What are other groups thoughts about the Cylon Leaders? I personally like them, but recently my group has been expressing dissatisfaction with them. some feel it takes away some of the 'unknown' accusation part of the game, as you have a DEFINITE cylon player. I remind them that their intentions are still unknown (sypathetic/aggressive) and that it adds a different game play choice (much harder than being a 'normal' cylon), but not all were swayed. Has anyone else had this come up? I know we dont HAVE to play with them, but still...

I enjoy playing them. I think they are really refreshing to play and help keep the game kinda lively and action packed. Plus I like to do a corny and very poor impersenation of Cavil while I play.

With that being said however, I in general do not like them. I have two primary reasons for this. Firstly, that the humans are going to be against the ropes as it is. In a 4-6 player game normally a sympathizer is in play and the humans have, at least to some degree a control on the sympathizer being human. In that instance the humans have taken a hit to a resource but the teams are not even. If the teams are even the cylons are going to win. It is almost a forgon conclusion, that if your symathizer is a cylon and the odds are 2 on 2 or 3 on 3, just pack it up and start over. The game is so HORRIBLY missbalanced towards the cylons (by design and necessity) that it is very nearly impossible to win. I know, I know ....."It's possible stories" and "I've seen it happen before stories" are gonna pop, BUT...the humans don't quit no matter how grim it looks and I can tell you that 9 times out of 10 when the cylon force is equal to humans,...you better hope you are a cylon. The problem that the leader brings is they replace the sympathizer which takes away the humans ability to control where the sympathizer loyalty goes. it becomes a crapshoot as to whether the teams will be even or not, which by extension makes the game a coin-flip. If the Leader gets a sympathetic human agenda the humans have a shot, if they don't then the humans are going to loose. The "balancing" aspect of the leader becomes to random and not determined by strategy or tactic.

the other reason I don't like them is perhaps a bit more rooted in play styles and that varies from person to person but in short several players don't understand what the leader does or is for. When I play a leader I do everything I can to get my agenda requirements, which may mean at some points helping the humans even if you seek their ultimate destruction. I have encountered a few times now where the player who is playing the leader just treats himself as a revealed cylon, or feel that they have no chance at attaining their agenda so just play to kill the humans. I understand that this is the work of just poor sport players who either don't understand or don't care about playing a game,..."properly"...defined as, "the intent to win the game," however, the cylon leader for some reason promotes this activity which can blow an entire game.

That's what I think of em....

Napoleon.

Maybe its my masochistic streak of always wanting a challenge, but like I said, I like them. I don't feel they hurt the suspicion aspect of the game, because your agenda is still unknown. I've had both symapthetic and hostile agendas, and it is always a personal challenge to complete your goals (just winning with humans sometimes or slowing their death.) When playing the leader, I get a HUGE kick out of watching the other players squirm. first time we tried them, I was infiltrated most of the game, and every turn the humans exclaimed "...and why is Cavil still running around the ship/in Weapons control/etc, yet there was always a bigger fire to put out than brig/execute me That was a good time. Any other thoughts?

I like the concept a lot, but there are definitely some problems in execution. I was hoping that some of them would be cleaned up a bit with stuff in the Exodus expansion, though I can understand why FFG didn't want to add components to that expansion which would only be playable by people who also own Pegasus.

Unfortunately the agendas are rather unbalanced against each other, particularly when not playing with New Caprica. Also, both human and cylon teams can often simply ignore trying to figure out what the cylon leader's agenda is; since nearly every agenda is built to force the leader player to help both sides, and since there's very little you can do to affect a leader's course of action, it doesn't really matter which team he's ultimately playing for.

I agree with Kushiel, the main problem I have with Cylon Leaders is that the Agendas are so unbalanced.
The easiest ones by far are "Humans lose but go 6 distance" and "Humans win and you have played a SC."
Also, Cavil's abilities are so OP and we've found that they don't even really help him achieve an objective so much as help him with determining which side will win. I also agree that for our group a lot of the fun comes from trying to figure out who the Cylons are, and trying to figure out an Agenda isn't nearly as much fun.

I quite like the Leaders, though we haven't used them very often. I have a fairly large group that I regularly play with, so being able to add that 7th person is nice option. I only wish that they had put some more Agenda cards into Exodus, but oh well. I quite like the Sympathizer changes to Pegasus, so having more agendas for the sympathizer, even if you're not using a Leader.

I'm actually looking for feedback on an idea I had regarding Cylon leaders. Let me preface it with group info.

My group is relatively new to the game (only 6 under our belt, and 2 players out of 5-7 every game are new) but for my love of the game and of BSG I quickly purchased all of the expansions. We introduced Pegasus two weeks ago and just introduced Exodus this week. Now, because we are new, I have been careful of what mechanics from the expansions we introduce to the game. We always use Pegasus just for the extra options and every character including Cylon Leaders from every expansion is open to be played. This week I introduced the Cylon Fleet and that seemed to work fine despite our newbness. We have played with the Kobol objective all but once, as it seems the most straightforward. The one time that we did try New Caprica was disastrous for the humans.

Our humans have yet to win a game. I believe that this mostly comes from our being relatively new. But one thing that I have noticed is a deciding factor in every last game we've played so far with Cylon Leaders is that every time they've drawn an agenda that was contrary to its deck. To explain, we have always had Cylon Leaders drawing from, say, the Sympathetic Deck and receiving an agenda that requires Cylon Victory. Since most of our games involve six players, this means 3 cylons versus 3 humans, which seems to make the game very difficult.

Now my first instinct is to remove Cylon Leaders and play a few games without them. If that's what you advise I still might decide to do it. But my players do love the idea of Cylon Leaders and we have a constant queue going of who gets to play one next game.

So, since we're pretty new and I want to give the humans a better chance in our 6 player games, my thought was to remove the Cylon Win agenda cards from the Sympathetic Deck without telling the rest of the players about it (and removing Human Win cards from the Hostile Deck). That way they still have the doubt but we're guaranteed to NOT have 3/6 players as hostile cylons. In the future I would add them back in, but only after we have some more experience.

And that's the idea I'm looking for feedback on. Do you think that would be okay or that it ruins the spirit of the game too much? Or is there a better variant that somebody can think of where we still use Cylon Leaders?

Sorry it was so long winded, just wanted ye to have as full a picture as ye could.

One six-player variant that I've played with that I quite liked was this:

1) Before the loyalty deck is constructed, the cylon leader draws his agenda from the appropriate deck. He also gets one Not a Cylon and one You Are a Cylon card, which he doesn't look at the text of. The loyalty deck is constructed as normal, but with only one You Are a Cylon card and with one fewer Not a Cylon card (so that it's one card short of how big it should be).

2) If the leader has a pro-human agenda, he adds the You Are a Cylon to the loyalty card deck. If he has a pro-cylon agenda, he adds the Not a Cylon card to the loyalty deck. He puts the other card back in the box. He's not allowed to tell anyone which card he added to the deck until he reveals his agenda (ie, after the game is done).

This keeps the game a bit more balanced, since there will still only be two pro-cylon players, and also gives the cylon leader a bit of inside knowlege, since he knows how many cylons are out there.

That is a fantastic idea!

I like how interesting it makes it for the Leader to be the only one who knows how many Cylons there are, but this seems even more unbalancing than the original. If either of the Cylons Win agendas come up, then instead of two cylons and a sympathizer against three humans, you have slightly less than two cylons against four humans. Surely the difference between Salvage their Equipment and Convert the Infidels isn't so great as to warrant eliminating nearly half the team...

I don't know about how games are for experienced players, but I think that for my new player group the game would be better balanced with 4h/2c than 3 of each. The numerous games where we've had 3 of each were a cakewalk for the cylons. I'd wager that if we get better at the game over time that balance would change, but until then we're going to try SOMEthing, and that variable loyalty deck idea is a good one.

subochre said:

Yes, of course. HooblaDGN was requesting a way to "give the humans a better chance in our 6 player games," because in his group the humans have never won. That's why I suggested a variant that would imbalance the game a bit in favor of the humans.

Well, would it be better for the Cylon side to have two hidden Cylons or 1 hidden Cylon and 1 Cylon leader? If Cylon Leaders are considered weaker than a regular hidden Cylon I wouldn't want to weaken the Cylons too much. I think that our games would be balanced for our experience level with 2 Cylons and 4 Humans/Friendlies. But I don't think that the would be with 1.5 Cylons and 4 Humans/Friendlies. I'd rather err on the side of caution with re-balancing anything and I'm not sure of Cylon Leader strength.

So would it mess up balance more to take out Cylon win agendas from the Sympathetic Deck without informing our players or to follow Kushiel's suggestion?

I would suggest not messing with the Agenda decks. For one thing it is completely unfair for you to know who the Leader is siding with before the game even starts. I also think the other players will notice that they were drawing an Agenda from a pile of 6 before and now there are only 4. With Pegasus the game should be slightly balanced for a human win, especially if you are using (ugh) New Caprica.
It seems to me that groups that report constant Cylon wins are encountering this problem because the humans are not playing to their full potential. For example, I remember when we first started playing the Cylons were winning a lot and then we realized that Launch Scout allowed you to look at the Destination deck and that cycling all the 1-distance jumps to the bottom of the pile was really important. We actually playes last night and the humans won so fast it made my cylon head spin - they pulled a 3-distance jump thanks to scouting, then Cain immediately blind-jumped them 2 more and then they went 3 distance again on the next jump due to scouts. And they didnt even have a character that drew yellow cards because we both ended up as Cylons!
if you haven't already, you may want to check out this thread for some ideas to help the humans. And also, I gotta ask, how successful are your Cylon Leaders at actually fulfilling their objective when they win? If most of the games end with the Cylons winning but the Leader losing, then the person playing the Leader might be going about it all wrong; a Leader is a Razor not a blunt object, they can't just be heavy-handed human-hating toasters and expect their objective to fall into place. If the Leaders aren't winning much anyway, you may want to go ahead and try a few games without them.

HooblaDGN said:

Cylon leaders are probably balanced with regular cylons in terms of character strength. Leaders are weaker than unrevealed cylons in terms of card draw, but they also don't lose their special abilities while they're on the cylon locations. Leaders' special abilities are also much more likely to benefit them, whereas many human characters have special abilities that can be difficult to use well as an unrevealed cylon. And while the agenda cards are mostly set up so that a leader will have to help the humans somewhat even if he's planning for the humans' eventual downfall, in practice this is largely balanced by the fact that most unrevealed cylons have to help out the humans somewhat in order to avoid blowing their cover. Power-wise, I think they're mostly a wash.

However, cylon leaders are more difficult to play than unrevealed cylons, due to having more scarcity of actions (you're unlikely to ever be XO'd while playing a leader) and being generally ignored by both teams. So that might very well shift the balance slightly away to make leader characters a bit less effective than regular cylons, unless the person playing the leader is a very good player.

HooblaDGN said:

I agree with Skowza that removing the leader's chance of not working with the cylons isn't a good idea. Fooling the rest of your gaming group by changing the game without telling them is borderline unethical, and it'd be weird to have one player who knew where his loyalties lay before the game even began when the rest of the group didn't.

My only experience is one game but at least in a 4 person game, the Cylon Leader seemed to reduce the paranoia and drama quite a bit:

I was Cavil, and I drew the sympathetic "Join the Colonials" card. Basically, I wanted humans to win utterly and my only condition is to be infiltrating and not detained at the end. So, it was like a 3 humans vs. 1 unrevealed cylon game. Pretty much immediately, I knew this would be most boring game ever (at least for me, and possibly for all). I used my limited powers only ever for good and spent much of the time trying to figure out who the unrevealed cylon was (additional sadness - there was no unrevealed cylon until sleeper phase), but no one ever trusted me or debated me or took my advice until nearly the end of the game when I headed the execution of the (at last) revealed cylon on New Caprica and helped spring a human out of detention right after. And ironically, the humans almost left me on NC when the Admiral was going to jump away - and I would have lost. I begged to be given another turn around the board to get on board, and they let me because I'd been such a "good cylon" - and the revealed cylon was like, "Hey, don't do that! You don't know WHAT he might do!" (I think he was just upset because he had no chance of winning himself).

So, this is just one experience and if I had had a more ambiguous agenda, it would likely have added, at least, a complexity to my choices. The humans (and perhaps the cylon) were fairly confused by me, but they never bargained with me or consulted me. Maybe that's because it was our first game with the Leader and no one knew how far to take that.

I've stated this before, and I certainly don't want to harp on this point so I'll just say it again really quickly... Cylon Leaders don't belong in smaller games. Our house rule is Leaders can only be played in a 6 or 7 player game; if a Leader pulls a human-friendly agenda in a 5 player game, the lone remaining Cylon will not be able to win unless the humans just play really poorly or barring unusual circumstances, such as pulling 5 attack Crisis cards in a row when Cain isnt around to blind jump their way out.

I agree that the cylon leader unbalances 4-player games way too much. And while the nuances of the agenda understandably matter a lot to the cylon leader, all the other players care about is "Is he with us or against us?" If it winds up a 2 v 2 game, it's almost impossible for humans to win. If it winds up 3 v 1 then it's the other way. I find that neither winds up being a very fun way of spending 2+ hours.

HooblaDGN said:

As far as I can tell, inexperienced players make mistakes. Because of the crisis cards, every mistake humans make counts double. It's twice as hard for humans to come back from a perilous situation where they made a serious mistake. If the Cylons, revealed or hidden, make a mistake, it's not nearly as bad.

Obviously this shifts as players get more experienced. Two of our last games allowed for the humans to make a remarkable comeback...mostly because the Cylon(s) was/were new to the game and didn't really know what to do. Play just the core game until the humans know what to do and win at least once. Don't start adding expansions (that make the game even more complex and harder to understand) until you feel like you got the hang of the core game.

About the original point of the thread, though, I personally like the idea of the Cylon Leaders. They add another level of depth to the game and, in my opinion, make for a very cool addition. However, I personally don't like playing a Cylon Leader. Because everyone knows that your agenda is different from the straight forward humans win/Cylons win concept, nobody really trusts you. Yes, in some groups people tend to ignore what the Cylon Leaders do and I think that's part of why they seem so unbalanced. Once you stop paying attention to what they do (notice, I'm saying "what they do" as opposed to "what agenda they have") problems start coming at you from left field and you don't even know what hit you. You don't need to know what agenda a Cylon Leader has. Just make sure he doesn't get the chance to screw you over...regardless of what team you're on.

My experience is that the game is most enjoyable with 2 hidden cylons, and I think 7 player games take too long between turns, so I'd really only suggest to use Cylon Leaders in 6 player games. In the context of the question asked earlier, I also wouldn't really use them if the players are new.

I think the main play issue with the CLs is that the Agendas are very predictable, and there's not enough variety. I'd like to see another expansion with 4-6 more agendas for each deck, with some having conditions that aren't dependant on who won or have different conditions depending on who won.

That said, I think Exodus' personal goals accomplished the goals CLs were supposed to in a far better way.

My experience is that leaders don't work particularly well in four-player games. Then again, four-player games in general don't work particularly well, either...but having a leader made them even worse.

Kushiel said:

How about a varient on that using the Sympathiser card instead of the "Not a Cylon"? Then a Cylon-siding CL has a reason not to drive down resources too early to gain an extra ally, while a Human-siding CL has a reason not to, because it gains nothing for the human side to do so. Meanwhile, the humans have to make the decision of whether to risk a resource going in to the red for the chance of not getting the extra cylon player.