We came with this variant to help the fact that a pro-cylon sympathizer is basically a cylon without the coolest cylon powers, which is kinda boring. This variant might need a twelfth You Are Not a Cylon card if the full six players with B&B are in play, you can use the Sympathizer card for this (treating it as any other Not a Cylon card).

Basically, instead of having the You Are a Sympathizer card, you wait for the Sleeper Agents phase, then you add a You Are a Cylon card (if all resources are in blue), or a You Are Not a Cylon card (if at least one is past the halfway mark).

We haven't tested this thing yet, because the next game we played was a 3-player game (brutal, centurion loss at distance 1, after barely averting damage loss at distance 0), and those don't use a Sympathizer.

I'm seeing that apparently this helps the Cylons more (a third [or second] full Cylon, with the power to stay hidden, a revealing power, a supercrisis card, and being able to activate the fleet, as opposed to a human that just skips the brig). OTOH, this puts a stress on the human players in that if they jump to fast, going for the minimal four jumps, they may be in trouble, but it means they were doing well so far (sucks to be at 5-5-6-7, but if Cylons manage that, they deserve the win). If they turn a resource in the red, they still give the cylon a target and it doesn't seem to change the game much. So it may need some tweaking.

Let's see what you guys think about this one.

I haven't yet played "BSG The Board Game" (is there an acceptable short form?), so please take what I say with the obligatory grain of salt. I'm getting it for Christmas, and I've already coerced my whole family into playing it with me at least once

I agree with most people that one of the few marks against the BSG board game is the Sympathizer rule. It's confusing, both mechanically and thematically, and it's not really all that fun compared to the distilled awesome that is everything else. It does seem ripe for a bit of re-tooling...

But this begs the question: Why did FFG design the Sympathizer rule like this in the first place? I know FFG is great at designing games. I also know they playtested BSG far more than any of us have. I'm sure they agonized over the Sympathizer rule more than many other aspects of the game, and it wouldn't surprise me if there are people on the design team who still don't like the final version.

So when I see a variant like yours that looks good, I ask myself: "Is this something FFG likely would have tested?" Simply dealing out an extra Loyalty Card of the losing team's strikes me as something they would have tested first. They must have had a darn good reason to drop your elegant idea for the comparatively clunky Sympathizer card, and so I'd be really hesitant to change it back without knowing that reason.

Maybe their reason is something as simple as, "we wanted to represent Cylon/Human sympathizers somehow, since they're a big part of the show." If that's the case, then we can house rule the Sympathizer out of existence, as long as we're comfortable losing that bit of theme. On the other hand, maybe months and months of testing revealed the Sympathizer card to be the only way to reliably maintain the balance of tension into the late game. If that's the case, we make changes to it at our peril.

Have the designers made any relevant comments outside of the manual and the FAQ that might shed some light on their thinking?

This change gives more of a boost to whichever side is "losing", which makes the game swingier. If that is what you want, go for it.

Humans winning, normal: add a weak Cylon

Humans winning, this variant: add a full Cylon

Cylons winning, normal: brig one of the humans, but at least he's still a human

Cylons winning, this variant: don't even bother brigging a human!

You guys make excellent points. First off, thank you for your comments.

It's true that it makes the advantage for the losing side bigger in our variant, and more testing might show that this is just too much variance. What we're trying to avoid is when a sympathizer goes to the cylon side and gets stuck with "I'm trying to make humans lose, yet I'm not allowed to take the strongest actions against them". I'd love to get designers here and say if they tried that and if so, why did they reject it.