I would love to hear what criticisms and fixes people have come up with for this game, especially who have played this game a dozen times or so.

Please include house rules and any physical modes of play, meaning manners and courtesies of game play (such as announcing turns, placement of tokens in certain ways, etc.) that clarify game play or make certain rules easier to follow.

Played about 10-15 games of BSG: Vanilla since I bought it. A really helpful rule, especially for new players. When you deal out the loyalty cards, don't let anyone look at them until everyone has their cards. Next, provide 30 seconds for all players to hold up their loyalty hands and look at the card. This helps because most players will not know what their, "You Are a Cylon" reveal cards do, and it could possibly give them away if they are holding up a card and reading it while everyone else has tossed their cards down. After the 30 seconds, have everyone put their cards down at the same time. It gives new players a better fighting chance.

My gaming group does the exact same thing. No one looks at their loyalty card until everyone has one, then we all look at them for a set amount of time, then put them down together.

Same thing if someone is dealt an extra loyalty card, they have to look at it for a set amount of time, regardless of what it says, before putting it down.

How we deal with new players is we play a round without loyalty cards at all. During this round, every player's turn we discuss what actions each person could take if they were a human or if they were a cylon. For each crisis, we do the same. Once we have gone around one time like that, loyalty cards are dealt out like normal.

We also have that whenever you look at your loyalty cards, you look at ALL your cards (sleeper phase), especially with Exodus.

If someone looks at your loyalty card, at the same time your look at your remaining loyalty cards, so you know which one they saw. This can be important if you have on Cylon and one not a cylon!

We use "Low middle and high" on skill check contributions, but it is getting out of hand as is talking about 0 and 6 cards.

shad0w0000 said:

This is indeed a good habit. However, in our first game with Conflicted Loyalties, one Human player got executed because of double-checking his loyalty cards in the middle of the game. Thankfully, he had two Personal Goals and no Final Five cards. The shooter had forgotten that with Conflicted Loyalties, the humans may have a reason to read their Loyalty Cards carefully.

Speaking of Conflicted Loyalties, we added a house rule for them: If you complete your Personal Goal, you may immediately draw two skill cards (which may come outside of your skill set). Effectively, you receive a free Consolidate Power action after you waste an action to complete a Personal Goal. Straight from the book, Personal Goals felt a bit stupid because there was no bonus for completing them. You had to choose whether to risk a resource or lose an action.

Other House rules:

Playing with Pegasus Expansion
-Mix Galactica and Pegasus Damage tokens together and draw at random whenever Galactica takes damage. It removes the silly scenario where Pegasus always ends up taking one for the team. We tried this in our previous game and agreed to use it in future.

Cylon Fleet
-Damaged basestar on Main Board does not prevent Pursuit Track from advancing when Launch Raiders or Activate Basestar is activated with no effect. This removes the gimmick tactic of trying to slow down Cylon attack by hanging around with a damaged Basestar.

Ionian Nebula
-If you draw an ally card that matches a character in play, do not discard that ally if the character is a revealed cylon. (And now that I think of it, the matching cylon player should be the one to choose the trauma token for the ally in this case).

McRae said:

Awesome. We've never indoctrinated our new players to that extent, instead just showing them the BSG_Web.mov available on FFG and doing a few mock skill-checks, but I like your idea a lot and will be pushing for it from now on.

jullevi said:

Wonderful! The damaged basestar problem is my biggest problem with the rules now that Exodus has fixed some of the Pegasus annoyances. Looks like you've got an interesting solution there that I can't imagine borking the game too badly in either direction.

Here's what I'd add to the discussion:

Investigative Committee : ALL uses of Investigative Committee are treated under the Pegasus version, that is that the destiny cards are played face-down. This makes IC work like it's supposed to, to make everyone play nice skill cards, and makes IC avoid what it's not supposed to be, a pass-a-skill-check perfectly calculator.

Laura Roslin : if activating a location on Colonial One, only discard one skill card instead of two. Otherwise she's, ironically, a mediocre president, as evidenced by the several threads about her here.

Revealing & Cylon Locations : use the Pegasus reveal rules and Pegasus locations. They're so much better. Get some super glue on there.

This is great. You guys have given me a jumpstart when I finally try my first game. Anything else?

Pulsar said:

Yeah, could you frakin' stop these pointless posts. I've got an idea. What not play a game and then ask intellegent questions about it? No one appointed you FFG Games Master.

The Old Man said:

Something I missed? I read this thread as one player's genuine curiosity about what works and doesn't, and some players' feedback on that question. Probably a lot of us who have games under our belt have already made up our own minds on this topic for our own playgroup, and I know I wasn't swayed terribly much by most of the conclusions other groups have come to. Fortunately I've got a "back" button on my browser and a jillion other threads to read. Don't see why we'd want to give Pulsar a hard time about his question.

Sorry, I didn't mean to flame. But he's doing this all over the FFG forums. He doesn't own any of the games, that's OK, but instead of asking general opinions, of which you can find numerous posts with minimal searching, he starts threads with provocative titles. Criticisms of rules? How about, are the rules pretty clear in this game? Or is this a difficult game, or…

"CRITICISMS OF THE FFG COSMIC ENCOUNTER (I think he owns this)

PLEASE LIST YOUR CRITICISMS OF CIV HERE! (which he doesn't appear to own or have played)

Let's help FFG make this game better! (about Battles of Westros which he doesn't appear to own or have played)

CRITICISMS AND HOUSE RULES/FIXES (Arkham Horror which he doesn't appear to own or have played)

After many good posts he apparently is just shooting the same question across the boards.

I am fairly new here and really didn't want to get off like this, but I tuned into one too many of these posts.

Sorry again.

Meh... my group had problems with Cylons always winning when we first started, so I can understand why someone would ask questions. We just had to figure out the right strategies (scout for jump preps, use XOs often, draw Quorum cards) and now it's about 50/50.

The Old Man said:

Fair enough. Not accusing you of flaming. I don't get out to the other forums too often, so maybe there's some history I'm unaware of. This seemed like an honest enough inquiry to me, and maybe it still is. Either way, I'll concede your point that mileage varies in this game, maybe to a greater extent than any other I've played. Different groups develop different personalities, and different characters / cards / actions have vastly different values depending on the given meta. So I agree with you there's no substitute for experience, particularly when it comes to a game as dynamic as BSG.

I guess I found what I was looking for in the Cosmic Encounter forum.

The OP wrote: "We are regularly frustrated by the apparent complete lack of care for the nervous system of the game itself. It's getting painful. I tried to start this kind of thread with House Rules/Fixes next to it in their forums, and though a lot of people were interested within the first couple days (as apparently most people come to these forums to try to fix their broken rules), I was practically lambasted for the effort, accused of spamming, and even told by a quintessential rules-lawyer type that my successful effort to get clarification on a couple elements of Cadwallon I suspected were rushed (by confirming my suspicion with the game's designer himself) was just an attempt."

Reading through the thread it was clear that the OP loves, and has played, all the versions of CE. He doesn't like the rule-tending that FFG has done for the game. Fair enough, there's plenty of room for discussion and FFG actually hosts this forum complaints and all. But then the OP made a leap and decided that he has to address as many FFG games as he could, even though it was clear he hadn't played them. So instead of questions addressing problems and solutions, many of which has been discussed over the months and years, his approach wastell me what's wrong with this game. Not so that he might play it one day, but because he decided it was his crusade to "fix" FFG's problems.

No game is perfect, the nature of these complex games is that there always be some question of the rules. I have found these forums, and its members, of great help my short time here. I appreciate the constructive efforts of the heroes on these forums, as opposed to someone taking blind scattered pot shots.
Note that in the above the OP complains of being attacked for his efforts. But if he would take the time to go through the forums he would note that this stuff is always being addressed.

As an old war gamer from the old Squad Leader days I appreciate the effort that FFG puts in to their games. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely! But by people making a good faith effort.

He even asked the same question in the Mansions of Madness forums, and that game isn't out for another month or so.

Hmm, I've been trying to reserve my judgment and wait to hear again from the OP on all this but it's been awfully silent for a couple of days, so I'm ready to concede the point and move on. Thanks Old Man and Bleached Lizard for the heads-up and my apologies if I took the moral high road a bit too fast.

THREAD LOCKED!

<rummaging through pocket for keys>

Dangit ...