More Power!

I played a couple games of Battlestar Galactica over the weekend. I talked a couple weeks ago about how I became President Admiral CAG Colonel Saul Tigh. Well, in the very next game I played I pulled it off again, become President Admiral CAG Samuel T Anders. This was even less likely since I started the game with no titles at all and Anders is near the bottom of the President and Admiral depth charts. This time I made a questionable call which resulted in us losing the game at a mere distance of 5 with a reasonable amount of every resource left. We lost to the ship exploding. The critical decision involved a crisis which would either gain us a morale but damage the ship twice or lose us a morale. We had 5 morale at the time, so we could either go up to a robust 6 or drop down to a scary 4 with likely 3 jumps still to come. 2 damage doesn't sound so bad except we were 3 damage from losing. The damage token pile had 4 left in it, and cylon Byung was up next. His action is likely to be roll a die and on a 4-8 he'd get a bunch of ships into play to attack us and he could then follow it up with rolling another die and on a 1-5 (I think) he'd damage the ship once.

So, we immediately lose specifically when the null token is the last one drawn and Byung makes two dice rolls for a little under 10% chance of instant loss. Of course, we're still left with a very damaged ship and 2 revealed cylons taking actions but we would have 2 human turns in between which included my turn which could launch a nuke with my once per game ability for the guaranteed destruction of all ships in one space. Our chief had some repair cards so it's entirely possibly we could have stabilized things under that choice. On the other hand, we weren't likely to win.

That said, dropping to 4 morale with so much game left to play is a lot like losing, too. We still have a rather damaged ship and pressure is coming in from all sides. I didn't really think the decision through all the way at the time and I still can't really quantify the odds of losing from 4 morale... The choice was definitely questionable but I'm sure if I'd made the other choice and we'd lost on morale we would have complained then, too.

As it turned out the non-damage token was the last one and Byung did make both of his rolls so we immediately lost.

The second game didn't involve consolidating power and the humans actually managed to win but that involved some pretty crazy luck too. We played with 10 loyalty cards and the sympathizer card in particular was the 10th one in that deck, which doesn't get dealt out. So our game which was supposed to be 2.5v1.5 became 3v1. Cylon Byung managed to force us to add an 11th card to the sympathizer and deal one of them to Andrew but still missed on dealing it out. Despite that we still came very close to losing and needed 14 or 16 straight cards to come up with jump prep in order to win. Ultimately it feels like the new cylon fleet action (the one that let Byung roll those dice in the first game) is just too powerful. The cylon fleet smooths out the attacks and makes the game feel more like BSG which is nice but it really seems like it makes the game a lot harder for the humans to win. Not sure how to fix it, though...