My biggest caveat about PEGASUS isn’t related to its design per se, it’s more that it is not an appropriate expansion for those new to the game. I think that anyone who comes into BSG with PEGASUS appended is not going to get the most out of it and may actually have a lesser experience because of the added complexities in player interaction, long term choices, and mechanics. I’ve always held that the most damaging thing that can happen in a BSG game is an incompetent Cylon player—meaning that a player who is unaware of how to “game” the system is going to wind up screwing themselves and revealing their loyalty by stupid actions, and the addition of subtler, more insidious means of sabotage and sowing dissent are going to be lost even more on amateur PEGASUS players. I’m the kind of person that usually wants to play any game with all available expansions from the get-go, but this is a case where new players are not going to have a full experience with the additions until they’ve had a few games of the base game under their belts.
And that’s another issue. Frankly, I could play BSG without PEGASUS for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy. There’s only a handful of games that I think are perfect or near-perfect and BSG is one of them. I am inclined to argue the old “don’t mess with greatness” chestnut and deliver a soapbox sermon that they shouldn’t have messed around with something that didn’t need any messing around. And there are points at which I feel that some elements—such as the relatively unbalanced Cylon Leader agenda cards—aren’t as tightly refined as the base game. But when the bottom line is thematic, interactive fun, things like that don’t matter to me so much. The expansion offers more BSG both in terms of source material and game, and for that alone I think it is pretty awesome.
To that end, the key things I liked about BSG in the first place: the phenomenal level of conceptual theme and subtext along with the emphasis on play and interaction over mechanics and structure, are definitely maintained in PEGASUS. The expansion succeeds in providing more possibilities without diminishing the integrity and achievement of its parent game. I can’t imagine our future games without it and I’m looking forward to seeing how the events of the show’s fourth season transpire in an assumed future expansion.
Volume One of this series of books does a grand job of introducing gaming to the masses, but offers a lot of familar information for gamers already in the know.
