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[Battlestar Galactica] - Daybreak expansion announced for Q3
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Speaking of being a fan, I may be able to pick up the Pegasus expansion this week, if people are interested in a Pegasus game. I certainly wouldn't mind trying to host a game.
I would love to get in on one of them in the future.
SS: 0775 9129 1567 Black: 3267 4422 1986
I do not think that word means what you think it means
Also, as the only player to yet have been Boxed/Executed on these forums, I call dibs on a spot in the next game.
Thirdly... I really don't like the Cylon Leader mechanic at all.
I'm not too sure how I feel about the Cylon leader. For this game it was a bit aggravating, but that's largely do to Six getting in the way.
Edit: The whole 'unknown' with the agenda is also...meh. Granted there's a lot of uncertainty in the game, but the agenda is an uncertainty of another kind.
My problem with them is also the agenda, but for the opposite reason: There's too few of them that they become somewhat predictable, and they are too much tied to reducing certain resources to X which are nearly completely out of your control.
Edit: Being that sympathizer isn't able to use some Cylon locations.
I think they're pretty important to the game in that way; If you played 3 cylons and they were all dealt out at the beginning, the game would get unbalanced pretty quickly. Whereas 3 cylons post-sleeper would probably have a hard time winning. If you have a leader there throughout balancing things out, the game tends to avoid tipping over one way or the other quite so much, because they need to draw things out to fulfill their agenda.
Now, some of the agendas are not good for this- "use a supercrisis" really doesn't cause the game to be extended at all, and getting executed or tossed in the brig really isn't that difficult- for the most part though the agendas require skill, planning and patience to pull off properly.
Gaius Baltar MUST be selected as a character.
Nobody should select Laura Roslin as a character. (This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but it's usually done out of courtesy for reasons that will be obvious soon.)
Gaius is controlled by two players who sit next to each other.
Gaius only gets one turn per round, even though he is controlled by two players.
Follow the normal rules for constructing a loyalty deck with Baltar, however each player gets one of his two loyalty cards.
Each turn, one player controls Gaius' quorum cards, while the other controls his skill cards. This alternates on each of his turns.
The player controlling his quorum cards makes movement choices and action choices.
The player controlling his skill cards chooses the card for his ability, and chooses whether and how to contribute to skill checks. The other player does not know what cards were contributed.
I think those are the major rules for it. This made for a real fun game where a married couple was controlling Baltar; hearing them argue back and forth about what they should do. Also, one was a Cylon and the other was human.
Interesting variant. What do you do if both have cylon loyalty cards, out of curiosity? Or has that ever come up?
So here's the thing: I own Exodus, now, and I can't help but feel that the Ionian Nebula stuff is evocative for the general nature of the series, but doesn't hold itself up when it comes to mechanics. The boxing/trial seems almost too random in its nature, and kind of unbalanced in the cards that get handed out - the act of entirely removing someone from the game for the final, climactic phase aside, there's something to be said of a system where you can play a game well, only to have two people "trauma bomb" you (a term I think is indicative of this mechanic), and you end up being removed.
I like the Cylon Fleet a whole lot, and the Final Five cards add something neat as well, but I really have issue with the Ionian Nebula.
My two cents, for what it is worth!
It works, but is it fun? That's a lot more subjective.
I do wish they had included alternative non-trauma bomb crossroads cards though - things more like Miraculous Return and Scanned, for variants where you just don't want to deal with all the elimination nonsense, but still want the nail-biting experience of the Crossroads phase.
No solid ideas yet, though.
The idea of completely eliminating someone from the game just irks me on a whole bunch of levels.
This is exactly how I felt after reading the Ionian nebula rules, but the allies seemed really cool to me, so we include them in a fashion. Basically allies get random trauma tokens from the pool, and the pool is 18 benevolent, 16 antaganistic (2 removed to make an even 50/50 chance of something good/bad happening), and 2 disasters. When a trauma token is revealed, it is thrown back in the pool, they are shuffled up, and a new ally is added. Whenever an ally says draw/discard x trauma tokens, we do the opposite with cards. So draw two trauma tokens becomes discard two cards, discard two trauma tokens becomes draw two cards. This makes the trauma token baseship damage be all revealed cylons discard two cards, which we've found fair. Basically this way we have what we find to be the funnest part of the ionian nebula, allies, without the complication and sometime bad taste left in our mouth by the full ionian nebula.
We can try Ultarune's variant for the Ionian Nebula, if people want.
In any event, Loss-By-Zero-Resource isn't checked for until the end of the current turn, so if they go to 0 then back up to 1, the game continues.
In regards to setting up the decks for the Exodus game, I use the rules from both as appropriate? I.e. the non-Caprica crisis deck from Pegasus is shuffled in along with the core and Exodus crisis decks?
Edit: Also, a variant including all three destinations. http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/612850/battlestar-campaign-variant-for-all-3-destinations
Before I get into formatting - is there any general interest in revisiting New Caprica with Exodus, or would Ionian Nebula be preferable?