I'm toying with a new loyalty card idea. I'm calling the "Ulterior Motives"

Goal of Mechanic: Create situations where Non-cylon players must draw suspicion on themselves to win the game.

Here's how it works - At the beginning of a 5+ player game, replace one regular "You Are Not A Cylon" with an Ulterior Motive card. This is treated as a "You are not a Cylon" card, but with the following additions:

*An Ulterior Motive card has additional/alternate win conditions that must be met for the player to win if they are not a Cylon.

*If you have an Ulterior Motive and become a revealed Cylon, gain and Ulterior Motive when you are already a revealed Cylon, or are executed, reveal your Ulterior Motive card and discard it.

Here are Some Sample Cards:

"You are not a Cylon"

Ulterior Motive: Power Hungry

You win the game if:

Humans win AND you are the President or Admiral

(Challenge: Grab power position while convincing others you're not the Cylon)

"You are not a Cylon"

Ulterior Motive: Care for the People

You win the game if:

Humans win AND Morale is 6 or more.

(Challenge: Conserve cards to protect one resource without haviung players thing you're screwing over the others)

"You are not a Cylon"

Ulterior Motive: Delusions of Grandeur

You win the game if:

Humans Lose

(note on this one: This may screw with balance, but the player with the motive must not get themselves caught because being executed would make them a regular human again. just spitballing anyway)

Thoughts?

It sounds exactly like the Cylon Leader agendas. What's the difference?

I guess the difference is that everyone knows you have a hidden agenda if you're a cylon leaderthis way they never know who has one.

My problem with the mechanic is: Wouldn't I want to be executed, thereby turning me back into a regular human and giving me a greater chance of victory?

It's not a bad concept, just needs some tweaking in the execution. A big part of the show was the agendas of the humans - Baltar, Zarek, Gaeta come quickly to mind - and this sounds like trying to capture that flavor. The Care of the People card would be very hard to obtain, as Morale can fall so often, and having a human working against the humans seems wrong. Even if for awhile there Baltar was not looking out for the humans best interests. The trick would be to ensure that no two Agendas counter-act each other. Even better might be Agendas that, when met, could affect the game. These could become Pass/Fail agendas. Like:

Care for the People

Pass: After Morale moves from Red to Blue, discard this Agenda to gain an additional morale.

Fail: If Morale is 2 or less, discard this Agenda and discard 2 skill cards from your hand.

Out for Yourself

Pass: After a resource is reduced by 2 during your turn, discard this agenda to draw your skill set.

Fail: If you are sent to the Brig or detention, discard this agenda and half your skill cards (rounded down).

Mutiny

Pass: After the Admiral is executed, discard this agenda to become the new admiral (regardless of which character is chosen by the other player).

Fail: If you lose the Admiral title, discard this agenda. You are executed. If you are human, there is no Morale loss.

Outlaw is right, no one knows who (or if) there's an ulterior motive floating around.

As for the latter question, I'm not sure how to balance the execution challenge. Obviously, getting ecexuted is bad for the humans and draws suspicion off the real cylons. It is a challenge.

@JJ - I like the idea of being able to reveal the card on some condition to gain a bonus. Maybe there is a tension of some ulterior motives being immediatly helpful under certain conditions while others give alternate win conditions. Since there's only one in the loyalty deck at a time, you wouldn't have to worry about ability overlap. The fail condition is problematic though, because the card is secret and a person could "forget" to reveal the drawback.

"You are Not a Cylon"

Ulterior Motive: Aspirations of Heroism

When a base star or 3 raiders, heavy raiders and/or centurions are destroyed on your turn, discard this card and draw three Leadership cards.

The Pass/Fail idea is similar to a mechanic in Arkham Horror. One would hope that the player would be willing to play with the Ulterior Motive, and honestly. Otherwise the other players could all call "schenanigans" on you, and you might not get to play the next game.

You're right about the shenanigans thing, same with self-executing to get out of ful-filling a win condition.

The fact remains though that this would be secret where the Personal Stories in Arkham are public knowledge. For instance, people wouldn't be able to know if you got the card pre-or-post-sleeper, and since its not directly visible one could genuinely forget without being reminded by another player.

rowanalpha said:

I've got my doubts on this. My experience has been that execution is often a win-win. Even when we mistakenly kill a human, the penalty is so trivial that it's usually more than offset by our increased security (e.g., ability to XO the player in critical situations). And I don't see it often drawing suspicion off the cylons--on the contrary, it usually helps the fleet with the process of elimination, heightening pressure on the real cylon with each human execution. I believe this is one of the frequent knocks I hear on the execution mechanic--that it's low risk / high reward. Even when you lose you win.

That's why I'd be tepid in my endorsement of any mechanic that might further incentivize executions--an element that already has a far heavier bootprint in the game than it did in the show--but I do think you're on the right track with some of these pass/fail ideas that are being proposed. And as long as the execution incentive is solved, the idea has the potential to add a bit of intrigue into the game, which is a good thing.

Our solution to de-incintivise execution has been for the executed player to redraw loyalty card, either shuffling theirs into the loyalty deck and redrawing if its pre-sleeper, or drawing a card from a mini deck of 2 YaNaC and one Cylon post sleeper. No auto-trust then.

rowanalpha said:

You know, I've heard this idea or something like it from a few places by now. I think my group's going to try it when we play next.

Holy Outlaw said:

I think it works well.

rowanalpha said:

I was just thinking of that same idea when reading the post. Post sleeper it won't work, but pre-sleeper it really puts a damper on casual executions. After all, it is a new character coming onto the ship, so the idea of shuffling the "You are not a cylon" card back into the deck and drawing a new loyalty card works well.

JerusalemJones said:

After sleeper, you make a seperate loyalty deck, with one unused cylon card and two "You are not a cylon" cards. The chance of making a third Cylon really kicks the desire to randomly execute in the rear.

Yeah, I saw that part, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about post-sleeper executions and the chance of a new cylon entered into the game. Our group plays BSG alot. And by alot I mean 3-6 times a week. It is the most played non-ccg/lcg game at our store. And I don't know about your games, but the humans win by Morale loss pretty often. Just the other night the humans were at 5 Morale having only made one jump for 2 distance. The president had to option to kill the admiral, but didn't for fear of the morale loss. And of course, the admiral was the other cylon (I had revealed before my second turn after having been given an EO). That was a nasty game where, with two jumps to go all resources were at 3 or less, with both fuel and morale at 1. And then Riots came up from the destiny deck.

If anything, my wife and I were thinking that post sleeper the player would then draw from their previous loyalty cards and either/both a You Are a Cylon card and/or an Agenda. We're already looking at sleeving the Cylon agendas because it's gotten to easy for us during seven player games with a leader to figure out certain agendas, and we want to add the mystery back to the game. That's why I like the whole re-draw loyalty cards concept.

I think every play group varies somewhat. We lose to all sorts of stuff ourselves.