Hi guys! Me and my friend came to think about a serious flaw with the way loyalty cards are dealt.

Any new player, unfamiliar with the action-text on the "You are a cylon" cards will stare at their cards a great deal longer than those who recieved "You are not a cylon" card to see what the action-text says.

To prevent this from happening we have thought out the following procedure for distributing the cards:

All players enter are handed their loyalty card as they enter a room (bathroom for example). All players are then required to stay there for 20 seconds. This way the ones who have to read the card can't be identified.

Another option would of course to make all the players familiarize themselves with the 4 different cylon cards and learn the actions by heart. This is a bit hard to pull off in a noobie group though.

Any thoughts on this issue?

EDIT:

Yet another option would be to give all players a guided tour of how to use the four different cylon cards before the game starts. This would give new players the chance to understand what they can do with a cylon action without having to know the game-lingo at the start of the game.

Congratulations, you solved the issue, kind of what we all did.

Every group solved this issue in its own way but asking the players to look at their card for 10 (or 20) seconds and not look at the other players (or go in another room) is a good way to do it.

Yeah. I always explain the 4 cards to new players, and we all take a long look at our cards and make jokes like "Well, I can tell you mine has a character from the show on it." or "Mine has the words You Are A and Cylon on it, and it may well have a Not.".

Yah, that's pretty much a common house rule that has sprung up independently among most play groups.

I have to wonder why it wasn't in the rulebook....

In my group there is another type of exploit. For more then 25 games so far, the humans won only 4-5 times! So couple of my friends came to conclusion that there is no point to play as week human and they allways try to take cherecters whit two loyalty cards(Baltar, Boomer). All they want is to win as a cylon and as fast as possible F#$^% **** Up!

What do you think about that? Do you have the same problem whit people in your groups?

Im trying to avoid those guys in my plays but its not easy, because its better to play in 6 people then in 4.

I'm sorry to hear your faced with those kind of players. Obviously, its kinda ironic since by throwing the games they are only helping increase the proportion of cylon wins to human. As to dealing with them, i'm not sure. Our group has about 50/50 human/cylon wins, so the problem doesn't come up. You can tell them its easily possible for the humans to win their share of the games, if everyone works together. You could try the rulebook variant, where you add 2 resources to every dial, in an attempt to skew the game toward the humans, then the other players wouldn't feel they had to throw the game.

RAFEL said:

So do they start trying to throw the game before they even know they're Cylons?

If they do, then they're idiots. My recomendation is throw them in the Brig if they start sabatoging stuff. If they act like Cylons then it's safe to treat them as such.

If not, that's really not that big a deal. I actually play Baltar a lot because I want to increase my chances of being on the Cylon team, but I still play for whatever side I end up with. Oddly enough I have yet to play Baltar and get a "You are a Cylon card".

My general observation about Cylon to Human victories is this:

If you look at posts from different playgroups you'll see many groups who say that it's too easy for Cylons to win, but you'll also see groups who say it is too easy for Humans.

If you are playing with an inexperienced group of players who havn't figured out how to maximize the efficiency of their actions, the game is going to favor the Cylons. By virtue of the human player's being inept, the Cylon doesn't have to try to very hard.

As groups become more experienced it is going to become increasingly more dificult for the Cylon player to get away with much of anything as the Human players will become more adept at spotting a Cylon. The Humans will also play much more efficiently and thus lessen the impact of anything the Cylon player can do. So with a more experienced group the game will seem to favor the humans.

Seems like those players have just decided that the game was impossible for the humans and try to prove their point by "breaking" it even more. From my point of view, just don't play with them anymore if you can. A fun 4p game is better than 6p game ruined by such players.

Imo, it's almost impossible to enforce the 'look at your loyalty card for 20 seconds & don't look at anyone else' rule. What we do, is everyone gets their loyalty card(s), goes to a different corner or the room facing the wall, and THEN everyone reads their cards for about 20 seconds while keeping the cards very close to your chest. That way your not even able to look at each other's faces, etc while this is going on. Everyone complains about having to stand up to do this, but it DEFINTITELY helps keep everyone honest.

Most of the group I'm with have played it enough now to not need to look very long at the loyalty card beyond confirming if they are or aren't a Cylon. When there's been someone who hasn't played before though we'll let them look at all of the loyalty cards before they're shuffled so that they can see what the different cards say. This way once they're dealt all that you need to do is take a quick glance to see if you are or aren't a Cylon.

This works pretty well for the most part. The only occasional problem we've had is someone getting their loyalty card, glancing at it, and then asking where the Super Crisis deck is...

Ok, so we played two new games today.

We ended up just turning our chairs around so nobody were looking at each other. Then I counted down from 5 after 20 seconds had passed. On one everyone turned around at the same time.

Today though, I was able to catch a glimpse of a crisis card as it was put on the bottom of the deck by our cylon Roslin player. All I saw was the "Jump" icon. And as all of us clearly wanted the crisis with a jump icon on it and the one he chose was without one I instantly knew he was a cylon. The lesson would be, don't be reckless when putting cards in the bottom of your deck.

Anyway, we had 1 cylon and one human win. Problem was, the human win came from one of the cylon player's extreme incompetence.

In my gaming group we just all look at our loyalty cards for 10 seconds, no matter what it says. no reason to turn your chair around.

Why are you trying to cheat to look at peoples cards and or crisis cards? Knowing only takes away from the game.

The game has a build it way to deal with bad human players, its called increase their resources by one or too. No one seems to want to do it though because the if they humans win then everyone just says well its because they got a boost. Well if theirs new players at the table I always increase by one and it makes for a great game.

My look is that when the humans have more resources they waste more resources, so it almost always ends up just as bad.