Battlestar Galactica - Storage

Oh boy this is going to be an exciting post! Hold on to your hats!

Back when I first got the Battlestar Galactica game, I was also starting to go through my "tacklebox phase". I was convinced that I needed a way to more-conveniently travel with a large amount of boardgames in tow.

So I purchased a fishing tackle bag that came with 4 Plano 3750 boxes inside.
Moving Small World to this kind of box made sense; with Galactica, it was somewhat forced.
Originally, it looked like this.

When I got Pegasus, I continued the paradigm and rearranged the bits some more. (no picture for this one).

I got a little bit of flak for this, mostly jokingly I think :)

When I got Exodus, I found out a terrible truth: While there was still enough separation of compartments, the Crisis Deck was too tall.
So I decided to un-tacklebox it.

Now, I moved all of the cards to 2 old white card-storage-boxes (one for "Large" and one for "Small" cards; incidentally sleeving the cards along the way), the Cardboard Bits into a VTES 10th Anniversary Tin (to double as a bits-randomizer), the plastic bits in ziploc baggies, and all shoved into the Exodus box.

The box doesn't really close perfectly, but everything does fit in one place now.

By the time the game gets played on Monday, or by TempleCon time, I may have changed my mind again; it makes me a little uncomfortable that the box top doesn't come down so tightly (off by more than an inch), so I might move things to a different sort of 2-box solution.. I might even try to find some Really Useful Boxes instead or something; but still, it looks like the Death of the Tacklebox for this game.

Yeah, aren't you happy you read this? :)

Battlestar Galactica - "Title Cards"

Yes, Exodus has arrived!

I just wanted to share what I have done with the Title Cards.
It's simple, but I think it is neat.
Exodus rounded the idea out nicely.

So, I have 4 clear sleeves set aside for the Title Cards; each one is double sided.

1) President: One side Base Game, one side New Caprica.
Not really necessary, since the New Caprica President card covers everything, but good for newbies to have the option of the Base Game President Card to avoid confusion.

2) Admiral: One side Cylon Fleet (with the improved nuke), one side New Caprica Admiral.
With this one, if you happen to be playing Cylon Fleet + New Caprica, you can flip the Admiral card over when you reach New Cap, since the information about the Nukes is irrelevant during that phase.

3) CAG/Admiral: One side CAG, one side Base Game Admiral (the corrected version, printed out).
You'll never need the CAG and the Base Game Admiral in the same game, and once again, you can use the Base Game Admiral card as a reference for how nukes work alongside the New Caprica Admiral card.

4) Cylon Leader: One side Infiltration Reference Card, the other side You Are A Sympathetic Cylon.
This card is meant to flip back and forth, as you Infiltrate and Exfiltrate (?). I have no plans to ever use the Sympathetic Cylon mechanic, since I think it is far more deeply flawed than the base game Sympathizer (an argument for another thread), but it serves as a clear reminder of whether the Leader is in Cylon Player Mode or Human Player Mode. And, well, it really does what it says. You get it pre-game, reveal it immediately, don't get a Super Crisis, and may Infiltrate as a Cylon Leader does.

How do you like that?

In League with ... who, exactly?

I got myself caught up in an argument about something I don't know much about, so I'm gonna dump my thoughts into a slightly-more-coherent form here. Especially since it's game-related.

So, the game in question is "Chaos in the Old World".
All that I really know about the game is:
* It plays with exactly 4 players, no more, no less.
* Each player plays a character (a Warhammer Universe god) with distinct mechanics and win conditions.
* There is one winner to the game.
* You don't get through much of the "event deck" (whatever that is) during each play, so there's high variability to each game.

I've been wanting to try the game out for awhile, and will get my chance soon.
But the discussion amongst the group led to the idea of a "league".
And discussions therein about how to keep people ranked in that league in a most balanced way, break ties, etc.

So, sure, great, it sounds like a game that you can get together once a week to play. Maybe even more interesting than VTES or Galactica, or at least "different enough".

The conceptual problem I have is calling it a "league" and tracking progress over the extended period of time.
If, for example, the loser of each game has to buy the beer, that's great.

But if we start a game well-aware that "John" is a certain number of points ahead, and it (for example) benefits me more in the long run to "make John lose" than "make me win", that seems to take away from the casual enjoyment of playing a game. To me.

On the other hand, maybe there isn't a way to do that in the game, or maybe the group is relying on the "Don't Be A Dick" rule to avoid it. (The group itself is very capable of nondickitude). And maybe they just enjoy collecting statistics.

I dunno, that's about it. Just realizing that I should stop arguing on the email list for 2 main reasons:

1) I know not of what I speak; have only seen people play the game from a distance, don't know anything about how it works. I'll get in at least one game of it at TempleCon, so I can pass judgement on how addictive it is, and how much of my speculation is unfounded.

2) I wouldn't have time to participate in a regular "league" even if it sounded like the Best Idea Ever to me.

Before I start hypocritically taking a tangent into "how would a BSG league work?" I'm just gonna stop.

BSG Pegasus *minimal* integration into Base Game

I'm just really excited about getting Exodus (although I haven't ordered it yet; online places still list it as a "preorder" and I'm not falling for that trap again, and I also don't want to place a "preorder" at the FLGS in case I can't make it there for awhile, so I'm waiting until I can get it within normal shipping time).
So I'm spouting random ideas about the BSG game.
Not really expecting any sort of epiphany here.

One of the things about the Pegasus expansion is that it is too tightly coupled to its own new rules in a lot of ways.
Which makes it difficult to teach new players the game, or to "fall back" to a base game without removing a ton of components.

Here is just an idea of how to use a minimum amount of the Pegasus components, with only a few modifications, but still have the feeling of playing the Base Game:

Please note that some of these are generic-sounding rules because I don't care enough to actually go through the decks and name cards. :)

1) Use the Plastic Basestars. This is an easy one.

2) Destination is always Kobol.

3) Don't use the Pegasus ship.

4) Don't use the Cylon Leaders.

5) Modify the other new characters in the following way:

Kat - no change, other than her official errata

Dee - Her penalty is changed to this:
"If Morale is 2 or less at the start of your turn, you start that turn in Sickbay." (Harsh, but better than being dead, and a Cylon Dee will still have incentive to reveal)

Ellen - She draws 1 Piloting skillcard instead of Treachery, and can not pilot a viper or use the abilities printed on Piloting cards. (Yes, this means she can hump pilots to enhance their firepower, but that seems thematically appropriate :) )

Cain - Is second in line for Admiral title (between Adama and Tigh).
Change her "Intolerant" ability to "Cannot contribute skillcards to the check for other players to exit the Brig".
Use your choice of House Rules for Blind Jump however you feel is necessary, as usual.

6) Any other reference to "Execution" is replaced with "Send to Sickbay". Any card which refers to a player previously being Executed is removed from the deck(s).

7) Use the Pegasus replacements for Investigative Committee.

8) Do not use Treachery cards. Any card which refers to Treachery cards is removed from the deck(s).

9) Maintain balance within the Skill Card decks; that is, if a card was removed from one deck because it referred to Treachery or Executions, remove the equivalently-numbered Pegasus card from the other decks.

10) Acknowledge the "Movement Step" as part of the rules, for the cards that refer to this.

Cylonnukah report

Six people showed up for the game dubbed "Cylonnukah" by Matt (who, ironically, couldn't come to play).

We played with the Pegasus expansion and the Kobol destination, with only a minor house rule for Cain which didn't even matter since she Blind Jumped without scouting.

The table went like this:

Me (Leoben) [Salvage their Equipment] ->

Max (Baltar) [Cylon] ->

Ben (Cain) [Human] ->

Krista (?) (Tyrol) [Human] ->

Man Ching (Apollo) [Human] ->

John (Dee) [Cylon]

Krista and Man Ching were newbies to the game; Ben had never played with Pegasus components before; this was my first time playing a Cylon Leader.

It turned out that both of the hidden Cylons had been Cylons since the beginning of the game. Just total coincidence that they were the most experienced players with this setup at the table, so they played it well.

Early on, I got a chance to look at the Admiral Or President's loyalty card, so I took a look at Cain, and honestly said that she was Not A Cylon. I figured nobody would believe me either way, even though I had a supposedly "Sympathetic" agenda.

A few turns later, a crisis came up which ended up sending Cain to the brig. In an unusual turn of events, Baltar fessed up to spiking the check. His justification was that since I'm a Cylon Leader, I'm obviously lying.

The Cylon Attacks were piling on, but the fleet didn't have much trouble jumping ahead of them. Especially due to Cain's blind jump, which took them 2 distance at a cost of 1 population (if I remember correctly).

Pegasus didn't get used much, and took most of the hits from the Basestar fire, which made me incredibly happy due to my personal goal (Cylons Win And 2 or fewer Galactica locations are damaged).

I was starting to get worried when 2 Galactica locations were damaged; post-Sleeper phase, I had un-infiltrated and started sitting on Caprica cycling Crises, but I was drawing my blue cards just in case I'd have to hop down there and fix the ship myself.

Baltar used a Quorum card to execute Cain in the brig, and she was replaced with Adama (under the "current" rules, so he was guaranteed human). Baltar never Revealed, but Dee did.

In the end, the humans had 1 Fuel, 1 Food, 4 Morale, and 4 Population.. Unfortunately they were able to spool up to the "-3" spot and win the game by pushing the button for the last destination-free jump, despite my best efforts. The only crisis that I had seen with "-1 fuel" was also "Admiral Chooses", and by this time, Apollo held both titles.

Treachery/Reckless effects did come up a few times in the game, but they weren't all that devastating.

Scar showed up all by himself at one point, and was a complete non-entity as the fleet jumped away from him.

I really enjoyed playing Leoben, his special to muck with the Destiny Deck is really cool.

Looking forward to getting my hands on Exodus, though, of course :)

Battlestar Galactica Character Selection variant.

Crossposted and updated from my BoardGameGeek post:

With the release of Exodus, there are now 18 non-Cylon-Leader characters available (5 Military, 5 Political, 5 Pilots, and 3 Support).
And without Cylon Leaders, the game goes up to 6 players.

This got me thinking about a simple variant for choosing characters, and spicing up this phase of the game a bit:

At the beginning of the game, set aside the 3 Cylon Leader characters.
Shuffle the rest of the character sheets.

In turn, each player goes through the following process:

A) If a Cylon Leader hasn't been chosen yet, the player may opt to choose any one of the Cylon Leaders. Otherwise:

B) Deal 3 character sheets, face down, to the player; he chooses one. If he doesn't like any of his choices, he may draw another character sheet to choose from, at a cost of starting with one fewer skillcard at the beginning of the game. You can do this up to 3 times, reducing your starting cards by 1 each time. (If you somehow would start the game with fewer than 3 skill cards anyway, for example being Samuel Anders and going first, then you have to "pay off" this debt with the next 3 cards you would otherwise draw).
You may not tell other players which characters you did not choose, by name or special ability. You may only discuss their category (Political, Military, Pilot, Support). For example, "I choose Saul Tigh, the other 2 were Pilots". You may, of course, lie about this, but it's a little too early to be deceptive.
Put all of your unchosen character sheets on the bottom of the pile, in any order you choose.

Remember that this may throw off the rulebook "balanced character selection" rule, so this variant is not recommended for beginner players.

Pandemic Report

Finally got a chance to play Pandemic with some On The Brink components last night, with the wife.

We played an Easy Mode game with the Virulent Strain, then switched to Normal Mode (5 epidemics) for a few more games with the Virulent Strain and one with the Mutation Challenge (but not with both).

Overall, it doesn't seem like the OtB additions have an enormous effect on the 2 player game. Maybe it was just lucky draws, but the only time the Virulent Strain ended up having a significant effect on us was when I was playing the Dispatcher (can move other pawns around) and she was playing the role that auto-removes a cube from a city with 2+ cubes, and we drew the effect that you can't leave a virulent city without using an action to Treat it. So I couldn't move her pawn through certain cities anymore.

In the one game we played with the Mutation Challenge, we did lose, but the purple cubes had very little to do with it. There was never a point where purple cubes spread out organically, only popping onto the table from card plays.

The point at which we lost the game (which was the case in most of our games) still does feel a little bit anticlimactic. But what can you really do about that? You have to go into this game understanding that the game just stops at a certain point.

I don't count that as a huge negative, but it is a change from other games.

Another minor negative is game setup time. Whenever you start or restart the game, you have to pull out a whole bunch of cards from the player deck, sometimes pull out cards from the infection deck, reshuffle things, deal cards out, and then reshuffle one or two more times. That can get more shuffletastically annoying than Dominion, and I'm thinking maybe I will have to sleeve the Pandemic cards after all.

I'd love to give the game more of a chance, especially trying it out with more than 2 players. And the Bioterrorist looks like a spicy little variant too.

I definitely rate it at least a GRRR.