And then there are offices in the game. Through election, force, or politicking you can find your character in the admiral’s seat, getting to choose between two location cards drawn every time the ship jumps- of course, if you’re the Cylon, you pick the bad one. The Admiral also gets to control the ship’s two nuclear warheads. Or you can take Laura Roslin’s title and become president, granting you access to Quorum cards which can have a huge impact on resources and other critical functions- or you can pull a Dubya and play dumb while leading the human race to its extinction.

Throughout the game there are all kinds of ways that the Cylon players can do bad things- but none are more effective than when the Cylons willfully reveal themselves. They are presumably thrown out of an airlock and wake up on the Resurrection Ship and are given a random “Super Crisis” card- something that in general is really tough for the humans to overcome.

So obviously, a big part of the game is sniffing out who the Cylon or Cylons are and preventing them from accomplishing their mission (destroying six sections of the Galactica or running one of four resource dials down to zero). But along the way, players have to deal with the effects of various crises, repairing damaged sections of the ship, participating in elections, throwing suspicious characters into the brig, and other various minor tasks and choices that could literally spell success or failure.

Through it all, I really felt like Mr. Koniesczka “gets” the show and understands what its strengths are. The interpersonal relationships are there, the politics are there, and the social drama is there. It feels like a complete BATTLESTAR GALACTICA experience and even with all the mechanics and rules it feels that every element is mapped directly to a story point, a character trait, or a thematic resonance. I haven’t played a game where I felt the mechanics were so holistically and organically tied to the game’s theme and narrative setting since DUNE.

But wait, there’s more. This being a space opera game, it would be incomplete without a suite of rules for space combat. And somehow, unbelievably, the game manages to incorporate a fairly comprehensive yet easy-to-manage out-of-ship experience into the on-ship game.

Viper pilots Starbuck, Lee Adama, and Boomer can hop into a Viper and hot dog around the ship, taking down the Cylon Raiders and Basestars that threaten Galactica while hunting the defenseless civilian ships in the convoy. Heavy Raiders appear and if they attack Galactica they dislodge a Centurion boarding party represented by a track- if it fills up, it’s metal curtains for the hapless humans. It’s all done with simple dice combat and a basic “AI” that triages how the Cylon ships move when they are called to do so by crisis cards. What’s more, some crisis cards act almost as scenario setups, indicating what Cylon ships show up to harass Galactica and provide special rules for the encounter. Even Raptors, the chubby reconnaissance ships used by the humans, come into play as useful scouts that can help Galactica steer clear of poor jump locations that can cause dangerous resource losses.

For the humans, the imperative is jumping and staying as far ahead of the Cylons as possible- as in the show, they’re on the run from superior forces so a lot of the game’s tension comes from getting from jump point to jump point. But it takes a while for the FTL drives to spin up, so what happens is that at the bottom of some crisis cards there is an icon that indicates that the jump track gets advanced until it reaches an automatic jump. It’s possible for a player in the FTL control to order a jump prematurely, which can incur population loss. Late in the game, those ill-prepared jumps get awfully tempting, even when the population dial is in the red. At each jump, the current Admiral looks at two cards and picks where everybody is going to go. Each card has a relative distance, and when the destination cards total eight, the next jump is to Kobol and to a human victory.

What emerges out of all this- a game that is obviously draws inspiration from other cooperative games like the previously mentioned SHADOWS OVER CAMELOT- is something that I think is quite special, a unique game that offers a new way to interact and play with our friends, families, and fellow BSG fans. While playing the game, I’ve been continually amazed at how accurately it replicates the BSG atmosphere and story in a relatively manageable set of rules. It seems like, in every game, that so much is going on and so many things are happening but because Mr. Koniecszka has orchestrated them all so masterfully with sensible, theme-driven rules and systems, it never feels gamey, empty, or too rigidly structured. Warily watching Galactica’s resource dials dwindle over the course of a game, sweating as the Cylon player when the humans are onto you, facing a personal decision that could literally cost the game, or praying for a jump to get out of a sticky space engagement are among the tense and dramatic delights that will keep players coming back for more, and in the end the fact that the game is brilliantly designed along mechanical terms is almost a footnote to what the game is actually about and how it engages the player.