Humanity Wins, Barely

A review of the new Battlestar Galactica Board Game by Gem

Recently, five 13^th Colonists got together for our inagural Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game experience. When I originally wrote this review it got a little novel-esque, so I’ve done my best to chop it down a bit. Hopefully, you’ll still understand the gist of the game without begging the Gods to spare you.

The objective of the game depends on whether or not you’re a human or a cylon (a fact that can change mid-way through the game). At the beginning of the game, each player is secretly assigned a team, so unlike many board games, you win as a team, not individually.  As a human, there is one way to win: travel eight units of distance and jump to Kobol. As a cylon, the goal is to prevent the humans from reaching their objective. This can be achieved by running the fleet out of essential resources  (fuel, morale, population, food), or invading the Galactica with centurion boarding parties, and last but not least, by destroying the Galactica altogether.

Battlestar Switcheroo

Being sneaky, eh? While a group of 13th Colonists were out this past weekend scouting around for shooting locations in one of the parks on Vancouver’s North Shore mountains, we discovered something interesting. One of the most famous features of the North Shore mountains are “The Lions” named because when they are covered in snow, they look like two reclining lions. Our beautiful Lions Gate Bridge is named after this natural formation, as is our local CFL football team, the BC Lions.

In the world of Battlestar Galactica, it appears on Kobol and is seen as below:

In actual fact, they’ve pulled a switch on us, reversing the shot from how it appears in nature, as seen from this picture we took from the north end of Capilano Park, near the Cleveland Dam.

Ha!  Very clever, but we’re on to you…and as a result of our most recent foray into the woods, we’ve also closed in a couple more shooting locations, so stay tuned and we’ll have more pics for you in the coming weeks.

Can’t See the Planet for All the Trees

by spacepug

A brave group of 13^th Colonists headed Into the Woods this past weekend, in our continuing search for Battlestar Galactica shooting locations. We’d been tipped off by someone on the show that Kobol scenes in Season Two were shot in Capilano Park and Lynn Valley on the North Shore. We’ve covered most of the trails in Capilano and a fair portion of Lynn Valley. Four scouting missions so far, two to each park, and we have yet to positively identify a single shot. We know we’re in the right areas. We suspect we’ve come very close to locations doubling as Caprica and New Caprica as well. There are just so damn many trees. Plus, more than two years have passed since shooting and “the big wind storm” of December 2006 could have changed the landscape quite a bit since then.

We even utilized the most up to date technical tools to help us. I thoroughly recommend the iTouch for wandering through a forest and trying to match screen shots to actual trees. Unlike my iPod, the larger display screen is big enough that there is no risk of tripping over a random tree root while trying to get the right perspective. My foot is healing nicely, now, thank you. Doubt if that use for the iPod & iTouch was foreseen by the genuises at Apple, but they would be proud.

Except for coming up with a new technobabble phrase, “good fern density,” we came up empty. And the kicker is the local newspaper published a story the very next day indicating the BSG crew had been shooting on the North Shore woods all of the previous week, just in a different river valley. That will likely be our next destination, but it is obvious we could spend all summer looking for trees and still never be sure we’d found the correct sites.

So, blog readers, we’re turning it over to you. Do you know where this swing set from “Flesh & Bone” is? Note the red posts and the teeter-totter (see-saw, in some countries) in the background? Should be easy to find, right?

Ready for the onslaught?

One of the best things about being the organizer of a fan club is that you get to meet other fans. Seeing as the club I run is a Battlestar Galactica fan club in Vancouver, where the show is made, I get to meet virtually, or in person, with BSG fans from all over the world.

The question I get asked most often is “If I come to Vancouver, can I see the Galactica Hangar Deck or CIC?” No. Unless you’ve got way better connections than I do.

Battlestar Galactica interiors are shot at Vancouver Film Studios. Unlike say Universal Studios or Disney in California, the film studios up here are not open to the public. Film crews go quietly about their business, generally not disturbed by the friendly Canadians. We like it that way. As I recently told a reporter who asked, rather than pestering the film crew, we would much rather they get on with the business of making the show we want to watch. (Of course, they’re not doing that right now, but that’s another blog post…)

One of the BSG fans from afar that we got a chance to meet recently while she was vacationing in Vancouver is millari. You’ll be hearing from her soon in this space. She can tell you about what an odd bunch we 13th Colonists are, and I must congratulate her on having the courage to meet up with us for coffee while she was in town!

So why the title of this post? millari’s recent visit as a tourist to Caprica/New Caprica/Kobol/Vancouver is going to be part of an article about The 13th Colony to appear soon at Wired.com

I have a feeling Caprica is about to become a major geek tourist destination. That’s OK. The locals are friendly.

Picnic on Kobol, anyone?

We’re at it again. The 13th Colony is planning the second of it’s Location Scouting Missions, to check out another cluster of locations used in the first Season of Battlestar Galactica. Our next stop? The campus of the University of British Columbia, which has doubled as the Rising Star in “Colonial Day” and Kobol in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Pt 2″. The picture above is of the Koerner Library at UBC, which is where Starbuck found a certain valuable arrow. We’re planning on a walking tour of the campus, followed by a picnic on the beach, on July 21st.

Also coming up later in the summer is a tour of the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver. The Orpheum was built in 1927 as a vaudeville theatre and has had a rich and varied history since then. It’s most recent claim to fame (and the one WE are so interested in) is that it has been featured prominently in the dreams of Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar. The stage at the Orpheum is where the sequence of D’Anna finally seeing the faces of the Final Five Cylons was shot. This summer, the theatre is offering 90 minute public tours for $10, the proceeds of which go to the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame. Tours start at 11am on July 7th and 14th, and August 11th and 18th. Click here for more details.