Developments:Clearplay, Battlestar Galactica, and First Impressions

Apologies.  This isn't a review, it's actually something that resembles a blog post.

TA DAAA!!!!

I'm a great lover of co-operative games, and in my trawls through the internet I had run into mentions of Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game as a great game.  I was a little put off by it being themed off of a TV show, because most themed games have the entertainment value of SpongeBob Squarepants, meaning they will turn your brain into gray tapioca if you get too close to them. (This prejudice probably came from my video gaming days)

But it was made by Fantasy Flight Games, the guys who made Citadels, so that bumped it up a bit in my sight.

A cousin of mine roped me into watching some of the TV show with him. (He bought the 1st season dvd, so I couldn't say no.)

They're good, but really need a better logo.

First an explanation: we have an amazing device called Clearplay, a dvd player that filters/mutes the less uplifting aspects of modern media.  The show is amazing so far, we've watched the prequel miniseries and 3 episodes, about 6 hours worth.  It's certainly not for kids (12 planets are nuked into oblivion in the first hour).  There are very frequent silences during shouting matches, as well as jumping cameras (which means skipped sections), so watching it without Clearplay probably wouldn't be wise. But with Clearplay we teens can watch it with Mom and Dad. Yay!

I'm a sucker for Sci-fi.  The main gist of the show is that a bunch of humans are trying to survive on their Battlestar (sort of a space dreadnought) while being pursued by the uncountable hordes of evil robots called Cylons.  The humans fly around, hoarding their resources and collecting as many civilian ships as possible.  But here's the rub: the Cylons have made synthetic humans, programmed to infiltrate the fleet and sabotage.  No one knows if their best friend will try to blow them all into atoms or dump all their food into space, which is the real meat of the show.  The characters are really fleshed out (including one that has hallucinations/transmissions of a Cylon/robot human) and they keep the audience guessing as to what their actions mean.

Anyway, we got the board game and have played 2 games.  It's definitely the most complex game we've ever tackled as a family, and took 3 nights to complete, about 4.5 hours all told.  At the start of the game, each player gets a Loyalty Card which tells them if they are a Cylon or not, and everyone picks a character from the show.  They all have positive and negative special abilities, the negative ones adding some dynamics other games don't have.  Also, half-way through the game everyone gets another Loyalty card, so if noone got a cylon card at the beginning, you will have a cylon by the end.

Mom was the sabotaging Cylon and had no clue what she was doing until about halfway through the game, but even so, we Humans barely scraped a win.
The 2nd game we played in one night, about 3 hours.  Mom was the Cylon again (talk about rotten luck) and I thought I was dead because the cards had practically framed me into being a cylon.  But Mom's such a rotten liar we figured out it was her, but before we could throw her in the brig she revealed herself and took lead of the Cylon army and ran us out of fuel.  Which means we died.

So we probably won't be playing BSG again for a while, but I look forward to our next game!

P.S. Mom says she looks forward to the next game, too.