Has anyone tried this?

We just ended up having one more person than expected for game night, so rather than force one to sit out we decided to give a 7 player game a shot. Since a 6 player game calls for 2 cylons and 1 sympathizer, we handled the 7 player game by having 3 cylons.

THE PROBLEM:

The game seemed to work, UNTIL all cylons were revealed and we got a centurion boarding.

At that point we were pretty screwed. Much more screwed than if the same thing happened in a 6 player game.

Assuming all revealed cylon players activate cylon fleet to advance the centurion:

6 player game: with 2 revealed cylons, the human players get 4x2 chances to get rid of centurion, 3x2 if there's a sympathizer

7 player game: with 3 revealed cylons, the human players get 4x1 chances

If even one person is in the brig or has run out of cards (which is often by that stage in the game) the humans are screwed. The third cylon being a sympathizer who cannot activate the cylon fleet really is critical in a 6 player game.

So technically there's not much preventing a 7 player game (though you run out of loyalty cards if Boomer and Balter are both used), but that third cylon fleet activation is killer. Anyone think up some sort of way around this? Maybe the third revealed cylon counts as a sympathizer so they can't activate the cylon fleet?

The Pegasus rulebook has a section in the back for a 7 player game. You get 2 Cylons and 1 Hostile Cylon Leader.

We don't have the expansion =(

Playing with 7 players without the expansion is very tricky. The situations you describe are balanced out when one of the cylons is a cylon leader and may not want to the cylons to win at a particular time, or may not even be on the cylon's side at all. Without the expansion I have trouble seeing 7 players working.

Hopefully, there are lots of Executive Orders flying to whoever is standing in the Armory, and many people to play Strategic Planning on those rolls. Can still be pretty rough if the Cylons all happen to be sitting together, though!

could 2 cylons and one symithizer work, so at the worst the 3rd "cylon" is a bit weakened.

That is how a 6-man games works, so you would just have one extra human.

.. maybe 2 Cylons, a Symp, AND set the dials to the no-symp-variant settings?

I have played the base game with 7 players; there were 3 Cylons, and both Mister Nice Gaius and Boomer were characters in the game. It worked well for the following reasons:

1. The Sympathizer card was used as a Not a Cylon card, and the 4th Cylon card had the sticky strip from a Post-It note placed on it and counted as a Not a Cylon card.
2. When the third Cylon is revealed, if it puts all three adjacent, then the one that just revealed has to change seats with a human player so it is not the case. Play resumes with the human player who just changed seats and the next turn of the Cylon who moved is skipped.

It was a very, very, very close game.

Mordenthral said:

We'll try this. The only other thing I can think of is just having the 3rd cylon player count as a sympathizer in terms of not being able to use Cylon fleet or get a super crises card. Unlike a full sympathizer he will always show up regardless of resource levels.

My worries for bigger and bigger games are card depletion for the players and time sat inactive for players - how do those two factors sit?

myrm said:

The time between turns was long, but each turn was filled with discussions, accusations, Skill checks, interrupts, Piloting cards, etc. Plenty to do.

We never ran out of cards to draw and hand limits kept the discard piles fed. As the number of players goes up, each person can contribute less cards to pass checks, but it comes out to the same amount of cards dropped on each check on average. Card count at 7 players was not an issue in the base game.

It got a tad bit frustrating when one player ran out of cards, was desperately looking forward to his turn so he could get some more, but got sent to sick bay right before his turn and could only draw 1, but other than that it worked out.

Ouch yeah that would hurt, but you could get that in a 5 or 6 player game too. By card depletion it was more how often players ran out that i was worried about rather than the draw decks actually (I hadn't considered that) - but it sounds like players running out didnt happen often enough to cause an issue.