Earlier this week I actually got out of the house and went to Sara's to play board games. I learned a couple of new games (Bling Bling Gemstone and Greed) and also got to play my second favourite game: Battlestar Galactica. It was a five player game where Sara and myself both have tons of plays but the other three players combined for three previous plays amongst them. It was a very fun game (with a bit of a terrible ending) but it really brought home for me why I asserted in the past that the cylons win more games when people don't really know what they're doing.
In this game I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that two of the other players were cylons from the getgo. So much so that when Sara tried to throw one of them in the brig (and maybe execute them since Sara was Admiral Cain) I was all in to make it happen. Turned out all three other players were against it (as was destiny) so it didn't happen. It also turned out that all five of us started the game as humans. But one of the new players chose a 1 over a 3 when we jumped. Another sent all the civilian ships home in order to let a bunch of raiders shoot Galactica instead of just flying around on their next two activations. And the third guy got to draw 2 cards outside his skillset and he chose treachery of all things! He then single handedly made us fail a skill check (I suspect he was just trying to dump his treachery cards) and then single handedly made us pass one. He was president and kept playing quorum cards to help the humans, but then he'd draw cards that weren't useful (aforementioned treachery, also some piloting).
I didn't know what was going on. Sara didn't know what was going on. There was a lot of intrigue and trying to figure out why people were doing what they were doing instead of just knowing that a person was guaranteed good or evil because they know the game and were taking the right/wrong actions. In a sense it was refreshing, and certainly fun. But in another sense it comes as little surprise that the cylons won.
The end of the game took a long time to happen because at one point there was a revealed cylon and 4 people in the brig. So no crisis cards were being drawn, and no jump prep could come out. The character selections had only two people capable of drawing yellow cards (one of the two colours for getting out of the brig) and those two people happened to both be the cylons. I was new Gaius Baltar and had to throw myself in the brig before I could reveal, though continually trying to throw someone out the airlock felt like a good use of my time as long as I had treachery cards to proc in the skillcheck. We made fantastic use of the mutiny card mechanic to throw everyone in the brig. This mostly was possible because we just kept activating the treachery card to shuffle 2 more treachery cards into destiny. Over and over and over again. I'm pretty sure we shuffled 22 treachery cards into one pass through destiny!
I think the humans had an easy path to victory. If the CAG had just not sent all the civilian ships home at the start of the game he wouldn't have ended up in the brig (Sara sent him there by giving him a second mutiny card). Combine that with the admiral choosing the 3 instead of the 1 when we jumped the second time and the humans easily win. But the chaos and discord from people making sketchy plays through inexperience sunk the humans.
Again, it was still fun (well, up until the game stopped progressing with 4 people in the brig anyway) but I definitely think newer players swing the game heavily in favour of the cylons. The other cylon was misplaying his cylon position too (he should have revealed much earlier than he did but he held off trying to get a good use of his reveal ability of knocking off 2 jump prep instead of just revealing and denying 55% of a jump prep each turn) but I feel like the cost of bad unrevealed cylon play was a lot less than the cost of bad human play.
Showing posts with label Battlestar Galactica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Battlestar Galactica. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2014
Monday, October 14, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: Blatant Unrevealed Cylon
This weekend I played another game of BSG as the cylon leader (in a 6 player game) and I ended up getting 2 cards for each side and was able to satisfy all 4 conditions without much effort. (I did need to damage Galactica a couple times to make one of them work, and I needed the humans to not repair the initially damaged vipers.) At that point it was a matter of just ending the game and I went to work with the cylons. We ended up destroying Galactica primarily with raider shots which is something I'd never seen before. It's pretty rare for a raider to get even a single shot on Galactica let alone to get 9 hits with them. (We had 19 raiders in play and I used Al's once per game to activate all raiders 3 times in order to wipe out all the civilian ships.)
On the way home I was talking a bit with Dave about the new version of Gaius Baltar. His downside is the inability to reveal himself as a cylon unless he's in the brig. Normally I just reveal as soon as I can, but if I was playing as Baltar that wouldn't be possible. So I wanted to think a bit about how much damage you could do while staying as a human. Dave said he just stood around trying to throw other people in the brig and consuming their cards trying to fight off those skill checks. That seemed like a reasonable enough thing to do, but could the humans fight that by just not defending? New Baltar only draws 2 cards that are positive on that skill check so even if the humans never throw in a card he probably needs to throw in 5 or 6 cards to succeed. So once every three turns he can pull it off? Maybe he spends one turn playing consolidate power to get two more cards and then the next turn trying to brig someone? The big problem with trying to defend is he gets to go last, so you have to commit all your cards first and then he can just hold off for next time.
What else can he do? Obviously he can go around and steal once per game tokens from a couple people. He can give out a mutiny card, which might be a better way to try to brig someone. Hand out some mutiny cards and then use admiral's quarters when he can actually make it pass could be strong. He can use communication to shift civilian ships around, but that's always seemed weak to me. He also gets to throw in as many cards as he wants on skill checks, which may be the best thing he can do. Especially the one on his own turn, if blue is negative for it, he probably gets to make it fail. Again, the humans are probably better off just sacrificing the skill check on his turn. But then that means they're failing one per time around the table, and he gets to keep his cards and probably gets to make another fail every other turn or so. If they get lucky his crisis won't be a skill check at all. Water shortage or something!
One thing having a blatant unrevealed cylon is it makes some skill checks irrelevant. Pass the check or send someone to sickbay? That's quite the cough you have, Gaius. The main reason I reveal when I'm found out is to prevent this from happening. Giving the humans an easy person to send to sickbay or execute or brig is really strong for them. Gaius doesn't really care about getting executed or brigged because at least then he gets to reveal so he's not as bad off as a normal cylon. But it does still save them the cards to pass it, and the consequence by having an easy target, and it shuts down any annoyances he's providing. And since in order for him to be really annoying he wants to have a threatening number of cards in hand executing him is extra good.
None of these things sound nearly as good as being able to activate the cylon fleet spaces. Having the cylon remain human means they keep getting the 55% of a jump prep on his crisis card and don't lose the 38% of a jump prep from the cylon fleet so keeping him around is worth almost a full jump prep per round. I continue to assert that jump prep is really all that matters for the humans.
The one thing that may be useful is if one cylon is already revealed and built up a hand of super crisis cards. Then having a human cylon who can throw in a ton of cards to said check could be really useful. But I've been in games where a cylon has just drawn super crisis cards and I've never been impressed by it. I'm not sure that having two people taking suboptimal actions is going to work out well for them, but maybe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in this case.
Having now thought it through a bit, I think if I'm in a game with cylon Baltar I'll advocate just letting him do what he wants and see what happens. I feel like we'll be better off having him draw crisis cards than wasting cards dealing with him. Maybe execute him if we get a free shot to do it from a crisis, but ideally sending him to sickbay to keep his cards under control while getting jump prep from his crisis cards sounds really awesome.
On the way home I was talking a bit with Dave about the new version of Gaius Baltar. His downside is the inability to reveal himself as a cylon unless he's in the brig. Normally I just reveal as soon as I can, but if I was playing as Baltar that wouldn't be possible. So I wanted to think a bit about how much damage you could do while staying as a human. Dave said he just stood around trying to throw other people in the brig and consuming their cards trying to fight off those skill checks. That seemed like a reasonable enough thing to do, but could the humans fight that by just not defending? New Baltar only draws 2 cards that are positive on that skill check so even if the humans never throw in a card he probably needs to throw in 5 or 6 cards to succeed. So once every three turns he can pull it off? Maybe he spends one turn playing consolidate power to get two more cards and then the next turn trying to brig someone? The big problem with trying to defend is he gets to go last, so you have to commit all your cards first and then he can just hold off for next time.
What else can he do? Obviously he can go around and steal once per game tokens from a couple people. He can give out a mutiny card, which might be a better way to try to brig someone. Hand out some mutiny cards and then use admiral's quarters when he can actually make it pass could be strong. He can use communication to shift civilian ships around, but that's always seemed weak to me. He also gets to throw in as many cards as he wants on skill checks, which may be the best thing he can do. Especially the one on his own turn, if blue is negative for it, he probably gets to make it fail. Again, the humans are probably better off just sacrificing the skill check on his turn. But then that means they're failing one per time around the table, and he gets to keep his cards and probably gets to make another fail every other turn or so. If they get lucky his crisis won't be a skill check at all. Water shortage or something!
One thing having a blatant unrevealed cylon is it makes some skill checks irrelevant. Pass the check or send someone to sickbay? That's quite the cough you have, Gaius. The main reason I reveal when I'm found out is to prevent this from happening. Giving the humans an easy person to send to sickbay or execute or brig is really strong for them. Gaius doesn't really care about getting executed or brigged because at least then he gets to reveal so he's not as bad off as a normal cylon. But it does still save them the cards to pass it, and the consequence by having an easy target, and it shuts down any annoyances he's providing. And since in order for him to be really annoying he wants to have a threatening number of cards in hand executing him is extra good.
None of these things sound nearly as good as being able to activate the cylon fleet spaces. Having the cylon remain human means they keep getting the 55% of a jump prep on his crisis card and don't lose the 38% of a jump prep from the cylon fleet so keeping him around is worth almost a full jump prep per round. I continue to assert that jump prep is really all that matters for the humans.
The one thing that may be useful is if one cylon is already revealed and built up a hand of super crisis cards. Then having a human cylon who can throw in a ton of cards to said check could be really useful. But I've been in games where a cylon has just drawn super crisis cards and I've never been impressed by it. I'm not sure that having two people taking suboptimal actions is going to work out well for them, but maybe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in this case.
Having now thought it through a bit, I think if I'm in a game with cylon Baltar I'll advocate just letting him do what he wants and see what happens. I feel like we'll be better off having him draw crisis cards than wasting cards dealing with him. Maybe execute him if we get a free shot to do it from a crisis, but ideally sending him to sickbay to keep his cards under control while getting jump prep from his crisis cards sounds really awesome.
Friday, September 20, 2013
5-Player Single Cylon Game
One of the game options added in the latest Battlestar Galactica expansion is the suggestion to play with 1 cylon, 1 cylon leader, 1 mutineer, and 2 human players. If you really want to use a cylon leader in a 5 player game it seems like the way to go, but is that something you should want to have happen? When the idea was brought up my instinctive reaction was that this option is adding extra complexity and randomness to fix a problem that doesn't exist. BSG is a game that feels properly balanced for exactly 5 players with 2 cylons and 3 humans. Cylon leader and mutineer are extra stuff trying to fix the issue of a 4 player game, or a 6 player game, or a 7 player game. The 5 player game isn't broken, so why try to fix it with two big patches?
That said, I'm willing to try anything, so when today's game was set up with this as the plan I was all in. I ended up starting the game as the president and was dealt the one cylon card in the opening phase. My general feeling for the game is the cylon should reveal as soon as possible because just sitting around waiting for a good opportunity to do damage means you're also drawing extra crisis cards and getting extra jump prep for the humans and jump prep is how they win the game. I drew a card that let me take two actions on my turn, and my president card had the potential for doing damage, so I went for it. Force a die roll to potentially lose a morale and then make them lose a morale right off the hop with my reveal action as well.
Snuggles has commented in the past that he likes having an unrevealed cylon for the power of confusion. I haven't had the chance to test the 'start with 2 revealed cylons' game that he thinks would be heavily tilted for the humans, but he really likes the uncertainty that comes about by the last cylon staying stealthy for a while. In this variant the first cylon is also the last cylon, and the power of knowing the remaining 3 players were human was immediately apparent. Especially given the chosen characters, the humans were set up such that they could use new Baltar to funnel once per game activations to Cain for lots of fast jumps or Boomer for lots of guaranteed crisis passes. But on the other hand I don't know what staying hidden would have accomplished for me. I was only drawing yellow and purple cards and was pretty much forced into drawing extra president cards if I wanted to be stealthy. And my passive ability was a pro human one (basically designed to take some of the sting out of water shortage) and if I didn't use it it would seem pretty shady. I couldn't even play a card to defend against the airlock since every single card I drew would be positive, so as soon as I make a play to hurt the humans and get found out, I'm screwed.
As the game progressed it became pretty clear that the cylon leader wanted the humans to win. Every action she took was pro human, and every card she played into a skill check was positive. (It also didn't help that she took probably the most pro human cylon leader as well.) There was one big skill check that destroyed every cylon ship on the board (the humans passed it by 31!) which allowed her to play a card that wanted the cylons to win but have a hard to obtain game state show up with no cylon ships in play after at least 3 jump prep had been earned. I was hoping this was going to be my chance to finally shift the game out of 4v1 but it wasn't to be. She continued to be pro human, and the couple of moves she made that were against the humans weren't planned very well and pretty much did nothing. (Using the communications space to move civilian ships around instead of going back to the cylon game board to move raiders.)
Things were almost dicey for the humans despite all that, with fuel ending at 2, food at 2, and morale at 3. Galactica also had 4 damage tokens on it, with Pegasus having 2 damage tokens. But even with all that damage I couldn't see a line of play to actually finish anything off and they were easily able to finish the game out with the engine room and FTL control to get the final jump since they still had 9 population.
The cylon leader ended up not winning either. She did satisfy 2 of her 4 cards, but they were both cylon wins cards which was very surprising to me. After meeting that one hard one with the cylon ship genocide it seemed like she had a line of play to win with the cylons winning if she just changed back to the cylon fleet, stopped generating jump prep for the humans, and actually attacked the civilian ships with the raiders I was putting on the board. One cylon fleet activation isn't really enough to make any progress but two of them can do some real damage, especially with the two cylons going beside each other in turn order like we were. To make that line even more right, one of her two unsatisfied cards required the humans to fall down to 6 or fewer population and the only real way to make that happen is to send raiders after civilian ships (or fail lots of FTL room activations).
At one point she did try to fly from Galactica directly to the cylon fleet board and use that space so I think part of the problem may have been that she just didn't understand fully how the game worked. The cylon leader can be seen as a balancing factor because they're able to play both sides against each other, but I think you really need to understand your options and be able to foresee the consequences of your actions in order for that to work. Finding a line of play to meet your hidden criteria while also getting the right side to win can be tricky, and ideally should require helping both sides some at different points in the game. She didn't find that line of play, she didn't help both sides, and she didn't balance the game out. She also didn't win.
It sounded like most (all?) of the people playing didn't really enjoy the game as much as a normal game of BSG and I'm inclined to agree. I'm also not sure this game was a good test because the cylon leader played so pro human to her own detriment. That said, I'm not sure that's actually atypical. This particular card setup was one where the cylon leader should have been working both sides but there are cylon leader card draws that are slanted one way or the other. Replace either of her cylons win cards with a humans win card and I'm not sure what she could have done differently. She plays anti-human for even a few turns and they probably lose since they were so close to losing on a few different conditions and they barely passed a couple of critical skill checks. So she probably has to play just as pro-human and can't meet two of her cards and loses. On the other hand she probably could have gone to the cylon board, shot down a few civvies, gotten pop down to 6 or less, and won because helping the cylons in that way and only that way probably doesn't let the cylons win one of the other ways and they probably don't lose enough civvies to make that a lose condition either.
I donno. The cylon leader certainly adds complexity and complication to the game. And I still think it does make the game more interesting for the cylon leader player in particular. So with a group that plays the game a lot and really wants everyone to get more cylon leader plays in I think this might be a viable game option. It probably makes the game a fair bit worse for the other 4 players in the process but that might be a trade worth making for some groups. I'm not opposed to trying again, but I do think the regular 5 player game is the optimal way to play. I do worry that if the cylon only shows up in the sleeper phase that they can't possibly win. Well, maybe if the cylon leader starts off anti-human at the start regardless of their cards because they need to do so to properly balance the game? I do think that's a thing that could well happen with a cylon leader experienced in this format. It is what they're designed to do, after all!
That said, I'm willing to try anything, so when today's game was set up with this as the plan I was all in. I ended up starting the game as the president and was dealt the one cylon card in the opening phase. My general feeling for the game is the cylon should reveal as soon as possible because just sitting around waiting for a good opportunity to do damage means you're also drawing extra crisis cards and getting extra jump prep for the humans and jump prep is how they win the game. I drew a card that let me take two actions on my turn, and my president card had the potential for doing damage, so I went for it. Force a die roll to potentially lose a morale and then make them lose a morale right off the hop with my reveal action as well.
Snuggles has commented in the past that he likes having an unrevealed cylon for the power of confusion. I haven't had the chance to test the 'start with 2 revealed cylons' game that he thinks would be heavily tilted for the humans, but he really likes the uncertainty that comes about by the last cylon staying stealthy for a while. In this variant the first cylon is also the last cylon, and the power of knowing the remaining 3 players were human was immediately apparent. Especially given the chosen characters, the humans were set up such that they could use new Baltar to funnel once per game activations to Cain for lots of fast jumps or Boomer for lots of guaranteed crisis passes. But on the other hand I don't know what staying hidden would have accomplished for me. I was only drawing yellow and purple cards and was pretty much forced into drawing extra president cards if I wanted to be stealthy. And my passive ability was a pro human one (basically designed to take some of the sting out of water shortage) and if I didn't use it it would seem pretty shady. I couldn't even play a card to defend against the airlock since every single card I drew would be positive, so as soon as I make a play to hurt the humans and get found out, I'm screwed.
As the game progressed it became pretty clear that the cylon leader wanted the humans to win. Every action she took was pro human, and every card she played into a skill check was positive. (It also didn't help that she took probably the most pro human cylon leader as well.) There was one big skill check that destroyed every cylon ship on the board (the humans passed it by 31!) which allowed her to play a card that wanted the cylons to win but have a hard to obtain game state show up with no cylon ships in play after at least 3 jump prep had been earned. I was hoping this was going to be my chance to finally shift the game out of 4v1 but it wasn't to be. She continued to be pro human, and the couple of moves she made that were against the humans weren't planned very well and pretty much did nothing. (Using the communications space to move civilian ships around instead of going back to the cylon game board to move raiders.)
Things were almost dicey for the humans despite all that, with fuel ending at 2, food at 2, and morale at 3. Galactica also had 4 damage tokens on it, with Pegasus having 2 damage tokens. But even with all that damage I couldn't see a line of play to actually finish anything off and they were easily able to finish the game out with the engine room and FTL control to get the final jump since they still had 9 population.
The cylon leader ended up not winning either. She did satisfy 2 of her 4 cards, but they were both cylon wins cards which was very surprising to me. After meeting that one hard one with the cylon ship genocide it seemed like she had a line of play to win with the cylons winning if she just changed back to the cylon fleet, stopped generating jump prep for the humans, and actually attacked the civilian ships with the raiders I was putting on the board. One cylon fleet activation isn't really enough to make any progress but two of them can do some real damage, especially with the two cylons going beside each other in turn order like we were. To make that line even more right, one of her two unsatisfied cards required the humans to fall down to 6 or fewer population and the only real way to make that happen is to send raiders after civilian ships (or fail lots of FTL room activations).
At one point she did try to fly from Galactica directly to the cylon fleet board and use that space so I think part of the problem may have been that she just didn't understand fully how the game worked. The cylon leader can be seen as a balancing factor because they're able to play both sides against each other, but I think you really need to understand your options and be able to foresee the consequences of your actions in order for that to work. Finding a line of play to meet your hidden criteria while also getting the right side to win can be tricky, and ideally should require helping both sides some at different points in the game. She didn't find that line of play, she didn't help both sides, and she didn't balance the game out. She also didn't win.
It sounded like most (all?) of the people playing didn't really enjoy the game as much as a normal game of BSG and I'm inclined to agree. I'm also not sure this game was a good test because the cylon leader played so pro human to her own detriment. That said, I'm not sure that's actually atypical. This particular card setup was one where the cylon leader should have been working both sides but there are cylon leader card draws that are slanted one way or the other. Replace either of her cylons win cards with a humans win card and I'm not sure what she could have done differently. She plays anti-human for even a few turns and they probably lose since they were so close to losing on a few different conditions and they barely passed a couple of critical skill checks. So she probably has to play just as pro-human and can't meet two of her cards and loses. On the other hand she probably could have gone to the cylon board, shot down a few civvies, gotten pop down to 6 or less, and won because helping the cylons in that way and only that way probably doesn't let the cylons win one of the other ways and they probably don't lose enough civvies to make that a lose condition either.
I donno. The cylon leader certainly adds complexity and complication to the game. And I still think it does make the game more interesting for the cylon leader player in particular. So with a group that plays the game a lot and really wants everyone to get more cylon leader plays in I think this might be a viable game option. It probably makes the game a fair bit worse for the other 4 players in the process but that might be a trade worth making for some groups. I'm not opposed to trying again, but I do think the regular 5 player game is the optimal way to play. I do worry that if the cylon only shows up in the sleeper phase that they can't possibly win. Well, maybe if the cylon leader starts off anti-human at the start regardless of their cards because they need to do so to properly balance the game? I do think that's a thing that could well happen with a cylon leader experienced in this format. It is what they're designed to do, after all!
Monday, September 02, 2013
Even More Cylon Leader Stuff
Yesterday I went out and played another game of Battlestar Galactica. It was another 6 player game and we gave the new cylon leader rule another spin. This time around Duncan was the cylon leader and I was on the human end of things. Dave commented on the Facebook link to my last post that he didn't like cylon leaders because they aren't playing the same game as everyone else. And as such they don't get to really participate in the conversations the same way other people do. I can definitely see how that's the case. Normally you're just trying to make a binary decision about the other people. They're human, or they're cylon. Maybe if you're playing with Andrew you also need to figure out if they're just being random? But with the cylon leader (at least early) pretty much everything they do is going to be shaded both ways. They're helping and hurting with everything they do and the other players can't know which way they're going to end up. So they can't really have discussions with them.
What it seems to boil down to is the cylon leader is playing a different game than the other players, and the game they're playing basically uses the other players as pawns. They're trying to set up board situations that will lead down the paths they want to go down. On the other hand the rest of the players don't really get to manipulate the cylon leader at all. They can do things that may end up helping or hurting the cylon leader but they can't get the cylon leader to do what they want them to do and they can rarely even tell if they even are helping or hurting. So the other players pretty much can only ignore the cylon leader, maybe throw them in the brig if they're infiltrating and are forced to brig someone, and hope they don't screw up their game that much.
In the game yesterday Duncan started off with two cards that wanted the humans to win and ended up with 3 human wins cards. So he had to spend the whole game trying to help us win. We got off to a fantastic start with Sara looking at the admiral's loyalty card and outing him as a cylon. The admiral got thrown out the airlock before he even got a turn. In an odd twist the person who threw him out the airlock was actually the other cylon. I'm convinced if that guy had taken any other action we were totally screwed. As it played out it looked really good for the humans, but having to go distance 10 is actually a pretty big deal. We managed to manipulate things such that the cylon fleet actually never jumped back in through a good choice of treachery card plays and destinations. (The new admiral was the other unrevealed cylon and he picked out probably the single best destination in the deck for us... I feel like he may not have understood how the cylon fleet board worked.) And even still we almost lost in several ways. We had 3 centurions on the boarding party track at one point and had to kill them all in one go around the table. We took 6 shots across 3 human player turns and got all 3 of them, thanks to the cylon leader having a calculations card. Then we ended up with 1 food, 2 fuel, and 2 morale when we finally jumped away. We did have 8 population left when we won, but there were 13 cylon raiders in the same location as 10 civilian ships with only 2 vipers for cover so we were pretty close to losing on that one too.
I'm pretty sure if Duncan had two cards for cylon wins he could have easily made the humans lose. 28% of the time he'll have 3 or 4 humans wins cards, so despite everything the other 5 players did there was a 72% chance Duncan could have had the cylons win. It feels like it's hard to accept that as one of the other players? But on the other hand having both cylon cards get dealt out at the start of the game is also brutal and that happens 22% of the time. I want to think BSG is a very skill intensive game, but it is also a game with small numbers of 'dice'. The cylon leader adds in another aspect of random chance the players can't control which may be a bad thing, or it may just be more of the same thing you need to expect out of the game?
One thing I will say is the new cylon leader rule feels very appropriate for the theme of the show. The average human and cylon get jerked around by the cylon leaders all the time! Dance my little puppets, dance!
But is it good for the game? My gut feeling after two plays is I'd probably rather just play a 5 player game. But in the past I would sit out and not play at all to make sure a 5 player game happened and now I'd be player 6 and hope to be the cylon leader! There is also the mutineer option which I haven't used. I'd like to try that out to see how it compares.
What it seems to boil down to is the cylon leader is playing a different game than the other players, and the game they're playing basically uses the other players as pawns. They're trying to set up board situations that will lead down the paths they want to go down. On the other hand the rest of the players don't really get to manipulate the cylon leader at all. They can do things that may end up helping or hurting the cylon leader but they can't get the cylon leader to do what they want them to do and they can rarely even tell if they even are helping or hurting. So the other players pretty much can only ignore the cylon leader, maybe throw them in the brig if they're infiltrating and are forced to brig someone, and hope they don't screw up their game that much.
In the game yesterday Duncan started off with two cards that wanted the humans to win and ended up with 3 human wins cards. So he had to spend the whole game trying to help us win. We got off to a fantastic start with Sara looking at the admiral's loyalty card and outing him as a cylon. The admiral got thrown out the airlock before he even got a turn. In an odd twist the person who threw him out the airlock was actually the other cylon. I'm convinced if that guy had taken any other action we were totally screwed. As it played out it looked really good for the humans, but having to go distance 10 is actually a pretty big deal. We managed to manipulate things such that the cylon fleet actually never jumped back in through a good choice of treachery card plays and destinations. (The new admiral was the other unrevealed cylon and he picked out probably the single best destination in the deck for us... I feel like he may not have understood how the cylon fleet board worked.) And even still we almost lost in several ways. We had 3 centurions on the boarding party track at one point and had to kill them all in one go around the table. We took 6 shots across 3 human player turns and got all 3 of them, thanks to the cylon leader having a calculations card. Then we ended up with 1 food, 2 fuel, and 2 morale when we finally jumped away. We did have 8 population left when we won, but there were 13 cylon raiders in the same location as 10 civilian ships with only 2 vipers for cover so we were pretty close to losing on that one too.
I'm pretty sure if Duncan had two cards for cylon wins he could have easily made the humans lose. 28% of the time he'll have 3 or 4 humans wins cards, so despite everything the other 5 players did there was a 72% chance Duncan could have had the cylons win. It feels like it's hard to accept that as one of the other players? But on the other hand having both cylon cards get dealt out at the start of the game is also brutal and that happens 22% of the time. I want to think BSG is a very skill intensive game, but it is also a game with small numbers of 'dice'. The cylon leader adds in another aspect of random chance the players can't control which may be a bad thing, or it may just be more of the same thing you need to expect out of the game?
One thing I will say is the new cylon leader rule feels very appropriate for the theme of the show. The average human and cylon get jerked around by the cylon leaders all the time! Dance my little puppets, dance!
But is it good for the game? My gut feeling after two plays is I'd probably rather just play a 5 player game. But in the past I would sit out and not play at all to make sure a 5 player game happened and now I'd be player 6 and hope to be the cylon leader! There is also the mutineer option which I haven't used. I'd like to try that out to see how it compares.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Revisiting Cylon Leaders
The 3rd expansion for Battlestar Galactica came out recently and I got a chance to play a game of it today. We had 6 people, which isn't optimal for BSG, but they made even more tweaks in this expansion to try to balance things out more. A mutineer option which pits 2 cylons against 4 humans, but makes one of the humans particularly volatile and forced to either spend the game in the brig or take suboptimal actions every now and then. And a revamp of the cylon leader system. I really liked the idea of the cylon leader when it first came out, but the first implementation had some flaws. So I was eager to see what they'd changed and if it worked any better.
As initially released the cylon leader starts the game as a more powerful revealed cylon. They have abilities, drawbacks, and once per game abilities like any other character. They have the ability to 'infiltrate' the humans and go pretend to be a slightly weaker human character. They can take most of the standard human actions and can do what humans can do, like get thrown in the brig or play positive action cards. To direct the actions the cylon leader takes they would be dealt one of six agenda cards. Each card would indicate which side needed to win (humans or cylons) and extra conditions that needed to be met. The extra conditions were designed such that the cylon leader would want the humans to ultimately win the game but take a lot of damage along the way, or that they'd want the cylons to ultimately win the game but in a trickier way. The idea being that the cylon leader would need to both help and hurt the humans as the game progressed, making the game into a 2.5 v 3.5.
The problem was the extra conditions weren't actually well designed. A couple of them were really trivial, so the game would really shake out as a 3v3 or a 2v4 and not really be a terribly interesting game. It also felt like adding the cylon leader would make the game more fun for that specific person, but was worse for the other players. Possibly because having 1 in 6 or 1 in 3 games just be a blowout was terrible. (It's a similar reason to why I hate the 'extra loyalty card' rule added in the second expansion. Having 2 in 11 games get screwed with only 1 cylon just wasn't very fun when it came up even if it was slightly fairer in the long run.)
What did they do in this expansion? Well, instead of having one deck of 6 cards and giving the cylon leader a single card instead there is a deck with 14 motive cards and you get dealt 4 of them. 2 at the very start of the game, and 2 more during the sleeper phase when the rest of the players get their second loyalty card. Each motive card lists an extra condition on it, and a winning side. In order for the cylon leader to win they need to satisfy at least 3 of their 4 extra conditions, and among the conditions they satisfied they need at least 2 of them to list the correct winning side.
This changes a few things. For one, the cylon leader may not know what side they want to win the game from the beginning. In the game today I was the cylon leader and my initial two cards were a human wins card and a cylon wins card. If my next two cards were human wins then I couldn't have the cylons win the game. On the other hand if they were both cylon wins cards then I couldn't have the humans win the game. So I actually had to play the start of the game right down the middle. I couldn't let one side or the other get too far ahead or I might have no way to win. Assuming the deck is half of each type this situation will come up 54% of the time. On the other hand you'll double up 46% of the time, and doubling up may be really bad for game balance. Can the humans win if the cylon leader starts with a pair of cylon wins cards? I feel like it's going to be really hard for them, which may be terrible...
Another thing that changes is it becomes a lot harder for the other players to figure out what the cylon leader is trying to do. With only 6 potential options in the past it wasn't that hard to figure out the goal of the cylon leader by deduction. Now there are 1001 different options for what the cylon leader could hold. Maybe you could piece together one or two of them, but maybe not. This should make it harder for one side or the other to spite out the cylon leader, which I like.
The end result of the game today was I got dealt 2 cards for each side. I managed to achieve 3 of the 4 cards (and was really close to the 4th one) and the right side ended up winning so I won too. Woo! It felt more reasonable than most of my games with the old cylon leader rules. I spent the early game trying to keep either side from getting too far ahead, and trying to work towards the two conditions I knew about. In this case it was lowering population to 6 or less and making sure the humans jumped at least distance 7. So I was trying to keep the humans from falling behind early, but I was also trying to work over their population and was trying to slow them down once it really looked like there were no starting cylons.
But is it actually a good thing in the long run? I'll need to see it play out a few more times. In particular, I need to see what happens when the cylon leader gets dealt a pair of 'cylon wins' cards from the start. I also need to see how it plays out when I'm a regular player in the game with a cylon leader. Is it still the case where being the cylon leader is more fun, but being in a game with someone else as the cylon leader is less fun? Would it be reasonable to force the first two cards to be one of each, and then shuffle the remaining 12 cards up to deal out the last 2? This would certainly make it even harder for the cylon leader to win, but would prevent the blowouts I fear. Or maybe the conditions on the 'cylon win' cards are harsh enough that even with 2 of them at the start you need to play both sides? Only more tries will tell. At the very least I think it's worth future testing. Which is a step in the right direction, since using the old cylon leader rules was not very appealing to me.
As initially released the cylon leader starts the game as a more powerful revealed cylon. They have abilities, drawbacks, and once per game abilities like any other character. They have the ability to 'infiltrate' the humans and go pretend to be a slightly weaker human character. They can take most of the standard human actions and can do what humans can do, like get thrown in the brig or play positive action cards. To direct the actions the cylon leader takes they would be dealt one of six agenda cards. Each card would indicate which side needed to win (humans or cylons) and extra conditions that needed to be met. The extra conditions were designed such that the cylon leader would want the humans to ultimately win the game but take a lot of damage along the way, or that they'd want the cylons to ultimately win the game but in a trickier way. The idea being that the cylon leader would need to both help and hurt the humans as the game progressed, making the game into a 2.5 v 3.5.
The problem was the extra conditions weren't actually well designed. A couple of them were really trivial, so the game would really shake out as a 3v3 or a 2v4 and not really be a terribly interesting game. It also felt like adding the cylon leader would make the game more fun for that specific person, but was worse for the other players. Possibly because having 1 in 6 or 1 in 3 games just be a blowout was terrible. (It's a similar reason to why I hate the 'extra loyalty card' rule added in the second expansion. Having 2 in 11 games get screwed with only 1 cylon just wasn't very fun when it came up even if it was slightly fairer in the long run.)
What did they do in this expansion? Well, instead of having one deck of 6 cards and giving the cylon leader a single card instead there is a deck with 14 motive cards and you get dealt 4 of them. 2 at the very start of the game, and 2 more during the sleeper phase when the rest of the players get their second loyalty card. Each motive card lists an extra condition on it, and a winning side. In order for the cylon leader to win they need to satisfy at least 3 of their 4 extra conditions, and among the conditions they satisfied they need at least 2 of them to list the correct winning side.
This changes a few things. For one, the cylon leader may not know what side they want to win the game from the beginning. In the game today I was the cylon leader and my initial two cards were a human wins card and a cylon wins card. If my next two cards were human wins then I couldn't have the cylons win the game. On the other hand if they were both cylon wins cards then I couldn't have the humans win the game. So I actually had to play the start of the game right down the middle. I couldn't let one side or the other get too far ahead or I might have no way to win. Assuming the deck is half of each type this situation will come up 54% of the time. On the other hand you'll double up 46% of the time, and doubling up may be really bad for game balance. Can the humans win if the cylon leader starts with a pair of cylon wins cards? I feel like it's going to be really hard for them, which may be terrible...
Another thing that changes is it becomes a lot harder for the other players to figure out what the cylon leader is trying to do. With only 6 potential options in the past it wasn't that hard to figure out the goal of the cylon leader by deduction. Now there are 1001 different options for what the cylon leader could hold. Maybe you could piece together one or two of them, but maybe not. This should make it harder for one side or the other to spite out the cylon leader, which I like.
The end result of the game today was I got dealt 2 cards for each side. I managed to achieve 3 of the 4 cards (and was really close to the 4th one) and the right side ended up winning so I won too. Woo! It felt more reasonable than most of my games with the old cylon leader rules. I spent the early game trying to keep either side from getting too far ahead, and trying to work towards the two conditions I knew about. In this case it was lowering population to 6 or less and making sure the humans jumped at least distance 7. So I was trying to keep the humans from falling behind early, but I was also trying to work over their population and was trying to slow them down once it really looked like there were no starting cylons.
But is it actually a good thing in the long run? I'll need to see it play out a few more times. In particular, I need to see what happens when the cylon leader gets dealt a pair of 'cylon wins' cards from the start. I also need to see how it plays out when I'm a regular player in the game with a cylon leader. Is it still the case where being the cylon leader is more fun, but being in a game with someone else as the cylon leader is less fun? Would it be reasonable to force the first two cards to be one of each, and then shuffle the remaining 12 cards up to deal out the last 2? This would certainly make it even harder for the cylon leader to win, but would prevent the blowouts I fear. Or maybe the conditions on the 'cylon win' cards are harsh enough that even with 2 of them at the start you need to play both sides? Only more tries will tell. At the very least I think it's worth future testing. Which is a step in the right direction, since using the old cylon leader rules was not very appealing to me.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: 2-Player Variant?
Snuggles commented on my revealed cylon post by saying he thinks the chaos spread by an unrevealed cylon is actually the biggest thing and he's strongly opposed to having both cylons reveal early. He posited the thought experiment of considering a game where the cylons start out revealed, and he asserted the humans would win almost every time. I feel the opposite, and that the cylons would win every time. I spent some time in the tub last night thinking about how to test this out. The easiest way would be to get 5 people to agree to a test game, but I've rarely found 5 people around to play an actual game of Battlestar Galactica. I don't know that I would even want to convert one of those games into a test game, and I doubt I could convince 4 other people to do it either.
On the other hand, if the cylons start revealed there's not really any need to have 5 people at all. It's a lot like Scotland Yard at that point... Ostensibly a 6 player game, but actually a 2 player game. BSG has a little bit of extra stuff going on (the humans get an advantage by knowing precisely what cards will be thrown in instead of having to use the 'little' or 'lot' of help explanations) but once you remove the randomness from who is on which team you get a pretty reasonable two player game. One with some wonky book keeping (needing to keep 3 separate hands and turn order), but probably still reasonable.
What sort of rules modification would you need? I'd think the following would be a good start...
On the other hand, if the cylons start revealed there's not really any need to have 5 people at all. It's a lot like Scotland Yard at that point... Ostensibly a 6 player game, but actually a 2 player game. BSG has a little bit of extra stuff going on (the humans get an advantage by knowing precisely what cards will be thrown in instead of having to use the 'little' or 'lot' of help explanations) but once you remove the randomness from who is on which team you get a pretty reasonable two player game. One with some wonky book keeping (needing to keep 3 separate hands and turn order), but probably still reasonable.
What sort of rules modification would you need? I'd think the following would be a good start...
- Draft characters in order, human-cylon-human-cylon-human. Then randomly choose two of those five players to become cylons. This keeps the humans from overloading with strictly awesome for the human characters. I'd prevent the cylon from picking two supports, which means the humans are guaranteed to get to pick a second pilot with their last choice. My main reason for setting it up this way is to keep the human team from always being Helo-Starbuck-Apollo-Kat-Roslin, or whatever the optimal split is. This way the human has to decide if they want to deny the Boomer (by first picking a pilot) or lock in the Helo (the cylon will likely pick a military leader second pick if the human starts with a pilot, probably Gaeta).
- Turn order would be in the order drafted. So some games you'd get the cylons acting in sequence. Other games you'd get them split up.
- I'd put some sort of 'announced punting' rule in. The first time a human player could add cards to a skill check the human has to tell the cylon if they're going to throw any cards in with future players. This is to try to bring back some of the 'secret hand' stuff from the main game. Though with the cylons drawing 2 cards per round and a max of 3 skill checks they may well have a card to throw in every time anyway.
- Start the cylons on the resurrection ship with a super crisis each. I'd also start players 2-5 with 3 cards from their initial skill-set. If the first player is a cylon they only get 1 card at the start of that turn, which hurts, but they get to go first, which is pretty sweet. Launching a super crisis while the humans have drawn a total of 9 cards as a team could be pretty hot.
Depending on who is right between Snuggles and I you may need other rules tweaks to make the game not be an auto-win one way or the other. Options to do that would be...
If the cylons need to be buffed:
- Deal out two 'you are a cylon' cards at the start of the game and resolve them to get some initial damage in there.
- Reduce some of the starting dials.
- Go back to the old version of the cylon ship space which lets you play a crisis by removing the jump prep icon again.
If the humans need to be buffed:
- Don't start the cylons with super crisis cards.
- Let the humans draft 3 characters of their choice and just randomize turn order/cylon seating.
- Let the human player have one hand containing a max of 30 cards. (This has the advantage of reducing bookkeeping issues, but is a really serious buff.)
- Add free resources to the starting dials.
- Make it easier to shoot centurions?
- Some sort of tweaks to allow repairing to be more reasonable? Though I think the answer to this problem is just to draft the Chief as a character.
Anyone see any flaws in this plan? Other suggestions for rules that need to be tweaked? Own a copy of the game and want to play?
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: Revealed Cylon Changes
Andrew commented on Facebook that he thought Sara was a human because she didn't choose to reveal as a cylon. Now, I've long asserted that a cylon should reveal as soon as possible, and I feel like I've said that a lot to Andrew over the years, so maybe I've brainwashed him into that line of thought. If that was true, and if there wasn't a shelf, then I can see the logic path that leads to executing Byung. Byung did have a full hand of cards, and if he was a cylon then he probably could have done some damage that would be prevented by executing him. But is it true? What exactly changes when a cylon reveals, and are they actually better off revealing at the earliest opportunity?
- An unrevealed cylon draws 5 cards at the start of their turn. A revealed cylon only draws 2. Skill cards are worth 2.2 on average, so a revealed cylon draws 6.6 points of skill power less each time around the table.
- An unrevealed cylon can throw any number of cards into a skill check. A revealed cylon can only throw 1. This really means that a revealed cylon can't cause any given check to fail, but their existence does put extra pressure on the humans. Every skill check is potentially a little harder. An unrevealed cylon can pretty much guarantee any given skill check will fail, assuming they draw the right colour of cards.
- An unrevealed cylon is restricted to certain card types. A revealed cylon can draw any colour card, including treachery. Unfortunately the treachery deck sucks, and is only worth 1.8 on average with a max of 3. The colour split only really matters if the unrevealed cylon has a very restricted colour set. Yellow and green tend to be positive, so it's harder to make a check fail if that's all you draw. Someone who draws lots of red and blue cards is in a great position to make skill checks fail.
- An unrevealed cylon has access to their character abilities, which can include some truly powerful once per game abilities. If Cally reveals without executing a human first it's probably a huge mistake, for example.
- A revealed cylon gets access to the cylon board spaces. Generally speaking the cylon board spaces will inflict more damage than the human board spaces. Way more damage. Most human spaces can only help the humans along. Probably the best you can do is draw extra cards or play 'launch scout' cards.
- An unrevealed cylon can hold a title. The admiral gets to choose the next destination and controls the nukes, both of which are very powerful abilities. The president can potentially draw cards to throw people in the brig. The CAG can't really hurt the humans, and they have to be pretty blatant to refuse to help the humans, but it's still something.
- An unrevealed cylon who plays it straight seeds potential confusion and disruption amongst the humans. As soon as the cylons have revealed the rest of the humans gain complete trust with each other. This has to have some benefit, but it's really hard to quantify and depends on the paranoia level of the other players. It seems like staying unrevealed has the potential to put Andrew on tilt, for example!
- An unrevealed cylon can be targeted by actions which hurt humans. They can be thrown in the brig, they can be sent to sick bay, and they can be executed. They can be forced to discard cards. If you've played it really straight you probably won't be abnormally hit by these, but if you've been at all shady you might well get hit. I've often said it's just fine to force the humans to waste a bunch of cards throwing you in the brig, but there are crisis cards with 'failure' conditions which force the humans to do bad things to one of their own. Having an unrevealed cylon as a target for these penalties is awesome for the humans. They don't need to pass the skill check, they get to hurt the cylons, and they don't get hurt themselves.
- A cylon that reveals on their own accord (not executed or in the brig) gets to use a powerful special ability when they reveal, they get to draw a powerful super crisis card, and they get to keep 3 cards from their hand. A cylon that reveals from the brig still gets the super crisis card. A cylon that is executed has to discard their hand and gets nothing special.
- Cylons don't get a crisis card at the end of their turn. This both slows down the damage done to the humans and slows down their progress towards game end. The lack of jump prep (which is apparently on 67% of the base game cards) is the biggest reason I've always wanted to reveal early. But is the extra damage done from those crisis worth it? On the one hand they're going to need the same number of jump prep to end the game so they're going to hit the same amount of damaging crisis cards along the way. As such revealing has to be good, because you can throw non-crisis damage their way. On the other hand by spreading those crisis cards out over more rounds around the table the humans get to draw more cards to use passing them.
Unrevealed cylons actually have the advantage in almost all of these bullet points. Some of the advantages are pretty big, even. Holding the admiral title, using your once per game ability, and being able to make a skill check fail are all huge. On the other hand the advantages you gain for actually revealing are really powerful. The revealing ability tends to do at least as much damage as failing a crisis, and the super crisis cards are often worth the damage of a couple crisis cards as well. Slowing the game down by denying jump prep is actually good. I think staying unrevealed to sow discord sounds really good, but doesn't really work out. If you do minor damage while staying unrevealed you risk a crisis coming up which brigs/executes a human player and then you're in big trouble. Getting executed for free is brutal. Even getting thrown out the airlock is pretty bad.
I feel like in a game with inexperienced players, where you can do minor damage and get away with it, or where you can really making someone else seem suspicious then it can be worth sticking around. If you can manage to stick around and cause multiple crisis skill checks to fail it'll be awesome for you. But I'd always be keeping my eye out for a way to do some blatant damage and reveal as soon as possible.
I actually wonder how viable it would be to claim to be a cylon right after the sleeper phase. In a 'hey, other cylon, whoever you are, executive orders me so I can use my once per game and reveal' sort of way. The best would be if you did that, were human, and got someone to executive orders you. And then you threw them out the airlock! Mwahaha!
At any rate... Do I think Sara should have revealed as her very first action? No, I don't. She hadn't had any opportunity to do any damage at all on her way out. She was Baltar, so she didn't have any good abilities to use (I think the cylon detector was broken), so maybe not? But sticking around for one turn around the table in order to cause a skill check to fail seems pretty reasonable. She was also president, so she had the potential to dig for 'brig you' quorum cards and she could make bad choices on 'president chooses' cards. The biggest thing, I think, is none of the other players had even had a chance to make obvious pro-human actions. There was a ton of opportunity for chaos and discord still. Especially with Byung and Andrew at the table. It would be a little different if I wasn't already revealed as well. Getting the first cylon revealed to slow the humans down a little and start using cylon actions is very good, and it doesn't cost you the chaos potential. So I probably reveal in her spot as the first cylon, but not as the second one. But the first chance I had to hurt the humans, I'd be all over it. (She eventually revealed to make use of her cylon reveal action, costing Andrew 7 skill cards which was pretty great.)
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: Favoured Side
A few months ago back at the Niagara Boardgaming Weekend Sara asked me while in a teaching game of Battlestar Galactica which side was favoured to win. I was playing something else at the time so I gave a pretty basic response: cylons win more when people are first starting; humans win more when people know what they're doing. I didn't elaborate any more (I wasn't asked to do so, and I was busy) but the idea has been spinning around in my crazy little brain ever since. I played a game of BSG last week with Sara, Duncan, Andrew, and Byung which the cylons won, but I feel like Andrew made a bizarre human play that pretty much caused it to happen. He figured I'd post about it, and I don't want to let him down, so I'll try to weave the two together...
At any rate, BSG is a game where any individual player can be in one of three states, each with their own goals and decisions to be made. You can either be a human, a hidden cylon, or a revealed cylon. The play behind each of these states evolves as you get experience with the game, and I feel like these evolutions are what causes the favoured side in the game to change over time.
First off, human players are at their very core playing a resource management game. You have access to a lot of different resources and have to make decisions about which ones to lose at which points in time. The whole goal for the humans is to survive until the end of the game. The biggest resources humans have to contend with, and one most people don't really think about, is cards in hand. Frequently over the course of the game the humans are given options to trade cards in hand for other resources to prolong the game. I've found that rookie players often feel like they need to try to pass every skill check that comes up and will throw cards into lost causes. Alternatively, and just as bad, they'll throw way too much into a skill check. If you need to get your total up to 10 it's great to end up in the 10-12 range. It's fine to end up around 15, or around -5. It's terrible to end up at 7, or at 25. When you end up at 7 you've thrown a bunch of cards away and still lost your skill check. At 25 you've thrown even more cards away. Giving up, staying at -5, is actually fine. You're going to fail some of the skill checks in the game. You can still win. So there's a lot of play involved in figuring out when to pass a skill check and when to intentionally fail it. New players don't have this ability. They won't be able to predict whether a skill check will end up at 0, 7, 12, or 20 without their help. They aren't going to know which resources are critical to protect and which can be sacrificed for the common good. A game with a lot of new human players is therefore going to be more inefficient with their resources than a game with a lot of experienced human players, and efficiency is pretty much everything for the humans. You can use up most of everything and still win, you just can't go critical on any one thing.
Revealed cylon players tend to have a pretty easy job regardless of their game experience. There are very limited numbers of actions they can take, and a limit impact they can have on skill checks. For the most part they exist merely to slow the game down and bleed off human resources. You can certainly be a better revealed cylon if you know what you're doing, but the difference between a passable revealed cylon and an awesome one isn't very big. For the most part it's pretty hard to target down a specific human resource so the revealed cylon is just trying to do damage anywhere they can, and that's an easy thing to grasp. Especially when pretty much anything you do will cause some damage somewhere! Certainly some games get won or lost based on the revealed cylon being able to shift gears at the right time and focus on a critical weakness, don't get me wrong... But a mediocre revealed cylon isn't apt to make big mistakes. A mediocre human player can make huge mistakes.
Unrevealed cylons are tricky. You'd think having a lot of experience with the game would have a big impact on how much secret damage you can inflict as an unrevealed cylon but I haven't found that to be the case at all. The thing is that as the humans gain experience with the game they become better and better at noticing strange plays. It's the start of your turn and you're the CAG... If no one knows what they're doing it's easy for you to 'forget' to use the CAG special ability. Probably everyone else will forget too! And if they notice you can easily feign ignorance and then do the action. I can't pull that off with experienced players. If I'd tried to 'forget' to use my CAG ability the jig would have been up. I probably wouldn't have gotten executed for it, but the spotlight would be on and I'd never be able to get away with anything. In the game last week I actually gave the CAG title away so I wouldn't get caught using it poorly. (As Apollo I could also use Duncan's CAG activation to reveal out of turn!) But now that I've done that once, I don't know that I can do it again. Now, maybe I'm just bad at being an unrevealed cylon but I find my best play is just to do blatant damage and reveal ASAP. Flipping up more jump prep on crisis cards only helps the humans out, I feel. Regardless, I think that the humans gain more in cylon detecting with experience than an unrevealed cylon gains in stealthiness. At least in games I play I find the unrevealed cylons have to go to great lengths to take pro-human actions or I'll sniff them out.
Which reminds me of a game a long time ago at Andrew's place where a brand new player was an unrevealed cylon. She made brutal misplay after misplay which hurt the humans. Everyone else at the table was convinced she was just new to the game and making mistakes. I knew she was a cylon, but I was playing as the cylon leader who wanted the humans to lose so I saw no reason to rain on her parade. It was glorious, and the humans got obliterated. But if the humans had more experience with the game at the time, or if she had more experience and couldn't play the newbie card, it likely wouldn't have worked at all.
My feeling is the humans get a lot better at managing their limited resources and at uncovering unrevealed cylons as they gain experience. This in turn makes the job of an unrevealed cylon harder! (Especially if you take into account human players who will track card colours in people's hands and in the destiny deck.) A revealed cylon can get better, but not much better, and the unrevealed cylons actually feel worse to me in an experienced game than in a newbie game. All of these things combine to make it more likely the humans will win with experienced players, and I think they contribute enough to shift the balance of power from the cylons to the humans.
And yet, the cylons won the game last week. And not by a little bit... Sara and I were in a dominating position. Four damaged sections of Galactica, 3 boarded centurions, and all four resources in the red. I don't know if the humans would have won one way or the other, but Andrew made certain they couldn't win. The sleeper phase went off at the end of Byung's turn, giving everyone a new loyalty card. I was already a revealed cylon at this point, so I gave my extra card to Andrew who was the admiral at the time. Duncan was next, and used an Ionian Nebula character to throw Andrew in the brig, taking the admiral title. Duncan then put out a new Nebula character, into the brig, and could either make Andrew discard his hand or let him out of the brig. Duncan then took a fairly human action and ended his turn. Sara went next, drew two Quorom cards, and said go. No skill checks came up on either turn. Andrew was next, found that Duncan had let him out of the brig, and decided that meant Duncan was human. Sara hadn't revealed, so obviously she was human. Therefore Byung was a cylon. So Andrew threw him out the air lock. Andrew spent 5 cards to pull it off and managed to convince Duncan that this was a good idea so Duncan chipped in a card as well. Byung was not a cylon. This cost the humans a morale, and it cost them all the cards in Byung's hand, and it cost them the 6 cards they spent. I think Sara and I also threw in a card. All told it was something like a 14 card loss, and a resource lost, and Andrew didn't take a real action on his turn. Oh, and we were playing with the 'set aside' loyalty card, so Andrew gave me a 50-50 chance of getting a cylon friend if it happened to be the shelf that was the extra cylon.
Byung hadn't taken a single action. Not that he hadn't taken a pro-human action... He hadn't done anything at all! I was convinced Andrew had to be a cylon because he took that action, but no. It turned out Sara had just punted her first turn in the hopes of getting a good skill check to sabotage before revealing. I'd say it worked out pretty well!
I was the next player in line, and since Andrew had killed Byung instead of letting Duncan go defend the space areas I was able to take my turn to shoot down 3 civilian ships. Which in turn cost the humans enough population that Duncan couldn't pick a far away planet on their next jump as it would have cost too much pop to pull off. Which gave the cylons enough time to decimate all the human resources. The game goes very differently if Andrew doesn't throw away a ton of human resources for no reason. But even though I had an awesome start to the game (I was revealed with 2 base stars in play and their jump prep track was still at the start) it was by no means in the bag.
At any rate, BSG is a game where any individual player can be in one of three states, each with their own goals and decisions to be made. You can either be a human, a hidden cylon, or a revealed cylon. The play behind each of these states evolves as you get experience with the game, and I feel like these evolutions are what causes the favoured side in the game to change over time.
First off, human players are at their very core playing a resource management game. You have access to a lot of different resources and have to make decisions about which ones to lose at which points in time. The whole goal for the humans is to survive until the end of the game. The biggest resources humans have to contend with, and one most people don't really think about, is cards in hand. Frequently over the course of the game the humans are given options to trade cards in hand for other resources to prolong the game. I've found that rookie players often feel like they need to try to pass every skill check that comes up and will throw cards into lost causes. Alternatively, and just as bad, they'll throw way too much into a skill check. If you need to get your total up to 10 it's great to end up in the 10-12 range. It's fine to end up around 15, or around -5. It's terrible to end up at 7, or at 25. When you end up at 7 you've thrown a bunch of cards away and still lost your skill check. At 25 you've thrown even more cards away. Giving up, staying at -5, is actually fine. You're going to fail some of the skill checks in the game. You can still win. So there's a lot of play involved in figuring out when to pass a skill check and when to intentionally fail it. New players don't have this ability. They won't be able to predict whether a skill check will end up at 0, 7, 12, or 20 without their help. They aren't going to know which resources are critical to protect and which can be sacrificed for the common good. A game with a lot of new human players is therefore going to be more inefficient with their resources than a game with a lot of experienced human players, and efficiency is pretty much everything for the humans. You can use up most of everything and still win, you just can't go critical on any one thing.
Revealed cylon players tend to have a pretty easy job regardless of their game experience. There are very limited numbers of actions they can take, and a limit impact they can have on skill checks. For the most part they exist merely to slow the game down and bleed off human resources. You can certainly be a better revealed cylon if you know what you're doing, but the difference between a passable revealed cylon and an awesome one isn't very big. For the most part it's pretty hard to target down a specific human resource so the revealed cylon is just trying to do damage anywhere they can, and that's an easy thing to grasp. Especially when pretty much anything you do will cause some damage somewhere! Certainly some games get won or lost based on the revealed cylon being able to shift gears at the right time and focus on a critical weakness, don't get me wrong... But a mediocre revealed cylon isn't apt to make big mistakes. A mediocre human player can make huge mistakes.
Unrevealed cylons are tricky. You'd think having a lot of experience with the game would have a big impact on how much secret damage you can inflict as an unrevealed cylon but I haven't found that to be the case at all. The thing is that as the humans gain experience with the game they become better and better at noticing strange plays. It's the start of your turn and you're the CAG... If no one knows what they're doing it's easy for you to 'forget' to use the CAG special ability. Probably everyone else will forget too! And if they notice you can easily feign ignorance and then do the action. I can't pull that off with experienced players. If I'd tried to 'forget' to use my CAG ability the jig would have been up. I probably wouldn't have gotten executed for it, but the spotlight would be on and I'd never be able to get away with anything. In the game last week I actually gave the CAG title away so I wouldn't get caught using it poorly. (As Apollo I could also use Duncan's CAG activation to reveal out of turn!) But now that I've done that once, I don't know that I can do it again. Now, maybe I'm just bad at being an unrevealed cylon but I find my best play is just to do blatant damage and reveal ASAP. Flipping up more jump prep on crisis cards only helps the humans out, I feel. Regardless, I think that the humans gain more in cylon detecting with experience than an unrevealed cylon gains in stealthiness. At least in games I play I find the unrevealed cylons have to go to great lengths to take pro-human actions or I'll sniff them out.
Which reminds me of a game a long time ago at Andrew's place where a brand new player was an unrevealed cylon. She made brutal misplay after misplay which hurt the humans. Everyone else at the table was convinced she was just new to the game and making mistakes. I knew she was a cylon, but I was playing as the cylon leader who wanted the humans to lose so I saw no reason to rain on her parade. It was glorious, and the humans got obliterated. But if the humans had more experience with the game at the time, or if she had more experience and couldn't play the newbie card, it likely wouldn't have worked at all.
My feeling is the humans get a lot better at managing their limited resources and at uncovering unrevealed cylons as they gain experience. This in turn makes the job of an unrevealed cylon harder! (Especially if you take into account human players who will track card colours in people's hands and in the destiny deck.) A revealed cylon can get better, but not much better, and the unrevealed cylons actually feel worse to me in an experienced game than in a newbie game. All of these things combine to make it more likely the humans will win with experienced players, and I think they contribute enough to shift the balance of power from the cylons to the humans.
And yet, the cylons won the game last week. And not by a little bit... Sara and I were in a dominating position. Four damaged sections of Galactica, 3 boarded centurions, and all four resources in the red. I don't know if the humans would have won one way or the other, but Andrew made certain they couldn't win. The sleeper phase went off at the end of Byung's turn, giving everyone a new loyalty card. I was already a revealed cylon at this point, so I gave my extra card to Andrew who was the admiral at the time. Duncan was next, and used an Ionian Nebula character to throw Andrew in the brig, taking the admiral title. Duncan then put out a new Nebula character, into the brig, and could either make Andrew discard his hand or let him out of the brig. Duncan then took a fairly human action and ended his turn. Sara went next, drew two Quorom cards, and said go. No skill checks came up on either turn. Andrew was next, found that Duncan had let him out of the brig, and decided that meant Duncan was human. Sara hadn't revealed, so obviously she was human. Therefore Byung was a cylon. So Andrew threw him out the air lock. Andrew spent 5 cards to pull it off and managed to convince Duncan that this was a good idea so Duncan chipped in a card as well. Byung was not a cylon. This cost the humans a morale, and it cost them all the cards in Byung's hand, and it cost them the 6 cards they spent. I think Sara and I also threw in a card. All told it was something like a 14 card loss, and a resource lost, and Andrew didn't take a real action on his turn. Oh, and we were playing with the 'set aside' loyalty card, so Andrew gave me a 50-50 chance of getting a cylon friend if it happened to be the shelf that was the extra cylon.
Byung hadn't taken a single action. Not that he hadn't taken a pro-human action... He hadn't done anything at all! I was convinced Andrew had to be a cylon because he took that action, but no. It turned out Sara had just punted her first turn in the hopes of getting a good skill check to sabotage before revealing. I'd say it worked out pretty well!
I was the next player in line, and since Andrew had killed Byung instead of letting Duncan go defend the space areas I was able to take my turn to shoot down 3 civilian ships. Which in turn cost the humans enough population that Duncan couldn't pick a far away planet on their next jump as it would have cost too much pop to pull off. Which gave the cylons enough time to decimate all the human resources. The game goes very differently if Andrew doesn't throw away a ton of human resources for no reason. But even though I had an awesome start to the game (I was revealed with 2 base stars in play and their jump prep track was still at the start) it was by no means in the bag.
Tuesday, April 09, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: One Cylon
A couple times in the last month Sara and Duncan had me over to play Battlestar Galactica. They have both expansions for the game and play with a mix of the rules variants from the expansions. In particular the games have used Pegasus, treachery cards, the cylon fleet/CAG/super vipers, and the new method of building the loyalty deck. They have not used the conflicted loyalties or the final five loyalty cards. Prior to playing these games there had been a Facebook thread discussing a wonky game a few months ago that only had one cylon which had people suggesting rules variants to 'fix' the issue. Having never been in a game with only one cylon I didn't really have anything to add to the discussion at the time.
It turns out both of the games I played recently also only had one cylon. Both games were trivial victories for the human players. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise since it feels like a 4-1 split should be heavily weighted towards the humans. A 3-2 split is supposed to be somewhat balanced, after all, and a 4-1 split is a massive power swing. It's hard to really quantify, but you're going from a game where there are 50% more human players to one where there are 300% more human players. In both cases I think the cylon player didn't play perfectly, but the humans won by such huge margins both times that I don't think even perfect play would have been anywhere close to good enough. In both games the single cylon appeared in the sleeper phase, which is even better for the humans, but I feel like even a single early cylon doesn't have a ton of play. I think that game isn't unwinnable by any stretch, but it feels like it should slant heavily in the humans favour.
I think part of the problem is with the way the game is 'balanced' in general. I feel like the game is built such that the expected value over a long series of games will result in a relatively even split of wins between humans and cylons, but that any individual game can suffer from uninteresting blowouts. Assume for a minute that a 3-2 split is tilted slightly in favour of the cylons. Then throwing in the occasional 4-1 split can help make the long term balance between the sides even. The problem with this fix is that the 4-1 games aren't nearly as fun as the 3-2 games. I have a similar problem with the cylon leader mechanic. I think including the cylon leader makes the game more fun for whoever is the cylon leader but can make individual games less fun for everyone else. So if you played enough games, and let everyone rotate in as the cylon leader, and everyone was happy with tons of fun 1 in 6 games then it's fine. But if you play sporadically, or if some people don't like being the cylon leader, or if people want a constant fun level it's pretty bad.
At any rate, I think the ruleset we've been using is flawed. So do the other people who were playing most of those games, since apparently they've had a real rash of 1 cylon games. It'll happen 18% of the time (unless the humans play suboptimally) so it's not actually that rare of a thing. I want to fix this issue. I think the best way to approach the problem is to identify what is added to the game by using the new loyalty deck rule and then trying to find a solution that keeps those additions while reducing or eliminating the 1 cylon problem.
So, what is the new loyalty deck rule exactly, and what does it accomplish? The original rules for a 5 player game involved shuffling 2 cylon cards in with 8 not-a-cylon cards, shuffling them up, and dealing one at random to each player at the start of the game and another at the mid point of the game. If you have a cylon card you're a cylon. If you don't, then you are a human. There's a rule in place to handle what happens if the same player gets dealt both cylon cards (they can give the extra one away) so after the second set of cards was dealt out it was a guarantee that you'd have 2 cylons and 3 humans. The new loyalty deck involves shuffling 2 cylon cards with 9 not-a-cylon cards. Deal them out the same as before, but you have one extra card lying around. The twist here is that if someone gets killed off they get to respawn as a new character, but they have to get a new loyalty card which is either the set aside card or a random not-a-cylon card.
This twist is the key, and accomplishes a couple of things. The first thing it does is allow the conflicted loyalties cards to work out. The second is it prevents the human players from obtaining perfect information regarding the cylon status of specific players, in particular the admiral. You see, in the first expansion they added an action to execute another player. When this happens they have to reveal if they are a cylon or not. If they are a cylon they become a revealed cylon and give away their other loyalty card. If they are not a cylon they reveal all of their loyalty cards, the humans lose one morale, and the player respawns as a new character. A new, guaranteed to be human, player. It quickly became known, at least at Andrew's place, that a strong tactic was to execute the admiral right after the new loyalty cards are dealt out regardless of how shifty they've been. If they were a cylon you desperately needed to get rid of them since a cylon admiral can be a real disaster. If they were a human then you lost a morale, which sucked, but it let you know for sure that the respawned player was human. And if they were smart (and we were) they'd choose someone who would get assigned the admiral title when they respawned. This would guarantee that the admiral was human, which ensures that you always jump to a pro-human location, and that you get the right choice made on the 'admiral chooses' crisis cards, and that you have access to the nukes when you need them. It also gives the humans a safe target for the executive orders card, so they can go hit the FTL button when needed.
Guaranteeing a human admiral is a huge deal, and there wasn't a logical argument the admiral could make to avoid this from happening. As a human admiral I'd advocate for executing myself, because of how awesome it was for all the human players to gain the information. I actually was strongly in favour of executing as many people as possible. You gain information each time you do it, each time you miss you get more likely to execute a cylon the next time you do it, and I'd much rather execute a human (and lose a morale) than send a human to the brig which I feel sets the humans back too much. Losing 1 morale and a few cards is nothing compared to lose out on jump prep from crisis cards. It made it hard to play as a cylon admiral, since if I was human I'd be trying to convince people to execute me!
With the new loyalty deck this is no longer true. When you execute the admiral, and they were human, they're going to respawn as a human 50% of the time (new not-a-cylon card) but they'll respawn as the set aside card the other 50% of the time. 18% of the time that card is a cylon card, so you could well be trading in a human admiral for a cylon admiral. Only 9% of the time, to be fair, but it's still a chance. And since they were only 18% to be a cylon admiral anyway (assuming they were human going into the sleeper phase) you're not actually making a huge gain. Losing the morale, the action, and the cards to not get perfect information is rough. Add in the fact that you may be throwing away a guaranteed human win (when the cylon card is set aside) by getting that card back into play and it becomes a bad idea, I think. If the admiral makes a sketchy play then you should absolutely still kill him, don't get me wrong, but it's no longer the strictly right play to execute the admiral as the first action after the sleeper phase.
The problem here is you're removing a strong human tactic by replacing it with an even stronger human tactic. Having the game end with a 4-1 split is super strong! It's so strong that even if you're using the conflicted loyalties cards I think the humans don't want to achieve those goals early on just to preserve the chances of keeping the 4-1 split! Inexperienced human players will still work at them, and it will cost them, but I don't think balancing the game around people making mistakes is a good idea. And regardless, we're not using that rule anyway.
So the new loyalty deck exists primarily to increase uncertainty. Someone who respawns can't be trusted for sure because they might be a cylon! I like this idea in general, but the specific implementation is bad. It's too easy to keep the extra loyalty card out of the game entirely, which gives the humans an 18% instant win. I do think the goal of keeping an easy human admiral out of the game is a good one. How else can we solve that problem without just throwing the humans a win 18% of the time?
We could force the set aside loyalty card to come into the game at some point. Duncan suggested giving a revealed cylon the option to give another player that loyalty card. Having it cost a full action seems a little weak, though. Maybe tack it on as a bonus to one of the other cylon actions? Whichever of the 4 is the 'worst' one? Maybe if you activate the 'give a crisis' space, and don't play the super crisis, you can give the set aside card out unseen? This way the cylon player gets to decide if the humans can have a safe execute or not.
Alternatively, you could force the card to go out, randomly, after a set distance. Say if you hit distance 7 or more? This could be really unfortunate for whoever turns into a cylon at distance 8, though. They'd go from what seemed like a sure win to a sure loss. So maybe you'd need to do it at distance 6+? Then to get screwed the humans would need to jump from 5 to 8 in one go. And in that case they're probably going to win anyway? On the plus side this would open up one more time to accuse people of being cylons, which is one of the best parts of the game.
An idea I suggested after out last game was to reassign titles instantly when someone dies without waiting for them to respawn first and remove the new loyalty deck rule entirely. So if you execute the human admiral they'll come back as a guaranteed human player, but they won't be the admiral. That will pass to one of the other players instead, who is 50-50 to be a cylon. (Assuming no double-cylon action... In which case they should reveal and give the other card to the new admiral anyway!) So while the humans can guarantee a human player, they can't guarantee a human with a title. Not without putting in even more effort, by then executing the new admiral too. Or tossing him in the brig, I guess.
Another option would be to make executions harsher. I feel like this plan makes it so the humans really want to avoid executions and the cylons really want to pop one off. Like if you lost 2 morale for executing a human with a title or something like that. Make it bad enough that it isn't an auto-do for the humans.
One idea I had while waiting for the bus is to build an extra loyalty deck. Stick 3 not-a-cylon cards and a 3rd cylon card into a pile and shuffle them up after the sleeper phase. Then if a human gets executed, give them one of these cards. This makes executions into a very scary proposition. 25% chance that the game becomes 2-3 instead of 3-2, which is very, very bad for the humans. It also adds some uncertainty back in. The new character who respawns might be a cylon! Again, this makes it so cylons really want to see humans get executed. And probably ends up skewing the game too much the other way when it happens.
Maybe use the extra loyalty deck from above, but only give one out to someone who respawns with a title? Then all the crisis cards and such that execute people don't swing too much in the cylon's favour. If a titled dude gets him with one of those they can just respawn as a support or something, unless maybe they want to be a cylon? I guess they always take that option, since either they become a 3rd cylon or they get a title.
I feel like assigning titles before respawning might make the most sense. I like that it removes any chance of a 4-1 or 2-3 split no matter what happens, which makes the game feel more like the initial BSG. It kills off executing people to gain immediate perfect information, but it still makes executing humans decent for both sides. The humans lose a morale, which is bad, but they gain less useful information, which is good. It also adds a bit of a twist where the next in line for a title has extra incentive to bump off the current person since they're guaranteed to get the title off of them no matter how they respawn.
Thinking about it more I also like the 'revealed cylon can give out the set aside card' rule. I don't think it should be their entire action. Ooh! Maybe you shuffle in a new not-a-cylon card with the set aside card and hand it out as the add-on to their other action. Then executions are going to maintain the slight uncertainty no matter how far into the game you go. It also has potential if you're using the conflicted loyalties cards, since then the cylons can try to funnel as many of them into the game as possible!
What do other people think? Anyone else had issues with the single cylon spawn? Have you tried any solutions to fix the problem?
It turns out both of the games I played recently also only had one cylon. Both games were trivial victories for the human players. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise since it feels like a 4-1 split should be heavily weighted towards the humans. A 3-2 split is supposed to be somewhat balanced, after all, and a 4-1 split is a massive power swing. It's hard to really quantify, but you're going from a game where there are 50% more human players to one where there are 300% more human players. In both cases I think the cylon player didn't play perfectly, but the humans won by such huge margins both times that I don't think even perfect play would have been anywhere close to good enough. In both games the single cylon appeared in the sleeper phase, which is even better for the humans, but I feel like even a single early cylon doesn't have a ton of play. I think that game isn't unwinnable by any stretch, but it feels like it should slant heavily in the humans favour.
I think part of the problem is with the way the game is 'balanced' in general. I feel like the game is built such that the expected value over a long series of games will result in a relatively even split of wins between humans and cylons, but that any individual game can suffer from uninteresting blowouts. Assume for a minute that a 3-2 split is tilted slightly in favour of the cylons. Then throwing in the occasional 4-1 split can help make the long term balance between the sides even. The problem with this fix is that the 4-1 games aren't nearly as fun as the 3-2 games. I have a similar problem with the cylon leader mechanic. I think including the cylon leader makes the game more fun for whoever is the cylon leader but can make individual games less fun for everyone else. So if you played enough games, and let everyone rotate in as the cylon leader, and everyone was happy with tons of fun 1 in 6 games then it's fine. But if you play sporadically, or if some people don't like being the cylon leader, or if people want a constant fun level it's pretty bad.
At any rate, I think the ruleset we've been using is flawed. So do the other people who were playing most of those games, since apparently they've had a real rash of 1 cylon games. It'll happen 18% of the time (unless the humans play suboptimally) so it's not actually that rare of a thing. I want to fix this issue. I think the best way to approach the problem is to identify what is added to the game by using the new loyalty deck rule and then trying to find a solution that keeps those additions while reducing or eliminating the 1 cylon problem.
So, what is the new loyalty deck rule exactly, and what does it accomplish? The original rules for a 5 player game involved shuffling 2 cylon cards in with 8 not-a-cylon cards, shuffling them up, and dealing one at random to each player at the start of the game and another at the mid point of the game. If you have a cylon card you're a cylon. If you don't, then you are a human. There's a rule in place to handle what happens if the same player gets dealt both cylon cards (they can give the extra one away) so after the second set of cards was dealt out it was a guarantee that you'd have 2 cylons and 3 humans. The new loyalty deck involves shuffling 2 cylon cards with 9 not-a-cylon cards. Deal them out the same as before, but you have one extra card lying around. The twist here is that if someone gets killed off they get to respawn as a new character, but they have to get a new loyalty card which is either the set aside card or a random not-a-cylon card.
This twist is the key, and accomplishes a couple of things. The first thing it does is allow the conflicted loyalties cards to work out. The second is it prevents the human players from obtaining perfect information regarding the cylon status of specific players, in particular the admiral. You see, in the first expansion they added an action to execute another player. When this happens they have to reveal if they are a cylon or not. If they are a cylon they become a revealed cylon and give away their other loyalty card. If they are not a cylon they reveal all of their loyalty cards, the humans lose one morale, and the player respawns as a new character. A new, guaranteed to be human, player. It quickly became known, at least at Andrew's place, that a strong tactic was to execute the admiral right after the new loyalty cards are dealt out regardless of how shifty they've been. If they were a cylon you desperately needed to get rid of them since a cylon admiral can be a real disaster. If they were a human then you lost a morale, which sucked, but it let you know for sure that the respawned player was human. And if they were smart (and we were) they'd choose someone who would get assigned the admiral title when they respawned. This would guarantee that the admiral was human, which ensures that you always jump to a pro-human location, and that you get the right choice made on the 'admiral chooses' crisis cards, and that you have access to the nukes when you need them. It also gives the humans a safe target for the executive orders card, so they can go hit the FTL button when needed.
Guaranteeing a human admiral is a huge deal, and there wasn't a logical argument the admiral could make to avoid this from happening. As a human admiral I'd advocate for executing myself, because of how awesome it was for all the human players to gain the information. I actually was strongly in favour of executing as many people as possible. You gain information each time you do it, each time you miss you get more likely to execute a cylon the next time you do it, and I'd much rather execute a human (and lose a morale) than send a human to the brig which I feel sets the humans back too much. Losing 1 morale and a few cards is nothing compared to lose out on jump prep from crisis cards. It made it hard to play as a cylon admiral, since if I was human I'd be trying to convince people to execute me!
With the new loyalty deck this is no longer true. When you execute the admiral, and they were human, they're going to respawn as a human 50% of the time (new not-a-cylon card) but they'll respawn as the set aside card the other 50% of the time. 18% of the time that card is a cylon card, so you could well be trading in a human admiral for a cylon admiral. Only 9% of the time, to be fair, but it's still a chance. And since they were only 18% to be a cylon admiral anyway (assuming they were human going into the sleeper phase) you're not actually making a huge gain. Losing the morale, the action, and the cards to not get perfect information is rough. Add in the fact that you may be throwing away a guaranteed human win (when the cylon card is set aside) by getting that card back into play and it becomes a bad idea, I think. If the admiral makes a sketchy play then you should absolutely still kill him, don't get me wrong, but it's no longer the strictly right play to execute the admiral as the first action after the sleeper phase.
The problem here is you're removing a strong human tactic by replacing it with an even stronger human tactic. Having the game end with a 4-1 split is super strong! It's so strong that even if you're using the conflicted loyalties cards I think the humans don't want to achieve those goals early on just to preserve the chances of keeping the 4-1 split! Inexperienced human players will still work at them, and it will cost them, but I don't think balancing the game around people making mistakes is a good idea. And regardless, we're not using that rule anyway.
So the new loyalty deck exists primarily to increase uncertainty. Someone who respawns can't be trusted for sure because they might be a cylon! I like this idea in general, but the specific implementation is bad. It's too easy to keep the extra loyalty card out of the game entirely, which gives the humans an 18% instant win. I do think the goal of keeping an easy human admiral out of the game is a good one. How else can we solve that problem without just throwing the humans a win 18% of the time?
We could force the set aside loyalty card to come into the game at some point. Duncan suggested giving a revealed cylon the option to give another player that loyalty card. Having it cost a full action seems a little weak, though. Maybe tack it on as a bonus to one of the other cylon actions? Whichever of the 4 is the 'worst' one? Maybe if you activate the 'give a crisis' space, and don't play the super crisis, you can give the set aside card out unseen? This way the cylon player gets to decide if the humans can have a safe execute or not.
Alternatively, you could force the card to go out, randomly, after a set distance. Say if you hit distance 7 or more? This could be really unfortunate for whoever turns into a cylon at distance 8, though. They'd go from what seemed like a sure win to a sure loss. So maybe you'd need to do it at distance 6+? Then to get screwed the humans would need to jump from 5 to 8 in one go. And in that case they're probably going to win anyway? On the plus side this would open up one more time to accuse people of being cylons, which is one of the best parts of the game.
An idea I suggested after out last game was to reassign titles instantly when someone dies without waiting for them to respawn first and remove the new loyalty deck rule entirely. So if you execute the human admiral they'll come back as a guaranteed human player, but they won't be the admiral. That will pass to one of the other players instead, who is 50-50 to be a cylon. (Assuming no double-cylon action... In which case they should reveal and give the other card to the new admiral anyway!) So while the humans can guarantee a human player, they can't guarantee a human with a title. Not without putting in even more effort, by then executing the new admiral too. Or tossing him in the brig, I guess.
Another option would be to make executions harsher. I feel like this plan makes it so the humans really want to avoid executions and the cylons really want to pop one off. Like if you lost 2 morale for executing a human with a title or something like that. Make it bad enough that it isn't an auto-do for the humans.
One idea I had while waiting for the bus is to build an extra loyalty deck. Stick 3 not-a-cylon cards and a 3rd cylon card into a pile and shuffle them up after the sleeper phase. Then if a human gets executed, give them one of these cards. This makes executions into a very scary proposition. 25% chance that the game becomes 2-3 instead of 3-2, which is very, very bad for the humans. It also adds some uncertainty back in. The new character who respawns might be a cylon! Again, this makes it so cylons really want to see humans get executed. And probably ends up skewing the game too much the other way when it happens.
Maybe use the extra loyalty deck from above, but only give one out to someone who respawns with a title? Then all the crisis cards and such that execute people don't swing too much in the cylon's favour. If a titled dude gets him with one of those they can just respawn as a support or something, unless maybe they want to be a cylon? I guess they always take that option, since either they become a 3rd cylon or they get a title.
I feel like assigning titles before respawning might make the most sense. I like that it removes any chance of a 4-1 or 2-3 split no matter what happens, which makes the game feel more like the initial BSG. It kills off executing people to gain immediate perfect information, but it still makes executing humans decent for both sides. The humans lose a morale, which is bad, but they gain less useful information, which is good. It also adds a bit of a twist where the next in line for a title has extra incentive to bump off the current person since they're guaranteed to get the title off of them no matter how they respawn.
Thinking about it more I also like the 'revealed cylon can give out the set aside card' rule. I don't think it should be their entire action. Ooh! Maybe you shuffle in a new not-a-cylon card with the set aside card and hand it out as the add-on to their other action. Then executions are going to maintain the slight uncertainty no matter how far into the game you go. It also has potential if you're using the conflicted loyalties cards, since then the cylons can try to funnel as many of them into the game as possible!
What do other people think? Anyone else had issues with the single cylon spawn? Have you tried any solutions to fix the problem?
Monday, January 28, 2013
Niagara Games Played
I played a fair number of games over the four day weekend in Niagara. Maybe not as many as one might expect for the length of time, but still a good number of games. Some old, many new. In particular:
new:
Gingkopolis x4
Trajan
Dungeon Petz x2
High Society
old:
Shipyard
Battlestar Galactica
Tichu
Space Alert
Dungeon Petz was definitely my favourite of the new (to me) games. It has the same sort of campy flavour as Dungeon Lords while leaving out most of the brutal punishing mechanics. In particular it isn't an uncommon occurrence in Dungeon Lords to have at least one person get locked out of a card they played due to lack of room on the space (all 4 people played the same card) or due to the uncertainty of the gold costs on some of the early spaces. Am I spending money when I play the food card? Am I gaining money? It can be hard to impossible to work that out on some turns and people can get badly punished as a result. Dungeon Petz, on the other hand, has a pseudo-auction system for the action spaces so you can likely ensure you get what you need by paying extra for it. And if all the spaces you wanted go away your guys aren't wasted. You can pretty much just delay using them until the next turn instead. Scoring also made way more immediate sense to me. Dungeon Lords I still don't have a good handle on turning actions into points while Dungeon Petz just worked for my strange little brain.
Gingkopolis, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. I say that despite having played it 4 times. I'll probably dig into the reasons more later but my current feeling is the game has an easy to implement dominant strategy that only works if you get dealt the right cards. So it's a bit of a crap shoot to see who wins. At least it's pretty short and it's obvious when you've already lost.
Battlestar Galactica was great. We played with most of the expansion rules including pretty much all of the ones that hurt the humans. We kept going out of our way to try to satisfy the conditions on the 'conflicted loyalty' not a cylon cards and I think it screwed us. One guy was acting sketchy because he wanted to get thrown in the brig to satisfy his card. Mine wanted me to collect titles (something I like to do anyway) so as Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh I declared martial law to become Mr President Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh. No CAG this game, though. This did make sense because I was convinced the current president was a cylon (he made a _terrible_ choice on a president chooses card) and didn't want that to happen again. Also, Baltar had previously looked at my loyalty card and knew what I had so I knew I'd have backing for my action. Baltar then executive ordersed me so I could get rid of my loyalty card and then play an action card. I intended to play an action to scout for fuel since we were down to 4 fuel at distance 3 but got dealt a new loyalty card that turned me into a cylon. Instead of revealing I launched a raptor scout and buried a planet that was 1 fuel for distance 2. A couple turns later I sabotaged what I thought was an important crisis card (pretty sure it was to subtract a jump prep instead of getting one while there were cylon ships in play) and got thrown in the brig for my hard work. Right before my turn to reveal, however, we jumped and hit the sleeper phase. I was dealt the sympathetic cylon card which let me escape the brig (and respawn on the cylon board) AND hand off my unrevealed cylon card to the new admiral/CAG. With Boomer as the other pilot in the brig the humans had no one to actually kill the cylon ships. And since I was the next player I went to the cylon fleet space and hooked us up with a cylon jump prep and flooded the board with enemies. My conflicted loyalty card needed the cylons to win with Galactica taking 2 or less damage. Not long after the cylons won, with Galactica at 1 damage and Pegasus at 2 damage. Is that a win? We went with yes since the card could easily had spelled out Pegasus being undamaged too if it mattered.
new:
Gingkopolis x4
Trajan
Dungeon Petz x2
High Society
old:
Shipyard
Battlestar Galactica
Tichu
Space Alert
Dungeon Petz was definitely my favourite of the new (to me) games. It has the same sort of campy flavour as Dungeon Lords while leaving out most of the brutal punishing mechanics. In particular it isn't an uncommon occurrence in Dungeon Lords to have at least one person get locked out of a card they played due to lack of room on the space (all 4 people played the same card) or due to the uncertainty of the gold costs on some of the early spaces. Am I spending money when I play the food card? Am I gaining money? It can be hard to impossible to work that out on some turns and people can get badly punished as a result. Dungeon Petz, on the other hand, has a pseudo-auction system for the action spaces so you can likely ensure you get what you need by paying extra for it. And if all the spaces you wanted go away your guys aren't wasted. You can pretty much just delay using them until the next turn instead. Scoring also made way more immediate sense to me. Dungeon Lords I still don't have a good handle on turning actions into points while Dungeon Petz just worked for my strange little brain.
Gingkopolis, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. I say that despite having played it 4 times. I'll probably dig into the reasons more later but my current feeling is the game has an easy to implement dominant strategy that only works if you get dealt the right cards. So it's a bit of a crap shoot to see who wins. At least it's pretty short and it's obvious when you've already lost.
Battlestar Galactica was great. We played with most of the expansion rules including pretty much all of the ones that hurt the humans. We kept going out of our way to try to satisfy the conditions on the 'conflicted loyalty' not a cylon cards and I think it screwed us. One guy was acting sketchy because he wanted to get thrown in the brig to satisfy his card. Mine wanted me to collect titles (something I like to do anyway) so as Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh I declared martial law to become Mr President Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh. No CAG this game, though. This did make sense because I was convinced the current president was a cylon (he made a _terrible_ choice on a president chooses card) and didn't want that to happen again. Also, Baltar had previously looked at my loyalty card and knew what I had so I knew I'd have backing for my action. Baltar then executive ordersed me so I could get rid of my loyalty card and then play an action card. I intended to play an action to scout for fuel since we were down to 4 fuel at distance 3 but got dealt a new loyalty card that turned me into a cylon. Instead of revealing I launched a raptor scout and buried a planet that was 1 fuel for distance 2. A couple turns later I sabotaged what I thought was an important crisis card (pretty sure it was to subtract a jump prep instead of getting one while there were cylon ships in play) and got thrown in the brig for my hard work. Right before my turn to reveal, however, we jumped and hit the sleeper phase. I was dealt the sympathetic cylon card which let me escape the brig (and respawn on the cylon board) AND hand off my unrevealed cylon card to the new admiral/CAG. With Boomer as the other pilot in the brig the humans had no one to actually kill the cylon ships. And since I was the next player I went to the cylon fleet space and hooked us up with a cylon jump prep and flooded the board with enemies. My conflicted loyalty card needed the cylons to win with Galactica taking 2 or less damage. Not long after the cylons won, with Galactica at 1 damage and Pegasus at 2 damage. Is that a win? We went with yes since the card could easily had spelled out Pegasus being undamaged too if it mattered.
Sunday, June 05, 2011
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...
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...
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Consolidating Power
I got a game of Battlestar Gallactica on the weekend. Typically the same characters get used every game so Byung and I wanted to shake things up by doing random by class. We got vetoed but put our own twists on getting new characters into the game. I've been rewatching the show recently and chose my favourite character from the show despite him being very weak in the game... Colonel Saul Tigh! He rarely gets played since he's pretty low on the admiral chain of command. Normally I'd be afraid someone would take Adama afterwards to have an actual good character as admiral and I'd be sitting around with no title and no ability to fly in space. I decided I didn't care this time and it turned out no one else took a military leader anyway so I got to start as admiral. Now, Tigh's once per game ability lets him give the president title to the admiral and one turn before the mid point of the game I had absolutely nothing good to do. Possibly I should have tried to throw Duncan out an air lock but instead I decided to grab more power and declared martial law. Duncan then revealed as a cylon and threw our CAG in the brig, knocking that title to Byung who was playing Boomer. Then we jumped and made it to distance 4, causing Byung to be thrown in the brig by his character's drawback. Next in line for CAG? Saul Tigh. So I managed to be Admiral President CAG Colonel Saul Tigh. Woo!
We ended up losing on the final die roll (50-50 chance!) but it was fun regardless of outcome. At one point we had something like 14 cylon raiders attacking Byung in space without managing to hit him. (Turns out we had a lot of reroll cards saved up!)
We ended up losing on the final die roll (50-50 chance!) but it was fun regardless of outcome. At one point we had something like 14 cylon raiders attacking Byung in space without managing to hit him. (Turns out we had a lot of reroll cards saved up!)
Thursday, January 06, 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)