Battlestar Galactica really needs a new edition in which they combine all the expansions and remove the not so great parts of them at the same time. It needs to be streamlined more.
I have a lot of great memories of BSG but it can be very clunky.
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I’ve not played either of them, but is this not what Unfathomable is supposed to be?
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This was kind of what I was hoping to get from this thread.
You wonderful people do not disappoint.
On Kyle Ferrin, I like his art (can see how some wouldn’t) but would love to have seen oath with his original grittier sketches. Looking at the latest images of arc I think it’s maybe losing some of it’s edge too.
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Eldritch Horror would be great at precisely half the play time.
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One of my most unpleasant gaming experiences was a game of Zombie Fluxx that went on for a ridiculously long time. We eventually all agreed to just engineer an ending as soon as we could.
Despite this, I am still tempted by Wonderland Fluxx (Alice fan that I am).
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I have never played Battlestar Galactica, but now that I have played Unfathomable, and I did really enjoy it, and hearing how people that loved BSG like Jay from Three Minutes Boardgames is loving Unfathomable, I’d say you should try it. I cannot compare, but certainly I would play any time it is suggested.
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As I got bought this for my birthday, youre not inspiring me!!
I do love it, though! For a game that I got pretty much when it came out in 2013, it’s still firmly in my collection.
(Try Leo Anderson with an absolute ton of Allies).
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I feel OK being negative about specific games here, since the whole point of the thread is that there are lots of really smart people who like them.
Race For the Galaxy. Tedious gameplay. Obtuse, incomprehensible, and inconsistent symbology, — sometimes card text fully interprets the symbols for you, sometimes it doesn’t, and you’re never sure which. On the other hand, the simpler and sleeker Roll for the Galaxy is fantastic, and totally should have been Quinns’s recommendation as an alternative to Wingspan instead of Race.
Dungeon Lords. Too many mechanics awkwardly crammed together into a too-long game. Vlaada loves punishing mistakes rather than rewarding good play, which means a few misplayed items early on make for a tedious waste of 2 hours as you play out the rest of the game. Galaxy Truckers is faster, funnier, and a far better expression of those ideas.
Santorini. I’m not into 2-player abstract strategy, but an acquaintance insisted Santorini was different. It wasn’t. I just didn’t get the strategies, and more importantly, the thought of playing enough to get those strategies was repellant.
I should like Xia: Legends of a Drift System (I adore open world games). But in the base game, options are limited, progression is slow, and task completion takes place over so many turns that I kept forgetting what I was doing. Everyone was spread out — you want to be spread out — such that we had no conflict or interaction at all. Apparently the expansions make it better, so I’d be willing to try it again, but for now this is way down on my list. Better open world games include Vindication, Eldritch Horror, and the glorious mess that is Western Legends.
The lockdown introduced me to digital versions of a lot of games in my collection, which… well, it doesn’t make the physical versions obsolete. But now that us meat-humans have to track everything again, it makes me think twice about bringing them out. Specifically: Scoring in Carcassonne, race/power tooltips in Small World, shuffling and reshuffling in Dominion.
BTW, I adore Oath while 100% getting why some people don’t like it. But hating the art? You’re a monster.
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There are whole classes of games I don’t care for. They don’t fit my style and there is no sense holding it against a popular game just because it is Co-Op, for example. There is one popular game that I dislike for an odd, specific reason. I like The Quacks of Quedlinburg in principle, but not in practice. Push your luck: cool. Bag building: excellent. Physically drawing the tokens out of the bag countless times: gets old really quickly. During a moment that is supposed to have tension, I’m really bored and just want it to end. I don’t have this problem with Orleans since you’re only drawing a few each round. I might like Quacks better as an app, but then it just becomes a solo game for me.
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I find the symbology in Race incredibly consistent
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Also replying to @Captbnut 
Never heard of Unfathomable, but I don’t keep up anymore with board game news to be honest. But I did some google searches and found out some interesting things.
- Apparently my copy of BSG + expansion is worth a lot
- Unfathomable is like a reprint or rather like a second edition with improvements over BSG.
I read these articles:
https://eriktwice.com/en/2021/11/26/unfathomable-vs-battlestar-galactica-which-one-is-better/
Thanks for the recommendation.
Interesting enough, when I played BSG a lot back in the day (2014), my wife was not around yet. And she would not like this game concept at all
Coop game? Yes. Being a traitor and lying? No, thanks.
So, I think I will look into my BSG board game sessions diary word document I made all these years ago and just read them again to reminisce about the great high tension moments we had
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It’s right there on the reference card, some are standard and are used across multiple cards, others are specific and explained on the card:
The symbols are weird, but the game doesn’t expect you to just instantly know them. They’re no more weird than any other game that strives to be language independent.
I like Roll, but it uses the same symbols and mechanisms plus a load more (symbols about all the stages of dice manipulation and fiddly rules about where your dice go at the end of a round, etc). How is that simpler than “everything is cards”?
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I know it’s fashionable to hate on Terraforming Mars here, but it use of icons allows you to instantly know them. The text on the cards matches the icons, so even if you never learned the icons and just read the card text, you’d know everything you needed to know.
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Yes, I may not enjoy other aspects of the gameplay but I won’t argue with that.
I was going to say one of my against popular opinion opinions was I cannot fathom the notion that Race for the Galaxy’s symbols are obtuse. I found them easy to learn, consistent, straight forward and useful. It’s said so much about Race that it’s pretty much cannon and I’ve always scratched my head as to why. And like you’ve said, all clearly noted on the player aid.
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Except the rulebook lies. Or exaggerates The text on some Special Power cards explain both the Special Power and the Standard Power… but not on every Special Power card. And since we found even the Standard Power syntax incomprehensible, we were never sure if the card text explained everything, or if we needed the dictionary, or what. We just wanted the card text to explain what the card does, even if it covered up the pretty artwork.
Roll for the Galaxy absolutely uses simpler mechanics and symbol syntax. (It has to, since it’s got the dice part layered on.) Friends who found Race for the Galaxy incomprehensible found Roll way easier to grasp. I think it’s because Race tries to have cards represent everything, while Roll splits things up between tiles and dice. Intuitively, you know any symbology that applies to dice will be restricted to dicelike things, and symbology that applies to tiles will do something else.
Plus: evaluating the table state in Roll is far easier than Race. Dice are 3D, meaning any used as produced goods or builders jump out on a player’s tableau. With Race, everything is cards, which means not only is the whole table is flat, but that as soon as anything gets nudged just a little, it starts looking like a hot mess.
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The gentlest of nudges here to perhaps phrase our positions in this thread with a lot of I terminology. I don’t think anyone is getting mean, but I’d really like it to stay that way and a brief reminder that I find something incomprehensible might help people remember you’re not arguing with them and their particular perspective.
For example: I found the symbols in Race to be utterly incomprehensible the first time I played it, but by game 2 it was as intuitive as riding a bicycle. I hate the art direction of Terraforming Mars, and I especially hate the slight-variations on those symbols, but I respect that it helps minimize confusion once you’re used to the systems (which by now I am).
On the flipside, I found the desire for precision in Android Netrunner to be extremely frustrating because a “Deck” is not an “HQ” despite them both being draw piles… or is it your hand? And the graveyard has different names depending on which side of the table you’re on… it’s weird. I utterly and totally respect the decision because it eliminates so much confusion (“Remove one card from the hand of your opponent” takes up way more space than “Remove one card from the Deck”). But it drove me sideways trying to remember all the terms.
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Weird naming of stuff is definitely annoying. Especially when you start calling it something sensible, but then you realise the people you’re teaching are going to encounter the “proper” name in some in-game text, so you do need to teach it.
A recent culprit: War of Whispers calling the cubes “banners” (because that’s what they are in the fancy version).
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Ah, yes, because one or more banners constitutes an Army, right? Or am I thinking of Kemet? Both…?
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