Under the section "Activating Vipers" (p. 25), there is the following statement:

Each viper may be activated any number of times during a
player’s turn, but players may not activate ships that are
being piloted by another player.

"Any number of times"? What exactly does that mean? If I'm in Command can I say "Okay, activate this viper and move. Now move again. Now attack this Cylon. Oops, failed. Attack again. Success! Move. Attack this Cylon." Et cetera, et cetera, until I wipe out the entire Cylon fleet? I seriously doubt that's the case, but that's sure what "any number of times" suggests to me.

Am I being extremely dense? Is this wording perfectly clear to everyone but me? If not, then how should it be worded, and can that get added to the Errata?

It would be really nice to have official clarification on this and Lee's CAG abillity. I have always played that the if you activate vipers you must activate *two* (or six if you are using CAG) vipers, and not one viper twice, but if you EO that location you can activate two vipers twice because it is an entirely different action.

I've seen this come up before and the ruling is you get two 'activations' (six from Apollo's CAG ability) and you can use them on the same viper.

Agreed. Unmanned vipers don't have "turns" -- each activation takes place in sequence, without regard to whether the viper in question has acted once or four times already that turn. Using the Command location, you can activate two vipers once each, or one viper twice -- that's two activations. By the same standard, Apollo can use his CAG ability to activate six vipers, one viper six times, three vipers twice each, or any other combination up to six activations.

If it bothers you to think of one viper acting so many times, just pretend that Hotdog just pulled off an incredible, once-in-a-season barrel roll that shot down two raiders and faked two more into colliding with each other. Looks like Starbuck's training paid off.

Tysonium said:

Or you can just realize that a viper represents a squad or wing or what ever gruop designation you want to use and not just a single ship. Just as one population on the counter is not one person but a few thousand. Atleast that makes sense to me

Exactly, if you want to play a numbers game it doesn't add up. There are what, 12 vipers in the box? In the show they started the series with 40-50 I think.

As long as "activate one viper" means either:

1. Move one viper from reserves onto board, or
2. Move one viper one step on the board, or
3. Attack one target once

and not "move one step and then attack", I think the wording is clear.

From Command Room you can tell a Viper to attack twice, or move once and attack once...

Of course with Executive orders you can get 4 activations...

Seems to me allowing a single viper to do multiple actions through so many different methods makes it much too easy for the humans to fend off cylon attacks. Isn't that what the "Maximum firepower" card is for? If the ability is "Activate 6 vipers", that says to me only 6 individual vipers may be activated once. If the intention was to also allow a single viper 6 actions (or 'activations'), the ability should be worded "take up to 6 viper actions" or some such. Same for the Command location.

Yea, but it's simpler to just say 'activate 6 vipers'.

timonkey said:

Not if it confuses the issue.

The designer has already stated that this was badly worded.

azuredarkness said:

Did they mention if it was 6 activations or 6 vypers and one activation each ?