2 Cylons and 3 Cylon Fleet deployments later

We played a 5 player game of Battlestar Galactica again last night.

Admiral Adama (Me, there is just something about the "Old man" that makes him fun to play - beside the obvious bonus of being Admiral of the fleet)

Tom Zarek (president)
Gaius Baltar
Lee "Apollo" Adama
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace

Thins started out OK for the fleet, some minor crisis cards that didn't do much impact on our resources. However we lost lots of time by drawing Crisis Cards without any "Jump preparation" symbols making the fleet pretty much stationary. Gaius Baltar acted weird very early on, in an open bidding, leading us to throwing him in the brig. The problem was that the Gaius Baltar player was new to the game, on the other hand he was certain of what he was doing and insisted on playing a bad card in our open bidding to overcome the crisis. Everyone else was weirded out and as a precaution we locked him up while remaining confused about his motives. Was he a Cylon or just screwing around?

I myself caused some unintended confusion and suspicion at the start of the game by bidding with the wrong type of cards making everyone to believe that a Cylon had sabotaged the bidding when it was just me screwing up - and not being able to tell about it lol!

Soon after Baltar had been thrown in the brig "Apollo" joined him as well - much nagging and complaining from the "Apollo" player. I myself was not certain of any of those two in the brig being Cylons. The weird play from Baltar, and complaining from Apollo could be interpreted any way. What followed was relative peace and good progress without any apparent sabotage. If someone had become a Cylon during the first Loyalty phase then it surely must have been someone in the brig.

As the Admiral I got to pick the destination cards, and I think we were lucky enough to draw the jump distance of “3” during our first draw. Travel 3, lose 3 fuel. An even trade, but I myself think it is much more important to go far very early on in the game before your resources start to dwindle due to crisis cards. So in our first two jump we had traveled the distance of 5. I’m pretty certain that the “Starbuck” player was dealt a “You are a Cylon” card during this phase because he had played straight up to this point. I got the Cylon sympathizer card but it had no effect since we were down to red on one resource already.

Starbuck revealed herself as a Cylon after a few turns and started bothering us with sporadic Cylon abilities. Things started to go downhill from there. Cylon Fleets started to deploy, at one time we had 4 heavy raiders at our door carrying boarding parties and our armory location was destroyed meaning we would not be able to handle any boarding parties at all!

We had a lucky break with me commanding unmanned Vyper fighters and managing to shoot down 3 of the 4 heavy raiders. The following turn we freed Apollo as well – much to this players joy making at least me a bit cautious and slightly more uncertain if that was the right thing to do. But we could not handle the Cylon BS with only 2 players operating the fleet and having 2 players in the brig.
We halfheartedly released the Baltar character as well, he had acted very weird throughout the game so far (in true Baltar fashion), helping us out in every single bidding from the brig. I was quite certain that he could be the 2nd Cylon – and since I had become the President as well due to a crisis card I had gotten hold of a presidential Quorum card allowing me to take a look at 1 Loyalty card of my choice. My intention was to use this card in my next turn to check out Baltar (now in possession of 3 Loyalty cards!).

That plan didn’t play out as planned as Baltar revealed himself as a Cylon just before I could do this. At least we were certain who the Cylons were now. Things didn’t look that bad yet, the odds were about 50-50 for a Human victory. However soon the Cylon Fleet deployments started appear in successive order (as they always seem to do even with a well shuffled deck of destiny cards). No less than 3 Cylon Deployments in about 5 turns time. I managed to destroy 2 base stars with the 2 nuclear weapon tokens in my possession earlier in the game. So without powerful weapons we were up to our knees in shit. 2 base stars firing ordnance weapons, and enemy fighters and transports wearing our fighter capacity down. The game ended when we were about to make a risky jump where we could lose 3 Population (all the population we had left). However since enemy fighters closed in on or unprotected civilian fleet tokens there was not much choice. In one last desperate attempt we played a card which tweaked the die roll giving us a +2 bonus, giving us a chance of successfully jumping without losing any civilian ships with 5+ on a D8 die roll. We rolled a 1…. Last civilian ships were left behind and we went down to 0 on Population.

However, when we turned the “Destination cards” to see how it would have ended if we had managed to jump – It turned out we would have ran out of fuel and become unable to make that final jump to victory!

A very exciting game of Battlestar Galactica, started out with a lull and ended with epic space combat and the extinction of mankind. Just the way we like it :-D