Ok, so I was lying awake tonight thinking about battlestar galactica. For those of you who have seen the show, please keep this a NO SPOILER thread, it's about rules, at its core.

Anyway, so I was thinking about a variant that might reflect that you never know when a sleeper is going to be "turned on". Sometimes in my experience during the first half of the game, its pretty obvious that there are no cylons out there, and the humans get really far ahead and its hard to catch up if you are a sleeper. At the moment, I realize this idea still has a few kinks, so that's why I'm asking for help in working them out. Also, I must say a word of caution; if you play with the New Caprica board, don't use this variant. I'd appreciate any feedback.

With that said:

Late Sleeper Variant:

Form the loyalty deck and deal out loyalty cards at the beginning of the game as normal.

There is no "sleeper agent" phase when Galactica reaches 4 distance, instead, each time Heavy Raiders move or Basestars fire, the current player draws one loyalty card from the pile of unused loyalty cards. These types of ships do not actually have to be on the board for this condition to trigger.

By activating the "Cylon Fleet" location to move Basestars or Heavy Raiders, a revealed cylon player may draw one unused loyalty card and give it to the player of their choice. By activating the "Human Fleet" location, a revealed cylon player may draw two loyalty cards, give one of them to the player of their choice, and shuffle the other card back into the deck of unused loyalty cards.

On the occasion that the game ends before any player has at least one "You Are a Cylon" card, then all players win.

I don't like it. It gives any revealed cylons way too much control over who is going to be the other cylon. It also has the possibility of being worse than the situation it's trying to fix.

A couple changes that might make it more palatable in that regard are if 1) the revealed cylon can only choose a player who hasn't yet received a sleeper phase card (or two cards, for Boomer), and 2) he/she has to choose whom to give it to before looking at the card. So the addition to the Cylon Fleet action just determines the order in which suspicion falls upon people and how early it happens, but the Human Fleet ability still seems pretty powerful.

One might want to even things out further by making it so that if a player already has their sleeper card when they draw a basestars/heavy raiders activation, then the loyalty card goes to the next available player...I'm intrigued by the idea of players getting different numbers of cards, but it also seems potentially pretty unbalancing.

Or heck, if one wanted to make a really simple Unpredictable Sleeper Variant, one could just deal out one loyalty card for each unit of distance the fleet jumps, starting with the current player. (Though naturally this would make small games harder on the humans than very large ones.)

(oh and needless to say, this seems like it would make the Sympathizer even more of a nightmare than it is already)