Unboxing BSG: Starship Battles from Ares Games

Battlestar Galactica (or BSG) was one of my favourite TV shows growing up as a kid. When it returned to the small screen in 2004 I was pretty excited - I can still remember watching the Pilot whilst my nephew fell asleep on me (he was a pretty small toddler at the time). The combination of outstanding story lines, brilliant "WW2 gun camera" style space cinematography and deep characters made it a must-see each week for me.

Fast forward some years and the FFG Board Game came along and it was equally brilliant. I've played many games, lost more than I have won, and been excited to play it each and every time. 

Now we get a chance to scratch that BSG itch again with a new spaceship game (from Ares Games) that promises a lot! Best of all I've managed to get hold of a copy thanks to some friends that went along to Essen SPIEL last month..

The box.... it is just a box.

Lifting the lid we find... some amazing ships (more on this at the end), flight dials and stands

The flight dials are pretty cool and give a little heads up on the complexity of the game

Next up we find the rule book, scenario book and ship ID tokens

A quick look at the Index. I've got some early thoughts to share (in a later post) about the rules

Tokens and templates. I wondered why the Asteroids were on a thinner cardboard stock. Presume it is because of the movement mechanics?

The bottom layer is filled with movement cards, pilot and ship cards and upgrades. Not a single square piece of paper in sight...

And now what you have really been waiting for....

The Raider:
A surprisingly impressive paint job. I expected much less detail if I am being blunt.

Apollo's Viper:
Apollo's ship looks nicely battered and weathered. I didn't even see some of the detail till I took these photos and looked at it at 400% size on my screen.

A bit blurry... sorry.

Hardball's Viper:
Hardball's ship is much cleaner, but no less detailed.

Viper Comparison:
A top down view of the two ships to see the major differences.

Thinking about the components (excluding the ships) they are nicely printed, stored in some useful vac trays, with really high quality pieces. You can see why the game has a higher RRP than X-Wing.

The ships however are where the game truly shines, and shines brightly for that matter. They are absolutely fantastic. I don't mean that in a "oh these are mass produced so how high a quality can you expect" kind of way. I mean it in a "these are painted better than I would paint them" kind of way. By comparison they are as good, or better than ANY FFG X-Wing model. I guess I should have expected this high level of quality given their Wings of War aircraft, but I was still blown away.

Now for the rules.... stay tuned. I've read them once, didn't quite "get" them and watched a couple of the GENCON videos to help.

Sails of Glory Arrives in Port

Last year the creators of Wings of Glory announced that they were going to launch a naval version, based around the Napoleonic Wars. I love naval wargaming going back to my days of playing Harpoon in the early ‘90s through to Dystopian Wars these days, so Sails of Glory sounded like it could tick all the boxes for me.

The game itself comes with a pile of tokens, four pre-painted ships, some card terrain, rulers etc and a nice full colour rulebook. I’ve read the basic rules and they seem straight forward enough, although it will no doubt take another couple of readings (taking 5-10 minutes so not a huge effort) and a couple of games before I can confirm either way. I am a little put off by the vast number of tokens from a setup and take down perspective (one of my bugbears with X-Wing) but a little organisation coupled with the bags that came with the Kickstarter version of the game will (presumably) alleviate these issues.

The most important thing to me though was the quality of the ships. Based on Ares Games track record I knew that they could make cards and tokens etc and I was confident that they could come up with a fun set of rules, but pre-painted ships without the backing and help of FFG was another thing. Well I can say that I am very impressed with their efforts and they are in fact a step ahead of what I expected. The paint jobs are not perfect and most gamers could do something better with some effort, however the key here is that just like the ships in X-Wing they are pre-painted and to a level where you do not need to do anything to them and still feel that you got a premium product at a good price.

Hopefully later this week a couple of us will manage to get in a lunch time game and we can see how it works.