Hi, my 2 questions are:

1. Can the admiral launch nukes from the brig?

2. Do you select a crisis card if you are in the brig?

1) Yes they can - it is an action and you can do actions while in the brig.

HOWEVER - remember that the chances of this happening are really quite small. The only way it can happen is if ALL Admiral eligible players are in the brig - so everyone who is human or an unrevealed cylon is in there - otherwise when the current Admiral is thrown in the brig the Admiral title simply moves to the most senior person in the succession order outside the brig.

2) No, if you look at the brig space it specifies that you do not draw a crisis card while in the brig

Thank you very much

myrm said:

And this can actually be beneficial if you're starting to run low on resources. We've had players purposefully get thrown into the brig to slow down how many crisis cards we went through.

Nazz04355 said:

That seems counter-productive to me. You will still need the same number of crisis cards to get the jump tracks, and while in the brig your ability to throw on checks is diminished. How can this strategy actually benefit you?

JerusalemJones said:

Very rarely productive, I agree. I've played the game a lot and can't remember a time when I thought it'd be good for the fleet to brig a human.

But speaking purely in the abstract, while having a player in the brig does not reduce the number of crisis cards drawn during a game, it does favorably alter the ratio of cards drawn vs. skill checks made.

CARDS DRAWN vs. POTENTIAL SKILL CHECKS IN ONE TURN (one full circling of the table):

5 humans, none in brig: 25 cards drawn, 5 skill checks (max)

5 humans, one in brig: 25 cards drawn, 4 skill checks (max)

If you employ this strategy, over the course of the game, there will be more turns, more human actions, more cards drawn by the human fleet, but the same number of crises.

Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that the presence of cylons at the table really turns the math against this strategy, while the absence of cylons makes it largely unnecessary, since five humans rarely run into the kind of card shortage that would justify such desperate measures. After all, when the cylons do finally show up at sleeper and human actions and cards are really at a premium, the fleet will usually regret having that human in the hole ...

JerusalemJones said:

It's beneficial as a delaying tactic. Yes you still need the same number of crisis cards to jump, but it gives you time to collect skill cards up to your maximum hand size. Even by reducing the crisis card count by one per round of play (round being everyone at the table gets a turn) you're allowing the players to hold onto more skill cards that they can use for the tougher crisis votes.

Holy Outlaw said:

We seem to always run into the situation where we have a run of high strength crisis cards in a row. Most players are usually hovering around 1-2 skill cards in their hand by time it comes back to their turn to draw. Having a character in the brig gives them 1 one less crisis card to have to vote on plus it allows the character in the brig to draw to their full hand size in about 2 turns.

I'm not saying that this is a long term strategy but it certainly has allowed us to slow the resource depletion rate that happens by failing skill checks.

The difficulty of brigging to stall is that being able to contribute only one card is horrible. In a five player game, if you brig 3 people, you aren't getting 5 players worth of cards for 2 crises in one full set of turns around the table. You're getting 2 players worth of cards, plus 6 (1 for each brigged individual, over two crises); barely more than 3 people's worth of cards. Now, this, strictly speaking, is beneficial. Normally, you'd be getting 5 players worth of cards for 5 crises, a one-to-one ratio, players recover about 5 cards per crisis. Now? you're getting 8 cards per crisis. Good stuff, presumably.

The problematic parts are when you consider that not everyone is working for the humans (i.e., someone may be a cylon before the sleeper phase, and certainly is after), and suddenly it throws your calculations off. Even if the cylon player is brigged, they're not helping and they're actively harming. In the scenario above, you're looking at 2 players worth of cards, plus 2 (normally six, but one person is throwing against, and not throwing to help, this assumes that the values are relatively the same). Still, it seems like there's 6 cards per crisis, rather than 5. Wise cylons will reveal once a few people have been brigged. This creates even more trouble. By using the Caprica location, the players will face more crises. In that 5 player game (assuming the cylon was brigged along with two humans), you'll have three crises per full revolution, and you'll and only have the same 12 cards to deal with them, which puts this strategy solidly into the negative (in the best case scenarios).

This is to say nothing of the actions being spent to defend galactica from cylon attacks, or the cards you spend brigging people and/or freeing them.

So, in short, it's not worth doing unless everyone is a human player. And then it's barely worth doing.

Sinis said:

I agree with this. Also with the point about diminishing returns on having more than one player in the hole.