Me and my buddies have thought of a new way to treat the IC-card and also debated about the purpose of the card itself, the purpose of having a Investigative Committee. We reasoned that the purpose of the card was to know, who in the end of the skill check played which card, to prevent an unrevealed cylon player to ruin the skill check, but WITHOUT taking away the excitement of a possible fail. Still, people act in panic/affect/fear/safety in a crisis situation, but it has to be an Investigative Committees purpose of investigate what the **** went wrong after the **** hit the fan, not making it easier ahead of the crises!

In the standard-way of treating this card it lets the last player just put in so much as needed to pass (or in the case of a cylon, not putting in any card, but that would be stupid, since it´s definately not his turn up next!) And as we figured it still should be up for grabs for everyone to guess to add incentives to everyone playing as they probably would (apart from a un-revealed cylon) without an IC-card in play.

So here is what we did:

1. Put the two Cards from the Destiny Deck on the boardgame first, as of any other skill check

2. Starting with the Current Player and clockwise, as standard, the player announce how many cards and puts them in for the check, BUT instead of putting them together, each player puts them in a small pile in FRONT OF HIM, being distinctively apart from his cards on the hand.

3. Resolve in the order of the Currenct Player first and then clockwise, ending with the Destiny Deck cards to add the extra excitement of the skill check.

This way, the purpose of the idea of an investigation committee is delivered, as you know who did what! But it´s NOT taking away the pressure and excitement of the skill check itself. We find this way a lot more exciting and fun and it doesn' t feel unbalanced in any way. We thought that the standard way just makes the skill check meta-gamish, since playing IC makes some players to save skill cards in the end and we thought that wasn´t the purpose of the card.

What is your opinion on the idea? Flaws, unbalancing, new ways of seeing it? Does it out-rule or unbalance some of the characters OP T/G options? As far as we´ve played, about ten games likes this, it feels natural and doesn´t ruin the game.

It makes the game harder on the humans, as overspending on a skill check is one of the most common ways to kill yourself.

Beckett, that's an interesting variant. For my money, I'm pretty happy with the Pegasus wording (where the deck rolls off face down but the rest are face up). The thing about IC is that it's a high value yellow that most of the time can just be added to the check face down, so every IC is essentially an "overpass" by whatever the value of the card is, not to mention how much the fleet put in to cover the destiny roll off. Sometimes it's attractive though, like when the suspected cylon is the first person to play in (an advantage the card loses with the suggested change). So while I'm curious to hear how the variant you're suggesting plays out in actual games, in my head it's too big of a nerf. Nice food for thought, though, and I'm curious to hear what others think.

I'm all for more IN CHARACTER action, and stuff, soo, the way you doing it makes it possible to prehaps play their character abit more like ROLEPLAYNG Which is AWESOME and fun try it out guys. In my group we do it just like you have described it but thats been how they do it waaay before I started playing bsg. =) We have also added one more thing to the game

Simply, "See how far we can get before we die no real goal more then to get as far as we possible can before we die" kinda mission... with that I mean, normally the game would end at 8. But instead we aim at trying to get to as high number as possible It's a nice change and I must say, just for once... GIVE it a go.. just try it.. give it a try you will see that it becomes a competition each time when everyone goes "COMEON!! We can reach 10 this time!" etc

As noted before, we tried it out a few times now and I can´t say the end-result doesn´t differ that much from other games! The IC-card is played att apprx 2 times per game and it´s not tweaking the game that much in the cylons favor comparing to other rounds we´ve played. I acknowledge that, in the end, the suggested new way of treating the IC is pro-cylon, but it seems that most things added in the Exodus is more unbalancing than this change of IC. And since I think that it´s much more fun playing it this way we stick to it...

Anyone else who tried it out with some other result or experience?

Your reasoning is based solely on your interpretation of the card and the purpose of an investigative committee. And I have to say, I disagree.

An investigative committee (and I'm not talking about the BSG skill card) always has one of two purposes:

1. To determine retrospectively what went wrong and who is to blame.
2. To monitor what is happening while it is happening.

Since the BSG skill card Investigative Committee must be played before throwing cards into a skill check, I find it safe to say that we are looking at number 2 of the above purposes. With that said, it would not make much sense to have an investigative committee look into a matter to monitor and then make a half-witted guess on whether or not things are actually going according to plan.

Therefore, the purpose of the BSG skill card Investigative Committee must clearly be that skill cards are added face up into the skill check.