Re: Katsue

Melonball said:

This. It's bad enough that they waste your action to reveal. That they get two actions and can consolidate power, launch a scout or use some location ability before revealing is even worse (you're quite screwed if they're a president with an arrest order).

I mean, it's not like my group never XOs people, but seriously, if you're in doubt or the situation is critical, you absolutely don't do it.

Sinis said:

no doubt. it's so ugly.

Though this reminds me, i'm really not feeling the new leadership card that lets you essentially XO yourself. Part of the fun of XO is that you have to trust the other players and it might just burn you in the process. giving yourselves two free actions is just kinda silly.

Melonball said:

Yeah - I've been thinking the same (though it's a tactics card, not a leadership card). The whole thing about XO was that you had to trust someone else to do whatever it is you wanted them to do. Critical Situation does away with that completely. Maybe if CS was a high-valued card it might make up for it, but from what I can tell all the new cards are low-valued. It's slightly rarer than XO, but not by much. Can anyone see any downside?

EDIT: Actually, I suppose one downside is that you have to stay in the same location to use it, whereas with XO you can play it on any of the other characters who may be in more useful locations... but seeing as you can usually use your second action to play a card from your hand anyway this still doesn't seem like an enormous drawback.

I thought i read somewhere that you couldn't XO someone the same turn you do CS.

Regardless, it's a silly card, and eliminates the fun of begging for an XO

I really like this card, for a couple reasons. Giving up your move to use it means you have to plan ahead to get the best result, by quite a bit in a 5 or 6 player game. Furthermore, if you have tactics (or have drawn tactics cards), it also means that other players are going to look at you a bit suspiciously if you, say, move to the Admiral's Quarters, or any one of a number of locations that could be helpful, but could also be part of an action, reveal strategy to put colonial ships or characters in danger (Communications, Command, several Pegasus locations), etc. This is one more tool, but also one more reason to doubt what would otherwise be a relatively benign move.

Further, since we're getting new leadership cards, that deck is going to be dilluted, which means XO's won't be as reliably drawn. These should help offset that.

If only they included the text "the next skill check this turn is considered Reckless". Then it would keep the fun.

Bleached Lizard said:

There are 5 Critical Situations in the Tactics deck compared to 12 Executive Orders in the Leadership deck. That's significantly rarer in my view. If you draw 2 Tactics cards per turn, then the naive probability of drawing a Critical Situation in any given turn is just under 35.4%. The chances of a character with 2 Leadership drawing an XO is 72%.

I imagine that the reason Critical Situation was printed is because there were new cards being printed, and FFG didn't want to distort the action economy of the game by reducing the number of XOs available without providing some extra actions elsewhere.

Katsue said:

Fair enough. However, most of the "criticism predictions" regarding the expansion aren't really about game balance. I'm sure it'll be very well balanced. The criticisms are more about how fun and/or thematic the new mechanics would be. As someone said above, the "fun" of XO was that you had to beg for one/trust the person you were playing it on. Critical Situation seems to remove this somewhat.

Bleached Lizard said:

In practice, I don't think it will make the game less fun. People can only play it when they're exactly where they need to be (which admittedly if you're Cylon Helena Cain, may be anywhere), and in those situations it doesn't make a lot of in-character sense for them to tell someone else who's in the same place to go sort out their problems.