Played my second game last night, was a great time and the humans won...go humanity!

My question, one of the players suggested that we build the loyalty deck with enough Not a Cylon cards so that its possible that there are No Cylons by the end of the game. Is this a common variant? Would the game still be challenging? I like the idea of it, since we can't confirm one way or the other, but wanted to make sure the game is still worth playing without any Cylons (but not knowing that there are no Cylons, like with a cooperative game)

There is a fully cooperative variant in the official optional rules .

I realize that's not totally helpful, but there it is. I haven't really heard of anyone modifying the loyalty decks so that there are a variable number of cylons.

Variable number of cylons basically means the cylons are hosed. The game is balanced for the standard number, having less than that number means they are sunk. THose rare games that I have played in the base game only where there has been one full cylon in a 5 or 6 player because one player has both cylon cards have wrecked any hope they have because its at least two actions to reveal and get another cylon in the game - Pegasus actually put a fix in for this meaning that revealing did make another player a cylon in these circumstances immediately, rather than requiring a further action by the cylon to dump off cards and limiting their ability to do so if a certain distance had been reached as per the base game.

Thanks for the replies. That's why I wanted to ask, to see how the balance would be affected. I might be able to incorporate some of the cooperative game elements to balance it out, but I'm not sure if that would work either, because if you have the full cylons, then its unbalanced towards them.

We need to get some games down before we go mucking with the rules.

My group has done it, but only in three-player games. We've found that it adds a little mystery to the three-player dynamic when you're not completely certain that there's a Cylon at all.

That's the size of my group as well. How was the game balance? Was it still a challenge?

The balance seems OK. It's definitely still challenging for both sides. It's not very often that there actually isn't a Cylon, but just the chance that there isn't one leads to doubts when thinking about accusing someone. To me, this erases the major weakness of a three-player game, which is that it can be too easy to ferret out the Cylon, especially if someone is playing Baltar.

We had a game once where we were really getting our butts kicked. At first we thought that someone had to be sabotaging us, but by late in the game it became apparent that everyone was really trying their best to win. We still couldn't be absolutely sure until the end, though, as things were going so badly that a Cylon could almost do nothing overtly bad and still win. We managed to win by the narrowest of margins. It turned out that there wasn't a Cylon, much to everyone's relief.

We've played it this way with both the base game and the expansion. It's the only house rule that we use.

Thank you. That's what I was hoping for. Most of my group has been playing games together so long that we can read each pretty well, so adding the mystery of possibly no Cylon should help. I don't think it would work for larger groups, but for three, it adds just enough "maybe" that we can still guess.

I dont like it ... If i would like to play without a "bad guy" i would play Shadows over Camelot, which is exactly this - no one can be sure if there is a traitor player. Galactica has other challanges and most fun is to figure out who is the cylon. And ... i dont like modifying the game with not an official rules at all.

Once we had a game we very good cylons - we couldn't make it out who they were until the end of the game. Accusations flew left and right, our paranoia kept us failing our crisises... Once it was over (humans won, but with great difficulty) it came out that no-one was the cylon! I made a mistake while builiding the loyality deck and didn't add any cylon cards, but I took enough 'you're not a cylon!' cards... After the game we agreed that it was one of the best games we'd had!

I agree with Rasiel that the main thing in Shadows over Camelot is that there is the potential of a traitor (but not guaranteed). However, it does sound kind of interesting to try this in a 3 player game.

I've mentioned this before, but in our group when we play with 6 players (and it works with 4 as well) we often play our "Super Secret Cylon" games. Instead of chossing a sympathizer card, we take the Sympathizer, Sympathetic Cylon, 1 You are not a Cylon and 1 You are a Cylon (chosen randomly) card, mix the four together, and then choose one randomly to add to the deck for the sleeper phase. Then when Sleeper hits and no-one has reveals as the sympathizer/Sympa-cylon we ahve to wonder are their 4 humans or 3 cylons? It adds an extra level of paranoia to the game, and does actually play pretty balanced. We even had one game where one player (as President) didnt' realize he received a You Are a Cylon card, and the sole cylon in the game still managed to pull off a victory over the humans.

I've only played two games so far, but my play group is also 3 players, and I feel like we're going to be able to pick out the cylon easily more often than not, so this might be an interesting option to try.

We player a New Caprica game where I... er... someone... screwed up the deck and we had 1 cylon in a 2 cylon game. The humans spent so much time paranoid, overspending, and executing (gotta have a human admiral!) they almost lost. So, with our group, a no cylon option could be effective.

Or second game of Exodus, we had the symapthiser, and it was the "last card" in the box at sleeper phase. We kept waiting for someone to turn it over - haha.