Ruling — Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Battlestar Galactica: The Board Gamebg-37111-en-1e

To play Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. Place the game board at the center of the table.[1]

2. Attach the four resource dials to the game board by pushing one side of a plastic connector through the board and the other through the dial, then pushing them together until they fit snugly.[2]

3. Set the food and fuel dials to '8,' the morale dial to '10,' and the population dial to '12'.[1]

4. Place the eight vipers and four raptors in the 'Viper and Raptor Reserves' space of the game board.[1]

5. Place the fleet token on the start space of the Jump Preparation track.[1]

6. Place all other tokens (facedown) and plastic ships adjacent to the game and include one basestar, three raiders in front of Galactica, two vipers below Galactica, and two civilian ships behind Galactica.[3][1]

7. Randomly choose a player to be the first player and give him the current player token.[1]

8. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player chooses a character of the character type(s) that is most plentiful (political leader, military leader, or pilot); support characters may be chosen at any time.[1]

9. After choosing, the player receives the corresponding character sheet, stand-up character token, and a piloting token if applicable, then places their character token on the location specified on their character sheet.[1]

10. Give the President title to the first available player from the list: Laura Roslin, Tom Zarek, or Gaius Baltar.[1]

11. Give the Admiral title to the first available player from the list: William Adama, Saul Tigh, or Helo Agathon.[1]

12. The Admiral is given two nuke tokens, and the President shuffles the Quorum deck and draws one Quorum Card.[1]

13. Set up the Loyalty deck by removing the 'You Are a Sympathizer' card, separating the remainder into 'You Are Not a Cylon' and 'You are a Cylon' piles, shuffling the 'You Are a Cylon' pile, and then dealing the appropriate number of cards based on player count (3 players: 6-card deck; 4 players: 7-card deck; 5 players: 10-card deck; 6 players: 11-card deck).[4]

14. Adjust the Loyalty deck by adding one extra 'You Are Not a Cylon' card for each 'Gaius Baltar' or 'Sharon Valerii' character playing.[4]

15. Shuffle the deck, deal one Loyalty Card facedown to each player, and if playing with four or six players, add the 'You Are a Sympathizer' card and shuffle again.[4]

16. Place the remaining Loyalty deck next to the game board.[4]

17. Shuffle the Quorum, Crisis, Super Crisis, and Destination decks and place them next to the game board.[3][1]

18. Separate Skill Cards into five decks by type, shuffle each separately, and place them facedown below the matching colored regions at the bottom of the game board.[3][1]

19. Place the Kobol Objective Card faceup next to the Destination deck.[3]

20. Deal two Skill Cards of each skill type facedown onto the 'Destiny deck' space and shuffle them.[3]

21. Each player (except the starting player) draws three Skill Cards from the cards available during their Receive Skills step.[3]

**Game Turn**

Players take turns clockwise, starting with the first player, through the following steps:

1. Receive Skills Step: The current player draws the number and types of Skill Cards listed on his character sheet.[5]

2. Movement Step: The current $player$ may move to a different location; if moving to a different ship (Galactica to Colonial One or vice versa), they must discard one Skill Card from their hand.[5]

3. Action Step: The current player chooses one action to perform, such as those listed on their location, character sheet, or Skill Cards.[5]

4. Crisis Step: The top card of the Crisis deck is drawn and resolved.[5]

5. Activate Cylon Ships Step (if necessary): If any are in play, Cylon ships are activated according to the drawn Crisis Card.[5]

6. Prepare for Jump Step (if necessary): If the Crisis Card has a 'prepare for jump' icon, the fleet token advances one space up the Jump Preparation track; if it reaches the end, the fleet jumps.[5]

**Winning and Losing**

* **Human Players Win

[1] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[2] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Plastic Ships

[3] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[4] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.6 · Creating the Loyalty Deck

[5] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.9 · Game Turn · Game Turn Detail

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 99 ms · ask 23449 ms · total 23553 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 23553 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 16, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "Many Crisis Cards and game board locations require skill checks. Skill checks represent struggles and challenges that require particular skill types to overcome. They are always represented by a difficulty number (listed first) followed by the necessary skill types (colored boxes). All skill checks ", "headingPath": "Skill Checks", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is played over a number of game turns. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, players take complete game turns in order until either the human or Cylon players have won the game. Each game turn consists of the following steps, carried out in ord", "headingPath": "Game Turn · Game Turn Detail", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.045245, "snippet": "All characters who have piloting in their skill set have the ability to personally pilot a viper. A piloted viper functions slightly differently than an unmanned viper and may not be activated using the 'Command' location. A player who wants his character to pilot a viper simply moves his character ", "headingPath": "Piloting Vipers · Moving and Actions when Piloting · Viper Destruction · Moving from a Viper", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.042817, "snippet": "Follow these steps to prepare to play Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game . Place Game Board: 1. Place the game board at the center of the table. Set the food and fuel dials to '8,' the morale dial to '10,' and the population dial to '12.' Set Up Tokens and Ships: 2. Place the eight vipers and four", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.042498, "snippet": "Before playing the game for the first time, attach the four resource dials to the game board. These dials are used to track the fleet's dwindling resources throughout each game. To attach a dial, simply push one side of a plastic connector through the board, and the other side through the dial. Then", "headingPath": "Plastic Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The object of the game for a given player depends on which team he belongs to. A player's team is determined by the Loyalty Cards he receives throughout the game (see 'Loyalty Cards' on page 18). All human players win the game if they travel at least eight units of distance (as specified by the Kobo", "headingPath": "Object of the Game · Choosing Optimal Characters", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "For the human players to win the game, they must successfully jump the fleet enough times to reach Kobol. Once the fleet has reached Kobol, the humans immediately win the game. For information on the Cylon players' objective, see 'Cylon Objective' on page 18. The fleet jumps to a new location in one", "headingPath": "Human Objective", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "· Skill Set: Each character sheet lists the skills the character has expertise in. At the start of the player's turn, he gains the number and types of Skill Cards listed in his character's skill set. When a character is allowed to draw Skill Cards of an unspecified type, they must be from within his", "headingPath": "Characters · Character Sheets · Title Cards · The President and Quorum Cards · The Admiral", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Plastic Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Creating the Loyalty Deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 9, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game Turn · Game Turn Detail", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 354 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 354 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.90485 of 3405 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 14:54

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Skill Checks	p.16	0.048139 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Game Turn · Game Turn Detail	p.9	0.047712 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Piloting Vipers · Moving and Actions when Piloting · Viper Destruction · Moving from a Viper	p.26	0.045245 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	0.042817 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Plastic Ships	p.5	0.042498 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Object of the Game · Choosing Optimal Characters	p.6	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Human Objective	p.12	0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Characters · Character Sheets · Title Cards · The President and Quorum Cards · The Admiral	p.12	0.029412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 53 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Plastic Ships	p.5	#5	0.042498 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Adjusting Diffi culty	p.28	#16	0.026014 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Creating the Loyalty Deck	p.6	#21	0.024607 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Partial Passes · Example of a Skill Check	p.17	#10	0.028219 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Object of the Game · Choosing Optimal Characters	p.6	#6	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	#36	0.0125 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one))	vector	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Game Turn · Game Turn Detail	p.9	#2	0.047712 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	#4	0.042817 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Plastic Ships	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Creating the Loyalty Deck	p.6	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Game Turn · Game Turn Detail	p.9	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 99 ms · first delta 3464 ms · total 23553 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 99 ms · ask 23449 ms · gateway work 23553 ms · total 23553 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2679
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 1024
tok/sec: 51.2 tok/sec — 1024 output tokens in 20.010 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 37s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 283), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.