Hey all

Just a quick question as we recently had a discussion about it in my group and we coudn't find any explicit answer in the rule book, plus I've searched on the forums and found no obvious thread regarding to it, so heres goes. It can relate to the original vanilla sympathiser mechanic, but we mainly just use the sympathetic cylon these days, as with the agendas its a bit more interesting for the player.

What is the course of action, when an unrevealed cylon player (still pretending to be one of the meatbags), recieves the sympathetic cylon card. Do they...

1) Imediately reveal to be a symp, and then receive the agenda card, and play the game as the symp with their new agenda victory conditions, forgetting their former genocidal ways?

2) Immediately reveal to be the symp, receive their agenda and pretend to follow it, but be secretly still following their original kill-all-humans cylon card?

3) Pass on the symp card to another player, accidently revealing themselves to be a pure evil cylon in the process, but still keeping the random element of the symp cylon passed to another player and keeping the recommended amount of humans / cylons per game?

Its never actually came up in a game yet, but we're just trying to be prepared. The answer might be staring us in the face but we keep missing it, lol.

Cheers guys!

Sympathetic Cylon or the Sympathiser depending on which you are using is a forced reveal. They reveal as the sympathetic one and process that. The remaining loyalty cards then end up going where the now sympathiser/sympathetic cylon chooses using the standard rules - which for Pegasus is go to the Ressurection Ship and hand the cards over

Righto, so its therefore possible for a player as an unrevealed cylon to effectively switch team to become potentionally pro-human and control who becomes the evil toaster?

Thats fine if its the case, just checking

I agree with myrm. That's how I read that rule, too.

I thought that when you revealed you passed off your other loyalty card(s) before picking your agenda (so you can't pick a worthless player to be the other cylon), just like you have to ditch your skill cards before you draw your Super Crisis card. But you do pass off your loyalty card(s) when you receive the Sympathizer.

If you want to mix it up a bit, randomly pick between the Sympathizer and Sympatheic Cylon cards. Not knowing which of the two will pop up can change the way the game plays out in the first few rounds.

Awesome, thanks for the tips. It makes that you are forced to pass on all loyalty cards before getting the agenda. I'll definately play it properly next time if the situation occurs.

And its a good idea about mixing up the sympathiser / symp cylon cards. Though generally the notion of the symp cylon is a lot more popular than the sympathiser in my gaming circle. But it should spice things up to have a random element if we can't get the fabled 5-player game going.

Cheers guys

We like to do things that shake the game up a little more, add more paranoia/guessing to what is going on. Not knowing which of the two sympathizers will come out makes some decisions harder. For example, if you know you are playing with the original sympathizer, getting a resource in the red before sleeper phase is almost a goal for the humans. With the Sympathetic Cylon you can conserve your resources instead. But if you don't know which is in the deck, you no longer have the minor luxury of knowing which way to play it.

Dogmeat said:

I used to think that when I first played, and awaited the alternative eagerly.

However, I actually prefer the Sympathiser as having been exposed to the Sympathetic Cylon card and the Cylon Leader system (and hence the agendas) do not think that the particular concept of the third team (which is fine) has been executed well enough (its the 4/2 split between actually being the type of cylon expected I do not like).

Also, the primary dislike of the Sympathiser in our group was the meme that 'everyone metagames to make it human and that adjusts how the game plays' and this turned out to be false over long play time. What we found was that people still did exactly the same gaming of the dials because they were uncertain of being Cylon or not in the sleeper phase and the balance point for the Sympathiser turned out to be the balance point for the game, low enough that you had a chance as a cylon to win but high enough that you had a chance as a confirmed human to hold the game out.

Combined this means that actually I have gone back to preferring to play with the Sympathiser over the Sympathetic Cylon. My jury is still out on Cylon Leaders - although I think they work worse with Kobol as the objective.