Battlestar Galactica with revealed Cylon player

Last Friday we played Battlestar Galactica. I've gradually introduced some of the elements from the Pegasus expansion over the last months, like the new characters, crisis cards and treachery cards. These all work fine and add a bit to the experience of the game. This time we thought it would be nice to use the option to have one of the players revealed as a Cylon at the start of the game.

How could one object to having Caprica Six around?

Because this makes life a lot harder for the human players (who still have to guess the other Cylon, but bear the full brunt of Cylon obstruction from the start) the revealed Cylon gets a hidden objective. This consists of a side which must win (human or Cylon) and a special condition, for example that the Galactica must be heavily damaged and some resources at a very low level.


The hidden objective should keep the other Cylon on its toes, while the objectives should tend to prevent the Cylons from pressing their advantage too soon. We only concluded that only at the end though.

My personal moment of glory: taking down Scar

Which meant that we, the humans, had an extremely tough time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't all due to the revealed Cylon but things went from bad to worse in no time. We never even managed a second jump, such were the crisis cards. And we failed so many of them we wondered if we'd succeed for any of them. You could feel the depression taking over.

Not that the Cylons (Andries especially) enjoyed their luck in silence. The constant happy chatter added insult to injury. It all seemed too easy for the frackin' toasters to obstruct our bids. I always seemed short of cards to play, while others had their hands full but pretty useless.

This was one of the easier moments in the game, really

Likewise we couldn't get rid of the raiders and heavy raiders, which meant centurions on board and rapid loss of civilian ships. This cost us the game in the end as humanity faced genocide.

As a small consolation this shut up the revealed Cylon player, because he hadn't been able to fulfill his victory conditions yet. This meant that Paul, the other Cylon, won the game alone. No mercy from him, so well played.

Gerard in a pose characteristic for the humans that night

I'm not overwhelmed with the revealed Cylon as it puts a lot of pressure on the humans from early on, but mostly because it takes away part of the atmosphere of paranoia that is central to the game. The best games are the ones in which the last Cylon stays hidden till the end and keeps fracking with the minds of the humans. I guess we'll give the revealed Cylon another try some time, but don't see it as a regular guest appearance.

Next time we might try the New Caprica ending. I've been waiting with this one because it seems to make the game longer and short length is not a problem of the game. On the other hand, I'm curious how it will pan out. It is an interesting episode in the series.

And after that, the Exodus expansion...