No, I don't want any toast!

PlayGamesWithJosh was a success, with an actual turnout of 5 this week.
So, no fears of playing Battlestar Galactica with an inefficient number, and that's what we did.

We played with 5 players, Ionian Nebula as the Destination.
The only "house rule" we used was including Scar in the decks (which was moot), and we took the "trauma tokens in a bag" shortcut which involves not putting physical tokens in Sickbay/Brig or on the initial 3 allies (just draw as appropriate; only will cause a problem if a character with no trauma tokens visits an ally).
At the last minute, despite setting aside some Cosmic Encounter UFOs for it, I decided to give up on the similar plan for Civilian Ships; with only 12 of them, maybe it's not such a big deal.

So, on to the show, here's the short version of how it broke down:

Tori (Shaun) (Cylon from the beginning) ->
Starbuck (Matt) ->
Dee (Me) ->
Gaeta (Kevin) (Cylon inherited from Tori) ->
Chief (Max)

I won't bore you with lots of details, partly because I don't remember (I might even get the details I do share wrong) and partly because I don't need to sound like this (even though this is actually a gamer blog): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5TxzDY_sEk

Tori was a Cylon from her very first Loyalty Card. And Shaun was playing it really well, we trusted him.
Enough so that, when he felt the time was right, he revealed on an XO from Gaeta (damaging Galactica; the peculiar ruling came up where the Current Player got to choose the Pegasus/Galactica ratio of the 5 damage tokens).
I can't even tell you what was going on at the time, to be honest, except that Tori had no Trauma.

At some point which I _think_ was before Sleeper Phase, President Gaeta and I were both in the Brig, not wanting to have a special visit with Ally Number Six, and Gaeta used his OPG followed by Pardoning me on an XO. That was nice.

We were handling things, our dials were blue, our fuel overflowing (2 ticks above starting), and we hit the sleeper phase at exactly distance 4 (something I'm not fond of, but it happens).
At that point, my 2 loyalty cards were "PG: President Brigged or lose 1 food" (not a concern) and "Final Five: If someone looks at your card, you are executed" (a mild concern, but not for long).
Tori passed her loyalty card to Gaeta. Not a big deal, or so we thought.

A little while later, the Crisis failed (we tanked it) which says that nobody can look at Loyalty cards for the rest of the game. Fine. That makes me safe from asploding.

Not long afterwards, I made a stupid move.
I was sitting on the FTL button, but I chose to XO Pradmiral Gaeta to get him to push the button. He said he could take care of some things...
...and that he did.
He played the Quorum Card (sorry I am bad with names) on me which says "roll a die, and either gain the admiral title or lose morale", and I became Admiral, and then _his_ second action was to Reveal (and push the jump track down 2 spaces, I think).

Fast forward a little further, and the end of the story involves Centurions.
We had an incredible number of Heavy Raider activations come up in succession.
Near the end, a pair of Centurions were 3 hops away from "Humans Lose".
I drew a crisis with a Heavy activation, Starbuck OPG'd it, and another Heavy activation showed up.
March-march-march.
Then it was Cylon Gaeta's turn, and he activated Heavies. March-march-march.
Then, lo and behold, the Crisis on Tyrol's turn also had a Heavy activation icon, and Cylon Tori's turn was going to be next.
We conceded. :(

So we still haven't actually ever gotten to the Crossroads phase, but the allies indirectly screwed us.
Our few encounters with them weren't that devastating, and most of us didn't even have trauma to speak of.

But poor Starbuck.
Matt was drawing nothing but Negative Trauma, and being the only pilot, had very little time to get on board and shed trauma to the allies.
It all felt a little too random. So we may never try Ionian Nebula again.

Did I also mention that we ran out of raptors? We may have had just 1 left before the Sleeper Phase, or we may have lost all 4 before, it's another hazy memory.
I swear I wasn't drinking, I just have bad retention :)

After the game of Galactica, nobody wanted to take the time to learn the rules of Glen More and have no idea how long that'd take (myself included), so we played a 5-player game of Dominion.
It involved Pirate Ship, which always changes things, but especially with 5 players it was always hitting treasure. Not much for +actions in the supply, the game went relatively slow, and I don't even remember who won (I think it was Matt with 23 points?) The game definitely ended with lots of Provinces left over (and yes I did find the one I thought I lost; sleeved cards are so sticky!) But Dominion is always an interesting game to figure out how to use the 10 cards at your disposal...