One thing I noticed with the Crisis deck is that sometimes its just nuts other times its a breeze.

One thing Ive been looking at trying is to split the Main Crisis deck into 2 halves and play one half before sleeper and one half after.

I was doing this with a friends game so I dont have the full card lists to break down but what I did was remove all the fleet attack cards then seperate the remaining cards into piles based on first skill check, or straight choice then by cylon activation symbol

I divided the skill check card within each activation based on if they seemed to thematicly be challenges early in the series or if they came a bit later.

This was actually almost even splits in most cases. I evenly distributed the food and water shortage cards (maybe a bit heavier on those in the pre sleeper deck.

I seperated the 33 and scar attack cards and placed 33 in the pre sleeper deck and scar in the other. Then I tried to even out the number of base star placements and civilian ships so that both sets of cards had near equal ammounts.

What I ended up with is two 45 card crisis decks that had roughly the same number of each cylon activations.

The idea is that once the fleet has entered the Sleeper Phase of the game you switchcrisis decks much like you do with the new caprica deck in the expansion.

Some other Ideas I had that might make it interesting.

1) I dont know if there is a variant out there where the Pegasus ship doesnt show up till after the first Jump but its something I was thinking would also make the game keep some of the feel from its play without the expansion. In those cases I would suggest that characters like Cain and Ellen would have similar rules to Helo at the start of the game and not be on the board till after the first Jump.

2) I was planning on designating a couple of the skill checks to have the additional pass effects.

a) current player chooses another player and changes seating position with them current players character is then sent to sickbay. (The purpose of this pass effect is to breakup the "murderers row" scenerio that happens fairly often.

b) In conjunction with the split crisis deck idea in the pre or post sleeper decks all players pass one face down loyalty card to the player on your right/left. If the player has no facedown loyalty cards pass to the next player that does. (This could also happen as a fail effect of a specific check)

Anyway what do you think about any of this.

I was looking for ways work within some of the already given game mechanics to see some more interesting plays as both humans and cylons.

At any rate I hope they make more expansions that play on some of the themes. I think the mechanics of the game have some really interesting possibilities.