Galactica - just too hard for family level with all rules?

Today we set out as a family to play BSG - as usual there is the long set up time and everyone picked their favourite characters - but quickly the game came to a stop because we found it was just too complex for us to follow properly what we were supposed to be doing. I knew what to do and tried to help the others by helping them in their decisions but I ended up playing a 5 player game by myself as the girls and Anita were making decisions they didn't understand or know why they were doing it, which was fair enough. Maya especially had a hard time with reading the cards.

This got me thinking about editing the rules slightly (or a lot!) to make the game easier to play simply because they are not used to playing games as complex as this. I thought about taking away the Admiral and Quorum cards plus having every Crisis card carry a jump prep icon - as one of the complaints was it was taking forever to initiate just one jump! Maybe also do a game end at distance 4 instead of drawing extra Cylon cards. Possibly also get the players to ignore the text on the cards and just use the colours. This may make it harder to win, but just so that the family get a good flavour of the game without being bogged down with ALL of the complexities and want to gradually introduce specific rules with each play.

I'll bring this up with them and see what they say...fingers crossed!!