This week, Nige wanted to try out the Pegasus Expansion to Battlestar Galactica, although we had doubts as to whether it would quite get finished. We did just about manage it but we only wrapped it up at 11.20 and it could easily have gone on another 20 minutes, if I'd chosen to be a bit more patient.

The expansion adds another phase to the game where, on arriving at New Caprica, Galactica beggars off for a bit and the humans have to survive until it returns and the civilian ships can then leave the planet, allowing the humans to jump to safety. There's also a new type of character, a Cylon leader, that players can choose to be but these characters and any Cylon sympathisers have a supplementary mission, which may or may not be in support of their native race - so Cylons leaders may be wanting the humans to survive. However, the game is not that much different from the original and I'm not sure it improves on the original. I guess, if you play BSG a lot, this adds some variety but the base game is just a bit cleaner design and, for me, is the better game.

Unfortunately, we got a bit mixed up with the loyalty rules and so some of the tension about revealing as a Cylon was lost. This was because, as soon as Nige declared himself as a Cylon sympathiser, Guy was obviously a Cylon and there was no point in him not revealing himself. However, we missed the rule that you shouldn't have the sympathiser card in play if we were using a Cylon leader, and Mark G had been playing as a frakkin' toaster. That said, as it turned out, Mark G and Nige both had human win objectives, although Nige's supplementary objective was that all the resource dials had to be at 3 or below, so he spent a couple of turns reducing our food and morale so that he had a chance of winning. However, once Galactica returned, the mother of all Cylon battle fleets turned up and most of our civilian ships were still on the planet. As admiral, I took the decision to sacrifice three civilian ships and jump without them, but these losse reduced our population to zero so we lost and Guy was able to claim the victory. Had I held off a bit, we may have lasted a bit longer but we discovered that Guy had only to destroy one of the ships in space also to kill off our population that I think the Cylon victory was inevitable.