This variant addresses some problems I see with the game balance and shortens the game length somewhat. It is not yet finished, as I don't know what to place the initial resources at. Comments are encouraged!


1) Fix to game length and large difference in balance caused by Cylons either getting Cylon loyalty cards early or late:

Each player is given a white and a black stone when dealt initial loyalty cards. Players then each put one stone into a bag. If they are Cylon the put in a black stone, if human a white stone. Other stones are secretly returned to a box, no one sees any of these stones or the ones in the bag.

To win the game, the humans must safely travel a distance of 9 minus the number of black stones in the bag. Once a distance of 7+ is reached, the bag is revealed. At this point, players now know the necessary distance traveled. Thus, for each Cylon who is dealt their Cylon loyalty card at game start, the game gets easier for the humans to compensate, by 1 distance required.

This should also be slightly shorter than the normal rules.

Additionally, the sleeper agent phase occurs at a distance of 3, not 4. This is because it should occur about 40% of the way through the game. Also, this has the added benefit that a ‘3’ planet for the initial jump isn’t massively better than the others (as it sets you up to have 5-6 distance before more Cylons come out). If you want to have extra distance before extra Cylons come out, you need to start out with a less than optimal planet!



2) Fix to Cylon’s power when revealed. I believe that a revealed Cylon should be less powerful than an unrevealed one (not more). This is far more interesting as it prevents the (currently logical?) Cylon strategy of blowing their hand to make everyone fail a skill check, then revealing very quickly.

To fix this, revealed Cylons no longer draw skill cards at the start of turn, and when revealed they must discard all skill cards. The only way they receive more cards is through using the Human Fleet action to steal a card. They may still play only one of these cards into each skill check if desired. This makes thematic sense because the Cylons shouldn’t be able to interfere in the humans ability to make skill checks unless they spend some time in the Human fleet!! Also, I believe this strengthens an otherwise weak role. (Normally, Cylon players just go to caprice all the time, except maybe the Cylon fleet if the board situation is critical).

Second, all revealed Cylons must contribute cards to skill checks first, before any other players.



3) Clarification to the communication rules for skill checks + game speedup:

When a choice occurs, the player making the decision must make the choice without any discussion of strategy/options/who can contribute, etc.

When a skill check occurs, players do not discuss what they are going to do. Instead, they simply proceed to start adding or not adding cards, after the card is explained to everyone.

After the choice or skill check is done, players may then discuss the results and may again discuss strategy of what they need to consume, discuss who may be responsible for the bad results, who should’ve put in stuff, what decision should’ve been made, etc.

The net result of this change should be to make the game harder for the humans. This compensates somewhat for other changes made such as the distance required.

Players still may not discuss what card #s they have, what colors, what they put in, etc. They can only claim that they put in helpful cards, and discuss who may have been responsible for the bad cards.


4) Spreading out of the Cylon Attack cards.
How many of these are drawn seems to be a huge determinant of game difficulty. Several in a short time is pretty much death, and not getting any for a long time gets pretty boring.

Therefore:
Sort out the 10 Cylon attack crises from the other Crises. Sort the 60 normal Crises into three piles of 20. Remove the Cylon attack card “Thirty Three”. Shuffle 3 of the other Cylon attack cards into each of the three piles. Place these piles on top of each other to form the deck. Now, there are 3 Cylon attacks per 23 cards, for a better distribution.
The thirty-three card is used in change #6:


5) Balancing of the Sympathizer card.
In 4 and 6 player, the sympathizer no longer potentially makes someone a Cylon. Instead, during the sleeper agent phase, the player receiving the sympathizer card is put in the brig, and the “Thirty-three” Cylon attack card is played. (This ensures that some Cylons will exist in play at the start of the second half of the game in this 4 and 6 player).

If the 33 card is shuffled into the deck, instead shuffle it into the top 8 crisis cards (so as not to mess up the deck’s Cylon attack distribution. And to have it come again. I mean come, on, they’re supposed to come back in 33 minutes!

I just like that card a lot. I want to see it played. I think it would be fun to play it with a timer and have the card get played again every 33 minutes of real life time, minus time that revealed Cylons are taking for their turns.


6) The resources at game start should be set to X at game start, which could depend on the # of players. I don’t know what X should be yet, but it is whatever makes it balanced under these rules. I’m pretty sure that fuel needs to not be reduced, and that some other stuff probably does.

I think that it makes sense to vary the starting resources based on # of players, since certain #s will be harder than others.


I’m obviously still working on the details of the final balancing, but it would at this point be interesting to try the rules (with normal starting resources?) and see how it goes.
For 4 and 6 player

This is good.




Yup, I was thinking of this too. That's a good change.



This section might need work. First, I'm worried it makes the Human Fleet space too good. That space is pretty boring from a cylon point of view; you just pick their best card and that's it. Your entire turn! Now, the only decision you get to make in the entire round is which skill check to play it in. And in fact, if you play your only card, the person you stole it from knows what it is.

Compare this to the current stuff that happens when you're a revealed cylon: On your turn, you get to pick which of two cards is worse for the humans. This is sometimes an interesting choice. You get to pick which decks to draw from. And every skill check, you get to decide what card to play for it. Because most of your cards are just blind draws, you have crappy cards like everyone else (unlike if your only source is the Human Fleet action). So you always have to balance playing one of your good cards with just playing a crappy one.

I agree with making revealed cylons weaker, but I think this is the wrong way to do it.

I do agree they get too many cards. So let's start with them discarding down to two on reveal, and only drawing one per turn.

Now, to prevent them from dominating the skill checks, why not just add one to the total of a skill check for every revealed cylon? This shifts the balance towards the humans while still letting cylons make meaningful choices.

By the way, we have to make sure to not make being revealed worse than staying in the brig, where you draw 5 cards and can play one in every skill check.



I'm not convinced this is an improvement.





Wait, why? This part of the game works just fine. Balance isn't an excuse since we're adjusting the resources anyway. I think this shouldn't be part of the discussion here, since it's completely unrelated to balance.



This seems like a lot of work for little benefit. Hmm. I don't even think they affect the balance that much, though they do make the game more or less interesting.

I'm also concerned this makes things too predictable when you get to the 20th card and have only seen 2 attacks.



This is awesome except for one problem: Thirty-three goes away if a basestar or civilian ship dies. So realistically, the humans just lose a nuke.

Make it so it always shuffles back in and we have ourselves a game! Although, what happens if it gets scouted away or otherwise sent to the bottom of the deck? Nothing? It's probably not going to come back no matter what rules we change.

Some interesting ideas that I may consider implementing after I've played a few more times. If revealed Cylons are actually much more powerful than unrevealed, I agree something needs to change. The best part of the game is dealing with the paranoia of having a traitor in your midst. However, if the Cylons' most effective move is to reveal immediately, that part of the game is lost.

However, I think that this:



would make the game far less interesting, since it would kill off a lot of the social aspect of playing. It would also weaken unrevealed Cylons, since they would no longer be able to influence the humans into making a bad decision.

The idea about variable/unknown end distance, and potentially variable sleeper phase would be very interesting. Also, any change to the sympathizer card is in my opinion, a good thing

I definitely like the potential change to 33 of shuffling it into the top X cards in the deck. It makes the card a little more interesting.

A number of your changes are predicated on the fact that a revealed cylon is more powerful than an unrevealed cylon. This is simply not true -- much of the early game revolves around uncertainty and suspicion. This suspicion leads to overpaying for crises, wasted cards on brig attempts, and less than optimal cooperation. That loss of efficiency is what balances out the better actions for revealed cylons.

The social aspect of discussing challenges and effort to be put forth to a challenge is absolutely central to the experience. If everyone just puts cards face down with no thought or knowledge of the intents of the rest of the party, two major problems arise. One, it is a -huge- disadvantage to the human side. Secondly, it takes the intrigue role of an unrevealed cylon away. One of the most powerful(and fun!) abilities of an unrevealed cylon is not mentioned on any card, space, or in the rules: it is their ability to convince the group to do the wrong thing.

As for the other changes, balancing out the cylon attack cards isn't a bad idea, but a proper shuffle should make this happen. I think it is too much effort for too little gain, and the potential for game-y "Ah, we know there -must- be a cylon attack in the next four cards" situations, which make little thematic sense and detract from the game.

Setting the resources to different numbers depending on the number of players isn't necessary. I've played 3, 4, 5, and 6 player games, and all have been close. We've only had one blowout win, a cylon victory, and it was due to some awful luck and poor play on the humans' part.

The only part I really agree about is the Thirty-Three card; it should have been worded so that it is placed X cards down from the top of the crisis deck (about 5-10). As it is, the crisis deck is so large that it likely you will only see it once again, and not with any sense of urgent repetition like there was in the show.

On the 'no talking before crisis cards' thing, I was mostly trying to speed the game up, but I think that probably that was taking too much out of the game. So I think I'll remove that part.


Its true that most of this is about trying to make a revealed cylon weaker than an unrevealedo ne. I think revealed cylons are stronger right now, primarily because the jump preparation track doesnt move forward on their turns. When they are not revealed yet, it can still move forward on their turns.

What do people think of the shuffling the Cylon attack cards into the three thirds of the deck? Kindof like the epidemic cards in pandemic?

On the Thirty Three card, I was even thinking that it should be 'put it under three crisis cards' or something. 33 minutes isnt a long time! :P
You should be nuking the basestar or letting a civilian ship die to get away from it.

My idea of putting the 33 card about 5-10 cards from the top was to mimic what happened on the show - the Cylon ships would turn up *just* as the human fleet was ready to jump. I'm sure if you counted the number of jump prep icons on the crisis cards, you would find that on average the human fleet should take about 10 cards to jump.

Yes, thats cool.

40/70 of the crisis cards are jump advancement cards. Lets say that we wanted an average of 4 jump advancements to occur first (so that the humans are 'almost' ready when they come. Then there should be about 7 cards between drawings of the 33 card. So you would put it under about 7 cards to achieve this result. 5-10 works, or you could make it a narrower range.

I might recommend to my play group that we play with the 33 mod at 7 cards next time and see how it goes.

General thoughts:

I like a lot of the ideas here. I suspect maybe some middle ground is better. My preference is to change the minimal set of rules to keep things interesting and so that the variant is still recognizable.

1) I really like the stones and variable jump distance idea. Ditto sleeper phase at 3 (although that probably only works if you change the sleeper role as you've done. Otherwise a cylon-Adama will always jump 3 and make it a 3-on-3; ugly). I assume via secrecy that the cylons aren't allow to tell each other when they were cylons. That's interesting, because Cylon A may be working under the assumption that the humans win at 7, and B knows it's 8.

2) As for the Cylons power, perhaps a middle ground of discard to 3 cards, but only draw 1/turn. Now you get a little bit of mess with them, but need the human fleet to really start hosing skill checks.

3) I don't mind the 'gunboat' (no talking) skill check, but it does remove the flavor of the game in some groups. We are generally a "hurry up and play", so it's fairly close. We may have a sentence "I'm useless" or two.

4) I think the deck stacking may be useful. But we haven't had much problem with ships showing up. While this is a fiddly rule, it's setup-fiddly, which isn't so bad.

5) As for the 33 card, Having it shuffle into the near future (say 5-10 cards down) seems reasonable. Or say it shows up after the jump drive has cycled 2 or 3 times. We always just nuke that bastard ASAP anyway. So this is probably just a fiddly rule that won't matter often. If necessary you move a ship towards the raiders, eat it, and run (even if Adama has wasted all the nukes). So, thematic, but probably not worth the effort.

6) Just a minor point, I might consider shuffling the deck (but not the discards) after each jump. That way if humanity has "buried" a few horrible cards early on, they might re-appear. That's usually how the enemy fleets get missed ... the president or scouts bury them. Then they are effectively gone all game. That may be enough to balance the various 'pro-human' changes above.

5) No idea on balance.

Variant V1.1:

(Game length + Balancing of whether Cylon cards dealt early or late):
1a: To win the game, the humans must safely travel a distance of 9 minus the number of Cylons in the initial loyalty card deal. Thus, for each Cylon who is dealt their Cylon loyalty card at game start, the game gets easier for the humans to compensate, by 1 distance required.
(Use tokens, secretly put into a bag by players with initial cylon loyalty. Check the bag at distance 7+).

1b: The sleeper agent phase occurs at a distance of 3, not 4.


(Fix to Cylon’s power when revealed):
The goal is that a revealed Cylon should be weaker than the potential of an unrevealed Cylon to damage skill checks, etc, but stronger than a Cylon in the Brig.

2a: Revealed Cylons must discard down to 'A' cards when revealed. (0-3?)
2b: Revealed Cylons draw only 'B' cards per turn. (0-1?)

What are good values for A and B?

(Removed the idea that Cylons add cards to skill checks first)

(Removed rules changes relating to skill check discussion)


(Spreading out of the Cylon Attack cards)

3a: Sort out the 10 Cylon attack crises from the other Crises. Sort the 60 normal Crises into three piles of 20. Remove the Cylon attack card “Thirty Three”. Shuffle 3 of the other Cylon attack cards into each of the three piles. Place these piles on top of each other to form the deck. Now, there are 3 Cylon attacks per 23 cards, for a better distribution.

3b: The "Thirty Three" card will be changed in the following way:
Instead of reshuffling in the 33 card into the whole deck, instead set aside the top 5 cards of the draw deck. Take the next 3 cards and shuffle the 33 card into them. Place those on top, and then place the 5 set aside cards on top of that.

The Thirty Three card will be played in some way. What is a good way to have this enter play? One idea I had was that a revealed Cylon could choose it as their Caprica action (instead of drawing 2 Crisis cards or playing a Super Crisis)? Or maybe, it is played in the sleeper agent phase if there are not yet any revealed Cylons? (To encourage revealing later).


(Removal of the Sympathizer card):
4a: Remove the Sympathizer card. (Replace it with another 'you are not a Cylon' card).


(Modification of starting resources):
5: Modify the starting resources to 'X'.

X is whatever makes the game balanced under these new rules. It may depend on the number of players. What is a good value for X? I believe Fuel should be 8, others might need to be lowered?

Yeah, minimal rules changes is preferable.


For #1, I think the Cylons should be able to claim whatever they want during the game about when they became cylon, so long as everyone playing hears the claims. Thus they could trick the humans into thinking a different distance is required than what it really is.




I think maybe we should start with trying discard to 3/draw 1, and see how it goes. I do kindof like how having less cards makes the human fleet option less bad.


For the no talking skill checks, I'm thinking now that it removes too much. Certainly its good for people to play fast, but I think just enforcing 'play fast' is good here.



For the deck stacking of cylon attacks, I had had one boring game where no cylon ships EVER appeared. I have also had a game with 3 cylon attacks in about 4 cards that put every civilian ship on the board and wiped us out. I think the extra setup time is worth it.

Actually, I'm kinda agreeing with you a little about the discard/draw thing. In the 4-player game we played recently, I was the Cylon and I found that I never ran out of skill cards to play - I could play one in almost every skill check that came up. This was because with only three human players, drawing two cards per turn and an average of one skill check per round where I didn't have a valid card, I would always have cards in my hand - I didn't really need to think about which skill checks to play my cards into.

Maybe the Cylon locations themselves should be changed...

Caprica: while on this location, you may force the current human player to discard their first drawn crisis and draw a new one.

Cylon Fleet: while on this location, you may choose to change the Cylon fleet activation icon on each crisis card that shows such an icon.

Human Fleet: while on this location, you may play skill cards to skill checks.

In this way, the revealed Cylon player has to choose which aspect of things he will control for the whole round, not just for his turn.

Those seem too powerful. I mean, Caprica becomes like a super-Rosyln (not quite as good, but used 3-4 times a round). And with two cylons, you'll cover two areas...

Yeah, the problem here is that it (Chris's suggestion) might work well for 3 players, but doesn't scale up well. Each Cylon location would be just as powerful with 3 players as it would with 6, only you could have 2-3 locations covered with anything over 3 players.

If you wanted to keep it thematic from the show, the text should read:

"This card remains on the table until the fleet jumps. Once the fleet has jumped, shuffle this card into the top 10 cards on the crisis deck."

This would prevent the "33" card from coming up multiple times before the fleet jumped.

The problem with anything fixed, such as "put it under three crisis cards," is that it can be easy avoided using "launch scout."

As for 33 minutes not being a long time, remember that time is very flexible and relative in this game. Firing the weapons take the same amount of time as "research." The president can fly to colonial one and take a press conference in the same amount of time it takes a pilot to fly one space and shoot a raider.

Sorry but… this proposition does not work at all, because all Cylons will put the white stone in the bag. Yes, it’s unfair but… they are Cylons and they want the death of Humanity!
OTOH, The Humans will probably put their black stones in the bag...

Luckily, the game doesn't work at all anyway, because the person dealing out the loyalty cards can "accidentally" see which one everyone is getting.

Alternately, you could play with people who don't cheat.