Battlestar Galactica the Board Game

When I first heard about the Battlestar Galactica board game I dismissed it as a shameless cash-in; might as well buy a Battlestar themed happy meal at McDonald’s (or, I suppose, a Starbuck themed coffee at Starbucks).  I’m a big fan of the show.  It was fresh and gutsy and the writing and acting were good enough that the characters managed to transcend the stereotypes that they undeniably were.  The plot was slow-moving and complex, with long plot arcs.  Unlike in Star Trek, unexpected things could and did actually happen, things that irreversibly altered the universe.  There was no requirement for things to return to the status quo at the end of the episode, and so there was real uncertainty in the decisions the crew had to face.  Despite its flaws I believe it stands as one of the truly great sci fi TV shows.

How could a board game capture all that?  A board game must necessarily reduce its subject matter to a few simple principles.  When they are representational, board games deal in stereotypes and stock characters.  The representations must be easily understood.  With the exception of RPGs and the like, games do not generally allow for elaborate background stories or sophisticated character development.  So the best I was hoping for was something akin to a Battlestar themed chess set, or a quake mod where you get to fight cylons: a skin thrown over an otherwise unrelated set of game mechanics.

But the Battlestar board game is so much more that that.  It is unbelievably successful at evoking the spirit of the series through the gameplay itself.  The events of the show do not just give flavour to the game, they form the game mechanics.  For example, the game is cooperative, with each player having to make decisions about how best to protect Galactica from the cylon onslaught, but there is a mechanic similar to that of mafia (aka vampire, aka werewolf) that is central to the game. Some players are secretly cylons and try to work against the rest of the crew without revealing their identities.  Others players are cylons but don’t know it themselves until half way through the game.  This is a simple mechanic, and certainly not an original one, but it succeeds in evoking the feeling of suspicion and paranoia that were so powerful in the show.  One could be a cylon oneself without knowing it.  The “crisis cards” that dictate the major events of the game sometimes necessitate a mad scramble into the vipers to shoot down approaching raiders, but during those times when the crises aren’t that bad, when the characters are basically just hanging out, the game is equally intense.  The lack of obvious things to do has a way of provoking accusations.  Each player’s decisions are analyzed in minute detail for any telltale sign that they might secretly be working against the rest of the crew.

Rather than being a skin, the Battlestar game is more like a translation or an adaptation.

Some of the mechanics seem a little forced or throwaway (for example, Helo starts the game down on a planet, and doesn’t make it back to Galactica until turn two), but the vast majority of them make sense from the perspective of the narrative world of Battlestar and work well with the game mechanics.  They add variety to the gameplay even as they provide satisfaction and recognition to fans of the show.

Rather than being a skin, the Battlestar game is more like a translation or an adaptation.  But here’s the thing: it’s not an adaptation of the narrative of the show, it’s an adaptation of what the narrative does.  The board game adapts the waxing and waning tensions of the show, the feelings of paranoia and suspicion, the stress and desperation and the sudden, unexpected bursts of hope.  It recreates all these things through gameplay instead of through narrative.

Of course we already knew that adaptation is not restricted to narrative works; just look at the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (adapted from a fairground ride) or the Lego Star Wars video games.  Play (with lego or board games) is not the same as narrative, and narrative is not the same as a rollercoaster, but they all do something similar; they deal in the creation and resolution of tension.  The board game could never have replicated the show’s narrative, but the designers of the game realized that the essence of the show lay in the ebb and flow of tension, the accumulation of crises upon crises, the frantic search for solutions—all of that stuff a board game can replicate very well indeed.