We've played that option twice, but haven't made it there yet. The first time we used that option plus the conflicted loyalties. We might have made it there. The humans were hanging on by a thread but we ran out of time and had to pack it up. The second time we used all three options. Two cylon reveals, one of which damaged Command and the Hangar, gave me and the other cylon player back to back turns. The humans burned their hands to crisis cards and two super crisis votes in a row all but ended it.

We do have human wins, a fair number of them. It just seems like we'll never make it to that phase. What's it like? It doesn't look like the threat of being removed from the game is all that big, since unwanted trauma tokens are easy to get rid of.

James McMurray said:

We've played it three times now, only failed to make it to that phase once (Galactica was destroyed). While I like the allies and trauma tokens during the game, I'm not convinced the actual trial is a good thing. It seems very random, and difficult to react to. We haven't had any player elimination, though - getting that many tokens is hard, unless you end up on the wrong side of token hell when you are forcibly revealed as a Cylon.

We have had one elimination so far (boxed a cylon), but we have made the ionian nebula most of the games we have played with it. It is definitely our favorite endgame choice of the three and can make for some tense moments if you havent managed your trauma well.

Only made it there once so far after a few games, and I agree with antherem that it seemed random - humans took some really bad hits and lost quickly after that, just because of the distribution of cards - if they had been shifted around a bit the humans would have been fine. We didn't have an elimination, despite our newfound human strategy of "abusing" the ally cards.

Skowza said:

I guess I'm missing something. It seems to me that the allies are the perfect way to get rid of trauma. How can they be abused in a way that makes it more likely you'll be eliminated?

You can get more trauma tokens off of Allies. A cylon who gets the disaster trauma token gets even more trauma.

We hit it quite often, usually having the humans lose during the final fight or flight.

We've never had someone boxed/executed honestly. You need 4 trauma tokens before the final sequence to have any real threat of being killed, we did lose during that section due to pop loss sadly. Lots of civie ships had to be destroyed

We love the npcs, but frankly in the 7 or 8 games where we've used the Nebula, the Admiral was executed every time (we tend to play 6 and 7 player games regularily, but even in the 4 player game the card came up for a cylon player). In one phase we had three executions (The Admiral card and two drawing trauma tokens) and had one player removed (I actually think it was a human). After that we decided to forgo the npcs because we didn't like how the Trial/Boxing interrupted the game.

My group and I tried this option the last time we played and the humans didn't even make it to the second jump. It was kind of brutal.

umboito said:

That doesn't sound like it is related to the Ionian Nebula option... what was the problem?

Oh, it was just a lot of bad luck all at once, lol. But we normally stick to Kobol for our destination.