Cylon Leaders

The second Battlestar Galactica board game expansion came out last week and it just happened to be New Year's Eve so of course it got picked up and played at Andrew's place. There are a lot of new mechanics so we wanted to minimize the impact of the first expansion but we ended up with 7 players and hence had to use a cylon leader. I rolled relatively high and got to pick second and decided if one of us had to be a cylon leader it might as well be me.

For those who may not know the game it's a team game where you don't know who's on your team at the start of the game. You get dealt secret cards indicating which team you're on both at the start of the game and halfway through the game. Everyone starts out as a human but some people are actually cylons in disguise. The humans are just trying to survive to game end; the cylons are trying to commit genocide in any of a variety of ways. You take a lot of hidden actions so people try to use logic to deduce who is actually evil based on imperfect information. It's pretty interesting but hard to balance with 7 people. 4 humans against 3 cylons is pretty much a slaughter for the cylons. 5 humans against 2 cylons is pretty much a guaranteed win for the humans. So what they did was they made the "cylon leader" who doesn't take part in the hidden team part of the game the way the other players do. They act as a cylon most of the time but can also turn into a human and help them if they want. Their motivation is derived from a secret agenda card which tells them what their win conditions are. They either need the humans to win while having done things to hurt them or they need the cylons to win with a lot of complications tacked on. In theory it makes the balance more like 4.5 vs 2.5 but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. I think it warps games but it's a reasonable solution to the problem of the game only being balanced with 5 players by default.

At any rate, an interesting situation arose in the game we played. It became pretty clear that I was a cylon-wins cylon leader since every overt action I took for the first 2 hours of the game was attacking the humans. It also became pretty clear that the humans were dead. They were in danger of losing on 5 of the 6 losing conditions and were a long way from the end. But I hadn't completed my special objectives yet, so we were basically just playing it out to see if I could win or not. Assuming I actually am a cylon-wins character there are 4 possible options for what I could need to accomplish. The question then is, how should the other players act?

The 4 humans should hope for a miracle and keep trying to survive as long as possible. I'd actually started helping them near the end and a couple lucky draws and maybe they could have pulled it off. Alternatively, if they've really given up they could try to work out my win condition and fight to keep me from getting it. The cylons win, no need to have the cylon leader win.

What should the 2 cylons do? If they get me working with them again they definitely win. Ignore me and they almost certainly win. If they work at it they might be able to screw me out of my goal, but should they even worry about it? There is certainly some risk involved, since the further they take me from my goal the more I need to prolong the game in order to win.

For me the answer is clear. I need to achieve my goal and then blow the humans up. If I'm not going to win I have to keep them alive, if I am I want them dead. I'm not spite playing here, if that matters, but maximizing my own winningness. This sort of thing came up in Republic of Rome too. Is it 'better' for the humans to have me lose too? Is it 'worse' if I win? Or once they've lost should it be irrelevant to them?

As it turned out I had to help the humans survive one card that was guaranteed to kill them if I hadn't helped. My criteria was met shortly thereafter and then we blew them up. No one even put any thought into what I could be trying to accomplish or tried to help/hinder me in any way. The game was a little long and I think most people just wanted it over, but I'm not sure they could have colluded to keep me from winning even if they knew my goal. (Not without just throwing in the towel long before they were practically guaranteed death.) I'm pretty sure I had the hardest secret objective (cylons win, 3 or less morale, 4 or more Galactica locations damaged) and it was pretty tricky trying to pull both of the requirements off. But I was essentially a better cylon from the start of the game to the end and only helped the humans once, so they didn't have a lot of hope of winning, sadly. Which is the problem with the cylon leaders in general. I had a great game but the humans (Andrew, Byung, Dee, and Heather) had a lot of trouble and the two cylons (Adam and Duncan) had an easier time than they should have. This isn't to say they didn't play well (Adam managed to take some bad actions as a hidden cylon without being ousted and I didn't think Duncan was a cylon either until he revealed) but the game balance was skewed in their favour because of the cylon leader. It's always great to be the cylon leader, so if I played a lot of games and everyone rotated being the cylon leader I think it would be a reasonable mechanic. But I don't play enough and some people refuse to be a cylon leader so I'm not much of a fan. Even if you can call me Al.