home. While their former captors continue to pursue them, the men and women of the Colonial Fleet find themselves haunted by the past. The struggle for survival has resulted in sacrifices, compromises, and grave errors. But when put to the test, will they be able to overcome their own painful secrets and stand together?
The Exodus Expansion for Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game brings players to the next chapter of the popular Syfy series. In addition to more characters, Destination, Crisis, Super Crisis, Loyalty, Quorum, and Skill Cards, this expansion offers three exciting new options for play that may be used in any combination. Create the Battlestar Galactica experience you want!
User Reviews (7)
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Oh my, where to begin? If you hate Battlestar Galactica the board game, this won’t fix it at all! However, if you love it and want more, then this is just the fix for you. Exodus makes the game a bit more complex and longer, but it also fixes some problems – and adds new ones.
First modules it provides is the Cylon basestar board. Instead of Cylons appearing over time before FTL, they stay behind and gather. Before, they were just removed. Now they’re moved to a staging area, in which more and more Cylons gather before jumping in after you. And when they do, they are many. Pilot characters have a more important role this time around, as they also need to save civilian ships. They aren’t taken away at FTL either.
Second module is the Ionian nebula. Each player receives some tokens, and they can be three things: good, bad, death. During the game, you may seek the help of other non-player characters. They have two options, usually one good and one bad. But it’s the trauma token which decides this, and they are hidden on the character. You have to take a chance, but it’s a chance to rid yourself of bad tokens as well. At the end of the game, trauma tokens might decide if someone is executed. You might even be executed at any time in the game, if you pull out that one death token.
Of course the expansion also gives you more characters to play as, which is always a welcome sight. However, if you mix it with the Pegasus expansion, be aware! There are many modules which don’t mix well in the rules provided. Forget New Caprica. Like, totally!
So lenghtier play time, but there’s a lot more to do, and you never know what will happen next or how long you’ll live. It’s a great expansion and I play with it every time. Of course I use most modules from Pegasus, but never New Caprica.
“Exodus” is the second expansion for the Battlestar Galactica board game, roughly covering the third season of the television series. Like “Pegasus”, it adds more gameplay mechanics and options in addition to the standard batch of characters, skill and crisis cards. And like Pegasus, some of these options are implemented better and a lot more worthwhile than others. Many of these mechanics focus on making playing as a Cylon more interesting and involve more choices; unfortunately, this also makes the Cylons more powerful, when they were in a pretty good place already.
The expansion is structured as three independent modules that can be added to the base game, or game with the Pegasus expansion, as well as a small set of new skill and crisis cards. There are 4 new skill cards for each skill type in the base game: three 0-strength cards that have abilities that trigger when revealed in a skill check, and one powerful but rare 6-strength ability. The new Crisis Cards introduce a new “Consequences” mechanic, where an additional negative effect is triggered by a 0-strength card being played into a skill check regardless of whether it passes or fails, but they’re so infrequent as to be a non-issue.
The first, and best, of Exodus’s three modules is the Cylon Fleet Board option. Playing wit the CFB introduces a new Title for humans — the CAG, who manages Vipers and civilian ships — adds a new board and new location for Cylon players, and removes all Cylon Attack cards from the Crisis deck. Instead of Cylon ships only appearing when an attack card is drawn, they steadily build up on the Cylon Fleet Board. As more ships are placed on the CFB, the Pursuit Track increases, and civilian ships are placed on the board. When the Pursuit Track maxes out, the entire Cylon fleet jumps in to attack Galactica. Most importantly, when Galactica jumps away, the Cylon ships are not discarded — they return to the CFB, and will come back in full force when they max out the Pursuit track. Pilots are given more to do with this option, as they can now escort civilians off the board, and destroying Cylon ships is more urgent since jumping no longer gets rid of them. The Cylon location “Basestar Bridge” gives Cylon players new options involving the CFB, allowing them to place raiders, place civilians, advance the Pursuit track or lower the Jump Prep track, or damage Galactica directly. It’s nice to have another option, but the Basestar Bridge is often SO good, you’d be a fool not to use it. Even though the CFB option gives the humans the CAG title and the tougher and faster MarkVII Vipers, it’s still a major advantage for the Cylon side.
The second module is called “Conflicted Loyalties”, and is meant to extend the “paranoid mistrust” period of the game by making it harder for humans to find Cylons. It adds two new types of “You Are Not A Cylon” loyalty cards, Personal Goals and The Final Five. Personal Goals are cards that have a certain objective on them that is somewhat harmful to the human side, one might require the fleet to have made a one-distance jump, or ask a player to discard 20 strength worth of Skill Cards, or send himself to Sickbay or the Brig. If, by the end of the game, a human player has not taken an action to reveal and complete a Personal Goal he has, the fleet loses a resource indicated on the card — which could turn a victory into a loss. By making players make sub-optimal plays, it’s easier for Cylons to hide and subtly sabotage the humans’ goals. Final Five loyalty cards represent characters who are allied with humanity, but are actually one of the Final Five models of Cylon and desperately trying to keep that fact secret. As such, Final Five loyalty cards all have some negative effect when viewed by another player: they can damage Galactica, execute the viewer, cause all players to discard cards, etc. Now, viewing a player’s loyalty cards can be dangerous, and players have legit reasons to say “You do not want to look at my loyalty”, making it easier for Cylons to hide behind the same excuses. Unfortunately, as-written, Conflicted Loyalties are ALL downside for the human players: Goals take an action to complete, require you to make somewhat harmful plays, can result in you getting a new loyalty card and changing sides if revealed before the endgame, and the only reward you get is “not losing a resource that wouldn’t have been at risk if you hadn’t played Conflicted Loyalties to begin with”.
The third module is the “Ionian Nebula”, a new Destination like Kobol in the base game and New Caprica in the Pegasus expansion. It adds the most rules and new mechanics, and unfortunately is also the worst of the new additions. Playing with the Ionian Nebula adds trauma tokens and allies; trauma tokens are collected by players to represent their personal growth or decay over the course of the game, and allies are minor characters who appear in the fleet and can help or hinder humanity’s efforts. Trauma tokens are either benevolent (good) or antagonistic (bad), every player starts with some and gains more every time they are sent to sickbay or the brig. Allies are placed at fixed locations in the fleet, and are given a face-down trauma token; players encounter them at the end of their movement, and the ally does something good for the humans if the trauma token on it is benevolent, and bad if it’s antagonistic. Then, after encountering the ally, a new ally is drawn, and the player places one of their own trauma tokens on it facedown. (Cylons can also place trauma tokens on allies, if a location with an ally on it is damaged or destroyed.) When the fleet jumps to distance 8, a special phase called “The Trial / Boxing The Line” begins, and players reveal the trauma tokens they have — a human player with too many Antagonistic tokens, or a Cylon player with too many benevolent tokens, can end up eliminated from the game.
You can see the idea behind this mechanic: the way to get rid of trauma tokens is to place them on allies, so you can either help your TEAM by giving good tokens to the allies and keeping the bad ones, or you can help YOURSELF by placing the bad ones and keeping the good ones so you are less likely to be eliminated. And unlike the other additions, it doesn’t notably favor Cylons over humans; the allies can provide new and powerful benefits to the human team. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that well in execution. Allies tend to get stuck on locations nobody wants to go to, and new allies don’t enter play until a current one leaves the board. Two of the trauma tokens are “disaster” instead of benevolent or antagonistic, and when a human draws them they are immediately executed, which is always terrible. Cylon players can get new trauma tokens (a new Basestar damage token assigns trauma to Cylon players), but have few opportunities to get rid of them. And part of resolving The Trial / Boxing The Line is playing “Crossroads cards”, which represent pivotal events and have varying effects based on what trauma tokens are put on them — but they end up making the resolution of The Trial far too random and make all your efforts managing trauma useless, and one of them is almost guaranteed to get the Admiral executed.
Exodus is best played with the Pegasus expansion, which tended to help out the human side more than it did the Cylon. It’s certainly not perfect, but is definitely a worthwhile addition for groups familiar with the ins and outs of BSG and ready to shake things up.
Like Pegasus, the Exodus expansion for Battlestar Galactica is a mostly-favorable collection of new components and new rules for the base game. In my opinion, this expansion does even more to improve the game than Pegasus.
As with Pegasus, there are several new characters in this set, which round out all the different role types nicely and evenly. The game also introduces a more advanced form of Viper that is more powerful than the regular “nuggets”. The big step forward, though, is the addition of the CAG title. The highest ranked political leader had the Presidency with the power to play Quorum cards; the highest ranked military leader was the Admiral and could nuke the Cylons and choose the distance of the next jump. Before, pilots would just go into space as required; now the powerful CAG title allows them more control over the space areas around Galactica. They also have the ability to “escort” civilian ships off the board, safe from Cylon attack.
The big new board in the set is the Cylon fleet board, which replaces the fleet cards in the Crisis deck. Now instead of going away and reappearing randomly, the Cylon ships simply migrate to the fleet board, and at intervals jump back to Galactica in the same configuration. This board gives the Cylons many more options to wreak havoc with the Cylon fleet, but it also removes some of the chaotic swings that came with the fleet crisis cards, allowing the humans a little more room to manage their defenses.
The new objective in the set is the Ionian Nebula, and it is tied to another added play element: Allies. Allies are small tokens representing major characters scattered throughout the ship. They can aid the players in various ways and contribute to the new good/bad Trauma Tokens accumulated by the players. The flip side to this is that as the players go into the nebula, they each undergo one final assignment which can add to or subtract from their good/bad total… and if they have too much bad Trauma (or good for the Cylons), they are eliminated from the game. Not executed: ELIMINATED. For the remaining round of play.
The production values on this set mirror its two predecessors; artwork and construction are every bit as good. The improvements made to gameplay are tremendous in most respects, but just as questionable in the parts that don’t work as well. Using our game group as an example, we nearly always play with the Cylon fleet board and the CAG title for pilots; these two aspects should always be played together or not at all. Conversely, we almost never play with the Nebula objective, and so the Allies and all bits that utilize Trauma are taken out. Like New Caprica, it adds wasted time to the endgame, and in an era when gameplay has evolved beyond Last Man Standing rules for most board games, player elimination in a co-op seems needless and harsh.
Despite the fact that we still play almost exclusively with the Kobol objective, we have taken the best parts of this expansion and paired it with the best of Pegasus to make Battlestar a very rich and satisfying gameplay experience. The fact that Fantasy Flight’s design allows for this modular form of expansion is a huge plus. If you loved BSG, complete your experience by adding this to it.
Battlestar Galactica:Exodus is the second expansion for the Battlestar Galactica board game.It covers the period after New Caprica.
BGE includes new characters: one for each of the four human roles,no new cylon characters(see BG:pegasus for that matter)
There are some new strength skill cards(0-6)and also introduces new destination, quorum and crisis cards, which are included into the existing deck.Beyond these additions, there are three modular options in the expansion.
Battlestar Galactica: Exodus is an excellent and thematic expansion that brings a lot of modular options to the game.
ps easy to learn 5 stars because is an expansion,nothing gamebreaking to rules.
It is hard enough to beat the Cylon threat with the base game.This gives the Cylons IMHO greater advantages. It makes the victory sweeter but the defeats more numerous. Just a caveat that money shouldn’t be sucked out of your wallet until you’ve mastered the base game.
I love all Battlestar games, but my first impression was, that it’s to much complicated for entertaiment we can get from it. After few games I started to understand, that I was wrong, coz it only need a little patient.
Exodus – Imo, better than Pegasus, although makes game more difficult for human players. Provide more emotions, when we can see all this cylon ships catching us ;)And finally, pilots show their advantages (my favourite character is Kara Starbuck, who (rule!! :D) many, many times proved necessery ;>) Next part – allies and trauma tokens. Possibility to character’s death! I’ll always remember that epic moments, provided f.ex. by “splash” in Ambu, what killed the cylon, or good/bad trauma placed on allie, who’s strategy point in that moment. Generally, game become much more differential and addictive. Only one problem can be to learn all new rules, but I think it is worth.
I love love love this expansion, the only thing I feel its missing is Billy and Doc Cottle. It’s like 3 mini expansions in one, the price seemed daunting and it sadly sat in my game bag forever untouched, but after a few of my BSG fans in the group made me pull it out I swore it would never gather dust again! The Cylon board is amazing and adds a little more to being a Cylon player and its makes it less worth it to jump. ( I mean its still worth it but dang, those ships keep coming back, need more fighters!) A great expansion to a great game.