Jared Ferenczy
United States
Dist of Columbia
-
This was a 6 player game that my group played last week, using Pegasus and Exodus. Destination was Kobol, no cylon fleet board, no conflicted loyalties.
Variants used:
Some characters tweaks, the only relevant one being Cain draws the first unscouted location for her blind jump.
We removed ~32 random cards from the crisis deck (equal to the number of Exodus crises-CAG chooses, Medal of Distinction and Cylon Genocide). We feel one of the shortcomings of Exodus was that it did not plan for players to not use the CFB, so that the ratio to attack cards:other cards was too off in the favor of humans, so we removed a random amount of crises before we added the attack cards. The only things we removed for certain were cards that did not work without the CFB).
We also remove the title reassigning card from Exodus and a random unkown card from the quorum deck to balance out the power lost. I was the only person who looked at the card to make sure it was of relative power.
We also removed character limits, because we feel those are mostly there to stop new players from making stupid teams rather than trying to balance the game in any significant way.
Characters were:
Laura Roslin- Experienced player. Several games played.
Cavil (me)- Experienced player. Too many games played.
Cain- Experienced player. Less games played than Cavil, but still too many.
Helo- New player. Not enough games played.
Starbuck- Experienced. A couple games played.
Chief- New Player. No games played.
The game starts off well. I give the new players a rundown of the rules and do a lot of set up work. I get dealt my agenda and am astonished to see Leoben's face looking back at me. I was dealt Salvage the Equipment. This amazed me because I have never actually had to go for a cylon victory before as a cylon leader (worse still since I am used to playing hostile agendas). I look at my Super Crisis, an attack card. So no help there.
I play the game coy from the start, trying not to give away my agenda and seeing where the card take the human's resources. Until the first crisis, where Roslin reveals a crisis that loses morale. I wasn't going to spike it early on, until they start talking about Iron Willing it. My starting hand contained a 5-Critical Situation and a 4-Calculations. All of a sudden, the idea of spiking this is just too good. I spike and lose them 2 morale on turn one. My turn comes up and I take a treachery just because. I go over to Caprica and look for a crises. I find one with a jump and one without a jump. The one without loses them another morale on a failed skill check. I know what to do. They lose yet another morale. The first round proceeds with a bunch of failed skill checks, and yet the humans get continually lucky. They gain some morale off of one crisis, gain another off of a destroyed basestar from Cain with a major victory, and president Roslin manages to give an inspirational speech. About halfway through the rotation, we have a confirmed spike from a human. Either they played an engineering or a piloting. Neither I nor Starbuck played into the check, meaning it is either Chief or Helo. We go for another round and the humans are doing better, they manage to get morale back and keep it steady. I start slowing down on my agenda. The fleet is oddly quiet and no cylons place themselves. I make my way to the human fleet and start messing with their destinations and drawing more skill cards. The humans manage to ID Chief as a cylon and brig him with an Arrest Order.
The humans manage a jump to sleeper phase after Starbuck's turn.
Round three begins with protests from Chief that he is human. Roslin does presidential things. I decide to infiltrate for giggles, since I mostly just want more crises to show up and more cards to spike with. Scar reveals as my crisis, which would be great, but Cain blind jumps next turn. So much for my pretty fleet. The good news is that Cain drew deep space for he blind jump, losing the humans another morale. Cain's crisis is in the ring, which gets spiked to hell by Helo on an IC, so everyone know he is one of our cylons. I get sent to sickbay along with Cain and morale is looking low. Helo reveals and we forget to discard my hand, not that it would have come up again in a significant way. Helo's reveal allows him to damage Galactica and I start politicking with him to blow up most of Pegasus, but he is having none of it. The weapon's control was already damaged as was the airlock. He decides to reveal the command damage token and fuel. Thank god, a different token I would have had to start helping the humans. Chief breaks out of the brig (the only skill check I helped on) and reveals Standoff with Pegasus as her crisis. Starbuck ditches it with her OPG, declaring it unpassable. I get XOd and I go to press room (which obviously should have been Research Lab since I wouldn't have had a hand, but oh well). My turn comes around and morale is at 1. Chief has been acting pretty human, so I am worried that she will use her OPG to make my last spike negative. I decide to OPG to scout and collect skill cards. My scout crashes. I CP for more tactics (would have been a straight research lab, shut up) and scout again. Crisis was Forced Water Mining. My choice, skill check or straight up lose a morale. Boo yah. And with that, the humans give up their will to go on, and I am left to wonder whether their tears are going to rust my newly acquired ship.
Interesting facts: Chief was the other cylon but thought her human loyalty overrode that. So we essentially won one cylon down.
I had received an XO earlier that allowed me a trip to the press room where I snagged political prowess, much to Roslin's chagrin.
I somehow managed to keep the humans guessing as to my agenda for most of the game. In the last round, the two most experience began suspecting that I had Guide Them to Their Destiny, but weren't sure.
-
-
Important thing: Iron will's negative kept coming up in this game, which made morale go down fast. Also, I figured the odds of it being Salvage the Equipment were 1/6, more realistically 1/3. And Standoff with Pegasus got special destinied cause it didn't have a jump prep and the fail was going to hurt.
-
Robert Stewart
United Kingdom
-
Minor rules point:
Unless I've missed something in the rules, Cylon Leaders don't get a Super Crisis (unless they Infiltrate, return to the Resurrection Ship, and spend an action there to draw one)
-
Kenny Renaud
United States
Florida
-
I was just about to ask if this was a variant of yours or misinterpretation?
-
Jared Ferenczy
United States
Dist of Columbia
-
rmsgrey wrote: Minor rules point:
Unless I've missed something in the rules, Cylon Leaders don't get a Super Crisis (unless they Infiltrate, return to the Resurrection Ship, and spend an action there to draw one)
Something we have apparently been playing wrong for a while now, mostly because I never thought to check on it. Now I'm going to have go read the CL rules. The person who taught me the game has a habit of overlooking certain rules. This would not be wholly atypical.
Edit: Well this has been enlightening. I'm tempted to keep doing it because it has worked fairly well for us in the past and I don't think it has ever cost the humans the game. Though it does put that hostile agenda in better perspective as requiring more than an action and playing king maker.
-
|
|
