Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game - Tips & Strategies

First thing is first, before you start to play the game, especially with any new players, everyone should understand that all players must stare at their card for a full minute so that people can not try to cheat and notice who is sitting there and reading their card.

Cylon card ability
If you drew a cylon card at the beginning of the game, try your best to memorize what your cards affect is. Some of the effects are more powerful than others. If you have the ability to damage Galactica twice, that can be pretty huge depending on when you reveal. Other reveal abilities are less potent. With the less potent ones, it might be better to try to force a failure on a crisis card that has a devastating affect rather than worry about getting your reveal bonus. You will have to discard most of your hand when you reveal, so using a hand full of cards to blow a crisis can be crucial.

Using your characters once per game ability
If the opportunity presents itself, the most devastating reveal must start with the turn directly before yours. For instance, if you have Helo (Agathon) , if you can use your moral compass to choose a really bad option on the crisis right before your turn, do so. Then use your cylon reveal ability as your action. This double whammy can sometimes be so much to overcome that the players start to lose hope. That is almost as important as whatever resources you damage. Also, such a bold move will usually give confidence to the other cylon player (if there is one).

In a position of power
The best example of this technique is for the admiral. Try to blow the nukes in ways that seem feasible, but that are not too damaging to the cylons. If you can figure out who the other cylon is and you are the president. Start giving them titles and other benefits before you reveal.

Don’t wait, Too late
One thing is for sure, don’t reveal yourself a full jump after the sleeper phase has begun. It can be tempting to keep bluffing and skirting the line with loyalty of the other players. The damage that you can potentially do will be minimal if you wait until the last two jumps of the game.

As a Cylon player, it’s easy to think there’s only two “modes” you can be in while playing: either you try to stay hidden and subtly hurt the humans while staying secret, or you reveal, go over to the Cylon spaces on the board, and openly start blasting. But there’s a third option: openly harming the humans while staying unrevealed. Every character’s once-per-game ability is designed to be useful to both humans and Cylons, and as a human player, you will be drawing 5 cards per turn instead of 2, greatly increasing your power to mess with skill checks. If you are confident you can stay out of the brig, or could at least make the humans waste a lot of skill cards to get and keep you there, then it may be a better plan to just openly be the worst human player possible. Tank skill checks, waste quorum cards or nukes, activate FTL control to lose 3 population with no Cylon ships on the board, scout to put the most beneficial crises and destinations on the bottom of the deck, and every time the humans talk about needing to stop you, shrug and say “Who, me?”

As the humans, always jump early. Jump the moment the readiness track hits -1. No excuses.

Why? The whole game for the humans is about advancing the jump track. That’s the win condition. Everything else is a side quest or a distraction. Every time you jump early, you put another jump advancement marker towards winning. The jump marker you save by not auto-jumping will advance your next jump.

Typically it’s going to take 5 jumps to win the game, maybe one more, maybe one less. Jumping at -1 means you only need 5 jump advancement markers per jump, not 6. So it’s only going to take you 25 jump markers instead of 30 to win the game. With 60% of the crisis deck having jump advancement counters on it, that means you have to survive ~37 turns to win, not ~45 as you would with auto jumping. That’s 8 less turns of everything going wrong. Less if you make clever use of scouting missions, and Boomer or Roslin’s powers.

And what do you really risk by jumping at -1? You’ve got a 75% chance of losing 1 population, which is less than you were likely to lose to other crisis while you waited for that last jump advancement to come up. Not even 75%, because someone’s going to be holding back Strategic Planning to play on the jump. Now you’re only losing a single population half the time. On average, that’s 2 or 3 population lost over the course of the entire game, for massive savings elsewhere. And jumping is the best fleet defense, too. Since fleet attacks are the biggest danger to your population dial, you’re protecting it at least as much as you’re putting it at risk.

Always jump one early on the track. Always always always.

One of the small flaws in this game is the meta-gaming that can happen. When identity’s are revealed through silly logical faults it takes away from the game. To avoid this when loyalty cards are dealt the house rule is that all players must keep their eyes on their own card while a slow count to ten is done by one person. This prevents the group from looking up and seeing who is actually reading their loyalty card which indicates Cylon. An excellent game that just need the cooperation of its players to make it an outstanding experience.

Want to play Battlestar for two players? The rules exists (heres the link), but they do include cylon traitor mechanics. “What’s wrong with that? Cylon traitor is a core of BSG!” – you would say, and you were right. But (at least for me) it just doesn’t work well with two players! If you want to play a satisfying game with no “I’ll just throw you to the brig – just because I can.” and so on, here’s something I’m doing when playing 2 player games:

SETUP

1) Do not create Loyalty deck, you play in full cooperation.

2) Exclude those characters from pick-up pile:
Laura Roslin
Gaius Baltar
Sharon “Boomer” Valerii‎

3) Lower all resources by 2.

4) Remove all of this quorum cards from the deck:
Arrest
Encourage Mutiny
Cylon Mugshots
Accept Prophecy
Assign Arbiter*

5) Rest of the setup remain unchanged

SLEEPER AGENT PHASE

1) Draw a random Super Crisis and resolve it immediately.

2) No Loyalty Cards are being drawn.

OTHER

All other rules remain unchanged.

It’s not going to be easy game, but it will be satisfying. Enjoy!

(*sorry if those titles aren’t exact. I’m not using English version of BSG and theres is nowhere to check up the English titles of Quorum Cards)

I recently played Battlestar Galactica again and I was amazed how quickly fuel gets depleted. Crisis cards that cost fuel are very bad, because jumping also nibbles at the fuel reserves. So avoid losing fuel except when jumping or you may be in for nasty surprises. Losing the game due to fuel loss when everything else goes smoothly is no fun.

For the humans of course, because if you’re a Cylon: get them to expend that fuel! It’s a quick way to turn a certain loss into victory for the Cylons!

There is probably some argument to the best card in the base set and I hope people will post their opinions.

Executive Order gets my vote. Using your action to give 2 actions to another player at the cost of a card that has a low skill check value is a great trade off. This card is especially powerful for pilots, getting rid of centurions, or for the president if they are in the right rooms.

The one danger of Executive Order is if you do not know who the cylon is and you give them an XO at the right time, it can just about spell doom for the fleet.

Many players find it not fun to play with sympathizer in loyalty deck.
Our group has found it more fun to remove the card from 4- and 6-player game and replace it with one additional “You are not a Cylon” and “You are a Cylon” card.

This way there will be at least one Cylon (two in 6 player game) and perhaps another one. This gives more leeway for Cylon players and keeps up the tension of mistrust.

Note this does give slight benefit on side the fortune favors, but in response it enhances one of best experiences of this game.

Now this might come up as rather aggressive tactic in game where there are 2 Cylons. You play as Gaius Baltar and have the fantastic Cylon Detector ability and you’re a Cylon.

Best moment of course is to use it when you sleeper phase has been activated and you suspect somebody to be a Cylon (other than you obviously). You find out that you’re right while checking it out, instead of protecting your colleague, reveal him as Cylon.

With luck he/she can use reveal action and do some damage and doesn’t go to brig. Either way your reliability has been raised to new heights, meaning you can do a lot of damage whilst hidden and the impact will be harder when you reveal yourself. Might be that you can jam some of humans to brig in meanwhile.

So in other words: act like Gaius did in series.

The brig is rather important part of the base game, but it might frustrate some players who get to sit there for longer periods of time. It has an important strategical value when you want to keep those might-be-cylons in check, I agree.

Pegasus expansion comes with good addition of execution. However not everybody has the Pegasus expansion and might not want to get it in fear that it makes the game too complicated.

Good choice is either replacing the brig or expand on it with execution. Same essential rules apply as in the expansion, if human player the character is discarded and replaced with new and he/she pulls new loyalty card, lastly one morale is lost. In case of Cylon player he/she discards all skill cards and is moved to ressurection ship, lastly no super crisis card is drawn.

Now killing your fellows should never be an easy decision, so you should make it more harder to pass the skill test (I would suggest positive cards being political and leadership). If you decided to expand on brig function, make it easier to kill the person in brig. Activation should still happen from Admirals quarters.