This week, we got to try out the new co-operative space game, Battlestar Galactica, designed by Corey Conieczka and published by Fantasy Flight Games. The game is very much in keeping with the TV series with some of the players representing the human characters, hoping to guide the Colonial Fleet back to Earth and other players representing the Cylons in human form, who are trying to destroy humanity. One interesting twist is that, halfway through the game, a human can discover that he is actually a Cylon after all and obviously his objective then changes.

In our game, we started out under heavy attack with two base stars closing in. Mark K was the President, Laura Roslin, but Mark G decided that his character, Admiral Bill Adama, should wrest the presidency away. We eventually managed to 'jump' away and things became much quieter for a while. I suspected Mark G of being a bit too underhand and threw him in the Brig. This was not good as Mark G was then stuck there with little chance of getting out - which he didn't for the rest of the game - and this seemed a very disappointing aspect of the game with Mark having virtually nothing to do from then on.

The game was very long. After two and a half hours, we were barely past half way and we decided to stop the game early. Mark K and Nige, as Gaius Baltar, turned out to be Cylons from the start while Mark G discovered while he was stuck in the Brig that he actually was a Cylon. We played with seven players and this was not the best number - the downtime between turns was too long - five players is probably the sweet spot. Some of the ideas in the game were good and it captured the theme of the TV show pretty well. It also gave me as Saul Tighe plenty of opportunities to curse the frakkin' toasters. However, the game needed to be half the length it turned out being. Maybe playing with four or five will shave enough off the time to make it really shine and I hope we'll get the chance to try again soon.