So Slayed We All

I played Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game for the first time this weekend, and it's a humdinger! Any game where you might cheer at a dice roll is pretty good, in my book.

So that the rest of this entry makes sense, I'll describe it briefly: Everyone plays a character from the show (I was Helo), and you work together to jump the fleet to Kobol. If you get there, you win! But some of the players are secretly Cylons, and they'll try to screw over the human race. Almost every time, the Cylons win, because this game is HARD.

It has a lot of the tension of the first season of BSG, which I like. Right off the bat, we were ambushed with a heavy assault, and it was like, "Crap! This ain't gonna be easy." But we were playing smart and rolling high and doing pretty well... until the halfway point, when my favorite thing happened ("What was your favorite part?" asks Dora at the end of every episode, so that's stuck in my head.)

Halfway through the game, you get another chance to discover if you're a Cylon. And it sucks to be me, because that's what happened to Helo. In retrospect, that's kind of cool, but at the time, it was very disappointing.

Like, my face fell, and I felt exactly how the Final Four did when they realized they were frakkin' toasters. We'd worked so hard to get this far, and we were doing so well, and all of a sudden, the people I'd been working with, my group of friends... we weren't on the same team anymore.

It's cool that the game made me experience what it's like to be a conflicted Cylon. I didn't want them all to lose, but I had a job to do, a game to play. Even if I didn't exactly enjoy it, I couldn't just go easy on them, because that's not respectful to the players.

Oh, it sucked massive in a most delicious way. Since the other Cylons were still undercover, I was operating alone, raining down my crises on the old ship and hating myself for it. But I could see, especially when my Cylon brethren joined me (Starbuck and the Chief, leaving the crew without any pilots or their engineer) that the human race was doomed. They'd never make it to Kobol, so why prolong their misery? Why force them to play hopelessly? It was a mercy killing, really. As Riff-Raff once said, "A decision had to be made."

So slayed we all.