"Gaming Battlestar Galactica" Topic

Hello all,

I'm sure that there are many opinions as to which game system is the best one to game science fictional spaceship battles in the Battlestar Galactica universe, so I'm interested in what your opinion is. What system do you use? (I understand Colonial Battlefleet and Full Thrust have been used; have any others?) Why do you use it? Have you tried more than one system? Are there any game systems that you think are *not* suitable for gaming BSG?

As a follow-on question, what miniatures do you use from which manufacturers to game BSG?

As a second follow-on question, has there been any attempt at creating an "official" BSG sci fi spaceship combat game?

If I've created a redundant topic, please just point me in the direction of the appropriate original.

Thanks,

"what miniatures do you use from which manufacturers to game BSG?"

My personal preferences are:
Ravenstar & Iron Wind Metals for Colonial & Cylon capital ships.
Studio Bergstrom for Colonial & Cylon fighters.
Colonial Battlefleet for rules.
I've heard good things about Fox miniatures but I don't have a program that reads whatever format (Powerpoint maybe?) his catalog is in.

I believe that Colonial Battlefleet was extracted from what were originally a very specifically BSG rules set.
It's still the closest match for BSG rules.

Haven't found interesting enough to pick up, but I believe you need Man vs. Machine, as well.

However, he was asking about other options. I'm sure I've seen Starmada fleets designed.

Doug

The Fox miniatures are superb, and are the IWM ship sculpts.

They make great looking fighters too.

Bergstrom makes some nice capital ships as well, though a bit smaller. They make two sizes of fighters, e.g. 1" scale, and smaller fleet scale ones. Those are quite nice too.

Full Thrust mods for me, for the rules, since they work pretty well, and since they're free, are priced right.

Come join the BSG Gaming in Miniature Yahoo Group:

link

We have downloadable BSG rules, model & game pics, and an active discussion of the various rules that are available and used for BSG gaming.

David G.
gamerarchitect.blogspot.com

Pretty much what moonbeast and Mako11 said. :)

I play both Colonial Battlefleet M vs M and Full Thrust. Both rules have their positive points. Check out the FT Yahoo group and FB page for discussions and AARs. Colonial Battlefleet has a forum here:

link

My ships are from Jim Fox and Ravenstar.

Where do you live? The best way to start is play some games with experienced gamers.

Ditto on what everyone here has said. We use FT mainly because thats the system everyone is using for their B5, star trek, star wars, etc. Fun to put diff genra on the table. Ive played colonial battle fleet at a game convention and its very good.

I wrote up BSG rules supplement for the original firestorm armada awhile back. Thos files are still on the Black Ocean website.

Let us know what you game system you end up goin with and what your ezpiriences with are.

Of course, if you are a megolomaniac like some of us, you'll be skipping the small stuff, and wanting large, die-cast fighters, or plastic kits of them, as well as the same for your capital ships too.

Note, you can easily use the plastic and resin capital ships with the smaller fighters (fleet scale, or 1" ones), and they look great together too.

I especially like the 18" long, or so plastic capital ships and the fleetscale fighter matchups.

"I've heard good things about Fox miniatures but I don't have a program that reads whatever format (Powerpoint maybe?) his catalog is in."

File viewers are available from Microsoft and are free.

You can also look up Open Office, it is a free program and reads all the MS Office format files and other formats too. I stopped using MS Office years ago because of this and the fact I no longer get free copies of Microsoft (well almost free since I got them at very reduced rates as a student at the University of Texas and had work computers for home use before that)

Nice to see that others liking BSG. Still remember the first series when it hit television. It was cool because I got to stay up later on the night it was on television. We watched every episode for almost the entire series run I think. Even though they used stock footage over and over, it was pretty cutting edge television for the time. It sure got a little silly when they finally found Earth though!

Have to admit to not watching the newer series much. I guess I couldn't get over Starbuck being female not matter how good looking she is :-) I kinda of liked the happy go luck womanizing gambler of the first series. Probably cause it reminded me of Maverick, another show I loved :-)

Thanks for the links and the Yahoo Group guys! Have been toying with the idea of getting back into Spaceship combat but prefer a more universal set so that we can use whatever ships we have. Some of my first miniatures were a big boxed set of spaceships. Didn't get past spray painting them white though. I wonder if they are still up in my Dad's attic? My Dad did do the horrible thing of getting rid of my childhood GI Joe and other action figures (Johnny West, Sinbad, etc.) in a move when I was in college, who knows if anything else survived? :-(

I use Starmada and Starmada Fleet Ops. Minis by Studio Bergstrom, Ravenstar, and Ninja Magic:

This is the Starmada Fleet Ops game I ran in November at Millennium Con:

Ships posted for Starmada of any variety? I know I said I was sure I'd seen 'em, but not finding any at the mo.

As for Colonial Battlefleet, there's still a folder on the Yahoo! group, but it's been gutted of files.

I thought I had a copy for playtest, but not finding same.

Doug

Here are my Cylons!

Good man!

Doug

My Capital ships are from Fox as well as my fighters. My gamming buddy ordered his fighters from Studio Berstrom. I prefer his fighters over mine because they are a little smaller.

I have thought about getting some fightes from Buck Rogers for another human fleet. The ones I have seen are more in scale with fox's fighters.

We use Colonial Battlefleet f Man vs Machine.

There use to be a comparison shot of all of the BSG fighter miniature makers at star-ranger.com/forum/, but I can't seem to find it.

I am using 5150 Fighter Command from THW for the viper vs raider dogfights. And yes, I really do use the hot wheels diecast BSG models they made. They look spiffy! Since this makes the game almost 15mm, I don't do the big capital battles.

You might want to take a quick look at our modified FT for Star Wars (it is simplified for conventions).

We modified the capital ship and fighter interaction to make it more like a WWII carrier battle (which is very fitting to Battlestar Galactica style battles).

What I like about FT is the ability to customize it. Also, would second Ravenstar and Bergstrom for ships!

A battle report:
PDF link

PDF of Modifications:
PDF link

We have run this at many conventions with a good response… if I was starting from scratch I would take the latest version of FT with hex based movement and firing arcs, and modify it to get something that felt like the Battle of Midway in Space :)

If you guys like Battlestar Galactica themed miniatures games you might like a board game I've been working on. You can check it out here:

link

The rules are finalized but the scenarios are still being play tested for balance.

The rules talk about using tokens to represent the ships and fighters, but I'm actually using 3" miniatures for the Galactica, Pegasus and Cylon basestars and 1" miniatures for the Raiders, Raptors and Vipers.

I had a 3'x5' vinyl space map game board printed by a banner company and had the cards printed by a playing card manufacturer.

If there's interest I can post some pictures sometime next week.

Yea def interested! Looks good

If there's interest

We live in an age of a glorious smorgasbord of space ship games, but if you don't think we're constantly moaning 'more more'… ;->=

Doug

Great! I'll post some pics next week when I get home from my business trip.

Warlock, that is an impressive armada that you have assembled there. Where did you get your map board?

In reference to the original questions: Years ago I used to play a lot of Starfleet Battles. The system seemed cumbersome to me and the gameplay was very slow. The rules are very complex. In my gaming group, the game sessions inevitably slowed to a crawl while we thumbed through several volumes of rules because we couldn't remember something or there was a disagreement about rules interactions. I also had some negative experiences with ADB and decided I wouldn't give them any more of my money. I quit playing SFB years ago and haven't looked back. However, you could convert SFB to BSG without too much trouble.

The miniatures I use are from FASA Hangar 18 and miniatures from the Fantasy Flight Games BSG board game.

Daricles, that mat is from Corsec Engineering and has 3" hexes. It is printed on heavy fabric and does not wrinkle or crease. Best Space Mat I have ever seen.

For those that have been asking for size comparisons and what not- here ya go with manufactures listed. The pictures didn't turn out as well as I had hoped- I think the new mat is messing up the camera. Unfortunately many of these models are out of production or soon will be. Most can still be found on Ebay tho.
To get an idea of scale, the Pegasus in the middle is 9", Galactica just under 6".
Any and all comments or questions welcome.

Wow – Great Models!!

i am suprosed that the people who make x wing the game have not done the same for fighter combat for Galactica with vipers and cylons that would be cool for many of us who like the fighter combat

Thank you for sharing

Thanks for the compliments!

I agree with the idea of a BSG spin off for x-wing. I think there are some fan made ideas out there but i havnt tried any of them yet.

Here are some pictures of my Battlestars Vs. Basestars board game. I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures. I didn't have a lot of time so I had to take them with an iPhone in poor lighting conditions.

Do you have files of the tokens and cards to share?

Unless, of course, I just missed them on your original link.

Doug

Doug,

I'll work on posting the files for the cards and tokens to my website. They aren't on there yet. I'm also working on a Vassal version of the game, but that will take a while since I'm just getting started with Vassal.

Looks great to me. have you considered a kickstarter to get it in production?

I'd love to actually publish it, but I doubt I could ever secure licensing.

I updated the Battlestars Vs. Basestars website with the card faces and the card counts.

I ordered the custom card decks from make-a-deck.com and was very pleased with the results. Hopefully tomorrow evening I'll have time to post the save files to use with their card builder program.

You da' man!

Going to take a bit to get this on the table, but this is a huge help. Will definitely show the lads at the store.

Hope this remains interesting to Wolfpack Six; deepest apologies if it's thread-jacking.

Doug

I'm going to open a new thread to avoid hijacking Wolfpack Six's thread.

Hey TheBeast and everyone,

Thanks for all the great information and ideas! All of this is interesting to me. I just cycled back around to this thread and it looks like there are a lot of folks interested in gaming BSG… and a lot of ideas on how to do that.