Innovation, Battlestar Galactica
Someone made a promise that they would bring Battlestar to game night, so of course I rushed over there after work. Before that game, I played a game of Innovation with someone whose been asking to play it for what feels like months now, so that he could show it to his wife, and she didn’t like it. The problem with Innovation is that a lot of your actions are dependent on the cards you get; get bad cards, or cards that combo with cards you don’t have, or get rocked by a demand that you didn’t see, and it just sucks. The fact that I wanted the game to end as soon as possible also didn’t help, I guess. But one player got in a great scoring position, able to grab up a lot of points when everyone else was sitting on nothing, and he eventually and inevitably won.
Then onto Battlestar, and wonder of fucking wonders, I was a Cylon again. I didn’t even touch the loyalty deck this time around, so it must be a case of me just being naturally deceitful. I am completely shocked that anyone trusts me anymore. Anyway, we started off pretty well, playing with only the personal goals and the cylon fleet (I can understand not wanting to play with the Ionian Nebula, it can be a bit of a hassle, so this was probably the best bet.) Everything was going great for the humans, with two pilots and adequate space battles when the crisis that shut down peeking at loyalties if it failed came up. The first two to put in balked and refused to assist, which should have been the first sign, as I put in a card to sabotage, as did the person to my left, and then the fifth person, who seemed willing to assist…didn’t. So we end up with only seven cards in the check, four of them bad, which points a huge sign at both of us, while telling each other that we are friends in need of human death. Unfortunately, it was a very public display, and we were both on the rack unless one of us implicated the other.
Luckily or not, I had the perfect opportunity, because I was playing the character who could execute someone once per game. After trying to make an impassioned argument that he MIGHT have tried to sabotage the check so that no one inadvertently looked at his Final Five card, causing unwanted destruction, when he says, “Oh, we aren’t playing with those.” Which was pretty stupid, because now I had no choice but to shoot him in the head, or I was getting brigged. So I pull the trigger, he is a toaster, and I’m in the clear. He moped on the Resurrection Ship for a few turns to draw super crisis cards, while I decided that it would be best if I was president, so that I could bang down food as fast as possible if I needed to. I also got a few really sweet opportunities to throw checks and be useless. Because I had to throw in at least two cards and got a large spread, I would toss in cards that equaled zero together, so it looked like I was helping, but also draining my hand. One time I threw in a 5 and 6 that would really help the check…and also the new 0 card that removed all 5s and 6s from the skill check. That was really clever and no fingers could be pointed. “I tried to help, really!”
But it turns out the Cylons didn’t need to work that hard. We were getting nowhere on the jump track for a few cycles and a lot of shitty rolls prevented us from getting rid of any basestars, and the humans couldn’t quite get focused, unable to take care of space and getting constantly flustered with skill checks. I withheld my repair cards as I watched the vipers slowly break until there was one left, and revealed to slap a centurion onto the ship, then sat back and watches as the board slowly was overwhelmed with raiders with no way to get rid of them. The game mercifully ended when population hit 0, but we could have called it five turns earlier than that.
I do realize that there’s a bit of a problem with the game; sometimes the actions of the cold unfeeling board just slaps the humans harder than they can handle, and the addition of cylons just make things worse. It’s almost as if at the beginning, you deal out the loyalty cards to see who gets to win and have a good time, and who gets to feel hopeless for three hours. It kinda sucks for the humans, but I’ve never gotten a chance to experience it because Lady Luck really likes it when I’m an asshole, so I keep getting the evil switch. It has made some of my friends not want to play the game at all once; I don’t really want a repeat.
No comments:
Post a Comment