First, I'd like to say hello to the everyone on the forums here. It's great to be here learning and understanding useful tips and strategies from you guys! I just started playing this game with my friends about a month ago. We always have had a group of five players minimum and at the most seven. I've never watched this show before, but this game is ridiculously fun, which means it must be really good if it attracted the attention of a non-watcher like myself hahaha.

Now for my real question. In my group, a lot of players underrate the politics deck. Granted, I do too, but I'm trying to understand the purpose of the cards in there and their importance because, to me, every card is important one way or another. If any experienced player could help explain the purpose and importance of having politics cards, that would be superb. Thanks a bunch in advance!

Deathco_019 said:

Hi there,

have you played as a political leader, yet?

If you haven't that might be why you don't realise the importance of it. Politics cards have special abilities such as being able to get more cards outside your skill deck (consolidate power), and investigative committee that if used timely, might help you find out who is the cylon in your game. The rules change for the investigative committee and you get some extra cards with Pegasus, but they are pretty useful. If you're playing as Roslin for example, the consolidate power card will work to your advantage since her weakness is not being able to activate locations without discarding two cards.

Being a political leader is fun as you can (in a RP way) choose to not participate in military actions. On my first play in game I played as Roslin and used that as an excuse to avoid military actions as 1 - I'd have to discard cards and 2- I'd be more useful as a president.

The other players took my word for it and bam...I was a cylon!

andyluv said:

I have not played as a political leader yet, but I see what you are saying and I might just have to. My two friends who have played as political leaders though never seem to use politics cards and say that they're useless most of the time. I guess I gotta prove 'em wrong!

Investigative Committee is very useful for conserving cards and ensuring that you pass skill checks with the lowest number of cards necessary; it always sucks to fail a skill check simply because everyone threw in way too much on the previous skill check. Consolidate Power is often useful as a 2nd action when you get XOed based on your location (Armory, FTL Control, a pilot who has just shot down the last Raider, etc).
At first they may not seem as useful to new players as some of the purple and green cards, but one of the most important survival tactics for the Humans in this game is to pass skill checks by as close a margin as possible, and know when it is ok to fail a skill check. For example, if you've gone 6 distance and your Food is at 7, you can probably neglect any skill checks that only target Food and focus on keeping cards so you can pass skill checks that hit your low resources.

Deathco_019, good to have you on the boards!

To a large extent, I judge each deck by its default low-value "common," so let's do that for yellow here:

Without a doubt, Consolidate Power lacks the eye-popping power of most other colors' commons. On the other hand, it also has the lowest cost by far (and by cost, I'm talking about factors including risk, opportunity cost, and conditional vs. all the time benefits). Executive Order is awesome, no doubt, and a couple threads up (or down) from here, you'll see me and some of the other respondents in this thread singing hosannas to it. But it's only usable once per turn, so let's assume an optimum fleet is doing it once every turn. What then? Where to sink all those extra actions? Launch Scout only has conditional value, and if you overuse it you break all your raptors and it becomes blank. Repair is tremendously important--about 10% of the time. The rest of the time it's cardboard that you can't even throw into checks. And that brings us to Consolidate Power. Never great, always good. There's never a time you can't play it. And it's the only low-value common you can say that for.