So I've played about a dozen games of BSG with an assortment of different players, and in all of those games there has been one universal truth:

The humans always lose.

Actually, that's not entirely true. It's not just that the humans always lose. It's that the humans are always completely blown out.

It doesn't matter which players end up human and which players end up cylons. It doesn't matter how many total players we have. It doesn't matter if the sympathizer ends up human or if the sympathizer ends up cylon. It doesn't matter if we try to triage the crisis cards or just succeed at as many as possible. It doesn't matter if the cylons stay hidden for most of the game, reveal on the first turn, or get executed on the second turn.

The games where we brig a human by mistake or have the destiny deck screw us on every turn? Yeah. Those are brutal. People suffer PTSD in those games.

The closest we have ever come to winning was making the second-to-last jump.... and then dying the very next turn.our resources were already at 1 or 2. (That was the game where didn't have any cylons until the sleeper phase.)

These losses are so lop-sided that the cylon players can't even enjoy winning. It feels like you're just stomping on kittens.

Asking around, I've chatted with some other players who have won as humans. But, oddly, it seems they've all house-ruled the game in one way or another. One group plays with one fewer cylon. Another allows Executive Order stacks.

So, having given this crappy game ample opportunities to prove itself, I'm at the point of selling it off. (Or just poaching the plastic ship pieces and tossing the rest.) But before I do, I wanted to bounce the problem off you folks: How do humans win in your games?

Not to be cliche but, I feel your pain.

It is VERY hard to win as the humans in this game. My group has played pretty consistently one or two games a weekend since the last expansion appeared. SInce then I can count the times humans have one without having to use my toes. Generally speaking we can't even get to the, "judgement" phase with the token counting. It is almost always sudden too, full stats suddenly start spinning out of control, a cylon centurion appears and highsteps to the endzone in a matter of a few turns. The cylon players don't have to do much because the game is so crazy hard. In one game of 5, the second cylon didn't understand the game, (it was her first time playing) and just played as a full human the whole time. The cylon STILL won. Just can't keep up with the votes no matter how cautious we are, you can't do anything about the cylon players cause you can't waste the cards on a vote to throw someone in jail, (don't bother with the airlock, ain't worth it.) Yes,...the odds are pretty much insurmountable and it's an easy win for the cylons.

There are LOTS of threads on here with advice, count cards on every vote, use EO every turn, use the Commitee often, scout crisises. But if your cylons are good,...it is easy to stay "human" and impossible to detect no matter how much you count votes. The commitees are super expensive on the numbers and so many times votes fail because didn't throw em in as votes. Having to eo and scout every turn leaves little else to do, espeically if you want your president to even have a chance of getting to the good quaram cards. And even if you scout and get rid of a really bad crisis, nearly all the crisises are REALLY bad so the next one is going to be bad if not worse, and even if it is not as bad as the one you dumped it's still gonna be rough.

SO....your question....why play if it is that lame? If the deal is so sealed for the cylons why bother? Well, first of all it is a team with a partial co-op element. That means it has to be harder. Want a real impossible game? Try Arkham Asylum, THAT game is lame. ( It's just shoots and ladders, spend tons of scratching for equipment then have one encounter that boils down to a one in six chance of defeating, fail and loose all your items. Rinse and repeat.) Secondly, games should be hard and challenging, I admit that BSG really needs a "for the humans" expansion to cool the cylon heals but I like it hard and nearly impossible. When we do win it's a great feeling. Lastly, we like it because it is fun,...which I suppose is the most important part. The winning and loosing is kinda secondary, it's the mystery the suspense. It's like trying to solve a murder mystery. The game breeds ALOT of player interaction almost turning it into a small version of, "how to host a murder." So, we play because it more for social interaction than for just winning and loosing. The game is very unique in that respect, it's focus isn't really on the machinations of the game but social interactions. Thats what really makes it special.

Maybe you just do need a break from it. Play some games with clear parameters, I win you loose everybody is quiet and scheming and totally cutthroat. After awhile you may get board(get the spelling;) of that and remember how much fun it was trying to talk your way out of the airlock or catch someone else in a lie, or convince everybody at the table that a lie is the truth. Then you might have a better appreciation for the game....

GL friend....

Napoleon et al.

"The game is very unique in that respect, it's focus isn't really on the machinations of the game but social interactions. Thats what really makes it special."

Not really. There are lots of traitor-based games out there that manage to get the balance right so that the game isn't pointless. Solving the mystery in BSG is, as you admit, completely irrelevant because you can't actually do anything meaningful about it. Throw 'em in the brig? Execute 'em? Leave 'em alone? It's all the same, because the cylons are going to cruise through the game to an easy victory.

"Want a real impossible game? Try Arkham Asylum, THAT game is lame."

I'm assuming you mean Arkham Horror, a game which almost suffers from the opposite problem: I've played AH dozens of times and I have never lost a game. But that game is enjoyable because it DOES get close and there are times I could have lost if different decisions were made or luck hadn't been on my side. It has often come down to a last, lucky die roll as our final, desperate strategy pays off.

OTOH, another co-op game that got quickly laid aside was Knizia's LOTR with the Friends and Foe expansion, which made the game so ridiculously easy that it was impossible to lose. (We eventually fixed that problem by getting rid of the FoF win condition of "defeat all foes", which made it so that that expasnion added challenge instead of eliminating it.)

"SO....your question....why play if it is that lame?"

Well, in our case we've kept coming back to it in the hope that it WOULDN'T be lame. The actual mechanics are interesting and provide for some great table dynamics... until you realize that it's all completely pointless because the balance of the game is so completely out-of-whack.

Unfortunately, unlike the Friend and Foe expansion of LOTR, there doesn't seem to be a quick-and-easy fix for BSG's balance problems. Removing a cylon from a 5-or-6 player game seems to swing the balance too far towards the humans. Maybe if you stacked the deck so that there's only one cylon but they would definitely be in present from the start of the game? But that begins undermining the social dynamics of the game. Ditto on leaving the number of cylons the same but only having them present after the sleeper phase. Maybe if cylons could only reveal after the sleeper phase?

Justin, believe me when I tell you I'm sympathetic to your plight, and you're far from alone in your experience of cylon dominance within your playgroup. At the same time, it's my belief (and in fact, it has been my experience) that with a competent and experienced playgroup, the human win rate should level out at 50-50. The ultimate strategy primer is hard to provide, but if I had to give my top ten pieces of advice, they would be these (assuming base game only):

1) Executive Order on every turn

2) Launch Scout on most turns

3) Learn to intuit what's needed for skill checks; overpassing is often worse than failing

4) Don't sweat the small stuff; save Strategic Planning, nukes, OPGs for big things. Oh, and you don't have to pass every crisis.

5) Suggest courses of action; it engenders trust from others, and their responses (specifically, the reasoning, or lack thereof, underlying their responses) can provide a big clue as to their loyalty.

6) Select top-tier characters. Until your group starts seeing some parity, I'd highly advise you lean toward (green): Bill Adama; (yellow): Laura Roslin; (red): Apollo; and (blue): Chief. The caveat would be that most of these characters are significantly better if the player controlling them knows how to exploit their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. Many would replace my Roslin recommendation with Gaius Baltar, and some argue for Starbuck as top pilot.

Oops, did I say ten? I could only think of these six right now. Maybe the community can help out? (And yes, I know I stepped into it with all these categorical statements, and I'm sure some (all?) of them are points of contention to many players, but these are things that my experience with the game has told me put the humans in a position to win 50 percent of the time, which is the kind of parity I want so that I have the best chance possible each game of of tilting the result to my favor through sound play, whichever side I winds up being on.)

Hope this helps!

Are you using just the Core? It doesn't sound like it since you mention executions, which (parts of which) expansions do you play with?
Outlaw's suggestions are all really good, I will second all of them, especially XO every turn (never the player after you!).
Use Launch Scout to stack the Destinations, not the Crisis deck. Getting the 3-distance destinations is essential to the survival of the Humans; if you have jumped twice and have only gone 2 distance, chances are its already a Cylon win. Rushing through the game as quickly as possible is important for the Humans; use FTL any time you can afford population loss.

7. Don't let players languish in the Brig. Players in the Brig do not get Crisis cards, therefore their turn is more or less a waste; without the Crisis card, you cannot make any progress. Yes, there are useful things that can be done from the Brig, XO and Launch Scout being the best options; an argument can even be made that sometimes having a player in the brig who can XO someone but skip a turn worth of Crisis is useful - but when are you going to get that player back out? After the ship is damaged, or in significant danger? When everyone has run out of cards because they have to play extra cards in every skill check to make up for the player in the Brig who can only play one? After two Cylons are revealed, Cylons who will make releasing that player painfully expensive? Unless you know someone is a Cylon, get them out ASAP; you definitely don't want a 2nd player to land in there through Crisis effects, or by a Cylon President.

8. Protect your resources in order of importance: Morale, Population, Fuel, Food. Others may disagree with me, but Morale is probably the most precious resource, Food the least precious (in 50+ games, I've never ever seen a Human loss because Food runs out). As Outlaw stated, its ok to fail a Crisis if it doesn't hurt you that much; better to fail a -1 Food Crisis than to pass it but run out of cards and pull a -1 Morale and -1 Fuel Crisis on the next turn.

9. This last suggestion has been hotly debated; I was initially in one camp, my position changed over time... don't waste time and actions with the Quorum cards. Sounds like bad advice at first, but here's the logic: the actions it took to get and use a Quorum card are actions that could have been used more efficiently for virtually anything else . The President should always be getting plenty of XOs, so a Pres who used their own action to draw Quorum cards wasted potentially 2 actions. They could have XOed someone to draw 4 cards or take 2 shots at a Centurion or Launch 2 Scouts. Another player XOing the Pres to use the Office could net you four Quorum Cards in a turn, but how many of them would actually be useful? Even the useful ones, say Inspirational Speech for example, still require another action to play them, and they aren't even guaranteed to work, and might fail even after you spend additional cards to improve die roll, etc. That's a lot of time and effort spent getting cards that might be helpful sometimes under the right circumstances. Even at the beginning of the game when nothing bad has happened yet, the actions could be better spent on Scouting or filling up on cards, especially with Pegasus and Exodus when you want to cycle through certain skill decks as quickly as you can to get certain key cards over and over (Preventative Policy). Try ignoring the Quorum deck for one or two games and see if the Humans do a little better.

If you are using Pegasus, Blind Jump is the best advantage the Humans can hope for. It can even be done within the first two or three turns; nothing is happening at the beginning, Cain can stock up on purple cards for scouting purposes, get XOed and scout the Destinations twice, find a decent planet and jump. It is ALWAYS an advantage to Blind Jump - so you lose some civilians, so what? Chances are you would have lost resources anyway over the course of the 8+ turns it would have taken to go the same distance without the Blind Jump.

If you are using Exodus, Apollo is the no-brainer choice for CAG. Every turn he can combo his abilities with the CAG title: go to Command, launch 2 Vipers, hop in the 2nd one because he's Apollo, activate another Viper with the CAG action, and take another action (XO). Add Starbuck starting the turn in a Viper and it gets even better.

The game is indeed very difficult for the Humans much of the time, but you don't need house rules for it to be possible. My group probably has about a 60-40 win ratio in favor of the Cylons.

I agree with Skowza on these points, especially his valuation of the various resources. I understand the logic behind ignoring the Quorum deck, but I also appreciate the asterisk on that point because it is one that's contested. His emphasis on making sure you only jump three times is very important (preferably you even want to abbreviate those three jumps with FTL, as he says, and FTL jumps are probably the prime target for the Strategic Plannings I suggested hanginh onto in point #4, above).

I hadn't noticed the reference to executions in the original post. That does bring in a few changes: Pegasus brings in Helena Cain and her ridiculous Blind Jump, and Exodus brings in the Cylon Fleet Board, which (among other things) increases Apollo's value.

Prior to Exodus, a human would generally only scout the Crisis deck for two reasons: 1) avoid maps, and 2) find jump icons. Exodus removes the primary reason for scouting the Crisis deck, while maintaining the very high value of scouting the Destination deck. This affects the value of characters like Roslin and Boomer who look at crises. Exodus also changes the timing on FTL; instead of using it early and often, humans will generally want to use it to keep the FTL and Pursuit track aligned.

To be honest, I'd suggest that the inclusion of expansions (especially Exodus) probably only complicates things for a group struggling to achieve parity. Justin, did your group ever play the game without any of the expansions? I'd advocate reducing some of the expansion components temporarily, particularly Exodus, which becomes friendly to humans when they really learn the ins and outs, but which I'd argue benefits cylons in an inexperienced playgroup.

We've only played two games.

First game was five player vanilla BSG. Humans won, but it was a nail biter the whole time (some players had to take smoke breaks). Granted, none of use had experience (except me in a sense because I spent two weeks pouring through these forums and the BBG forums) but from what I read, new human players tend to sabotage themselves without Cylon help. Both Cylons did a good job too; one revealed when we needed him most and the other was brigged, but fought her case so well, we started to doubt ourselves.

Second game was three players using Pegasus and New Caprica. I was the Cylon. Cylons won... actually what I should say is New Caprica won because I didn't have to do anything. I don't know if that's common, but we figured that NC isn't a game for two humans.

Has the OP tried upping the starting Resources? If that doesn't work, has someone brainstormed and idea that makes it harder for the Cylons, but not necessarily easier for the humans?

In my experience (a regular play group and playing BSG at three local CA gaming conventions every year), the Humans win about 40-45% of the time.

At one convention, Memorial Day Weekend of 2010, I played as a Human twice and a Sympathetic Cylon Leader (Cavil, of course) once, and the Humans won all three games. They escaped New Caprica twice and reached Kobol once.

I was able to pull of Guide Them To Destiny as Cavil, probably my greatest achievement as a Galactica player. Sometimes it's better to play with people you don't know. Yes, they're more suspicious, but they're usually far easier to manipulate once you've got them on your side.

Playing with or as Cain is very helpful to the Human cause. Once she proves she's not a Cylon (however many times that has to be done), she's a great asset. When playing Cain, I usually Blind Jump at my first opportunity, shaving off the distance to whatever endgame we're facing. The Pegasus board is a lot of help to the Humans as well, to sop up damage if nothing else. But I find the greater weapons capacity of Pegasus and the ability to add Jump icons with the Engine Room to be very, very useful. Baltar makes a better President than Roslin. And Tori isn't bad at being President either.

If you're a Human player, don't be afraid to be bossy. Tell people what to do if they don't know already. Ask for opinions on what you should be doing. Put things to an informal vote, if necessary. Do whatever it takes to prove your loyalty to the Human cause. XO whenever necessary. Ask early and often for help on die rolls. If you're sitting quietly during a game, you're not doing all you can to help. Cylons are quiet, Humans shouldn't be.

But BSG is one of those games where who you play with can be as important as how you play. If your Cylon players are weak or inexperienced, the Humans are going to have a much easier time of it (at least before they reach New Caprica). If you're playing with contentious, Brig-happy players, then the outcome is going to favor the Cylons. I have to say that it is uncommon to see a lot of players going to the Brig or being executed in games I play in. There are some players who are determined to act shifty or belligerent whether they're a Human or a Cylon. Better to push them out the Airlock (as many times as necessary) and plan a nice Eulogy or an Inspirational Speech than to indulge their bad behavior.

Exodus changed a lot of things about BSG...including encouraging players to forget the Pegasus expansion ever happened...and it makes giving advice a bit tougher since certain scenarios favor the Humans more than others.

My experience has been very different - playing a mixture of pure base game and base game with various expansion elements, human victories have outnumbered Cylon ones by roughly 3:1. Some of that probably comes from having started with increased resources for the first few games, though it's not clear whether that made a difference to the outcome (if we'd had less of any given resource, we'd have started being more protective of it sooner...).

Either we're better at playing humans as a team, or we're worse at playing Cylons, or we just get luckier than some.

The biggest piece of advice I would give is to treat all players as trustworthy humans until given a fairly strong reason to believe them to be Cylons - yes, sometimes you'll get hammered by an awesome sabotage-and-reveal off an executive order, but the rest of the time you're not spending actions and cards on admiral's quarters, brig and administration checks, you're getting extra actions from executive orders, and you're (ideally) not wasting cards on skill-checks either by playing into a failed check, or by massively overshooting a passed check (we're not so good at that last part). The increased efficiency of the smooth teamwork should more than offset the highly visible damage from the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayals.

The other thing is to look for ways to take advantage of the game mechanics - for example, Apollo's alert viper pilot ability lets him get into space and take an extra action whenever any viper launches, provided he's on Galactica at the time, so a player without any executive orders in hand can sometimes still effectively use one by activating Command and then having Apollo AVP into a just-launched viper and play an executive order from his own hand. If you're playing with the Cylon Fleet Board, Apollo can jump into a launching viper, use the CAG title card to activate any unmanned viper, and still get a bonus action on top of that. Or Starbuck can start her turn in space, discard a skill card to land somewhere for movement, activate that location, and either activate it a second time, or use an executive order on someone...

rmsgrey,

I generally agree with your tips. Some are going to doubt your numbers and assume your group is doing something wrong. Even I have to admit that 3:1 seems very high. But my group is another that sees greater human victory than cylon (for us, humans have a 55-45 advantage all time, but it includes a period of early cylon dominance; we're closer to 60-40 in 2011.) And that's not to say that we all play full-human from Loyalty with maximum teamwork. Some of our players are individualistic, distrustful and/or contrarian. But humans still win at least half the time, and it has a lot to do with the tips laid out above.

I usually see the humans win, maybe 60% so far in the times I have played the game. I don't play with house rules, but I have only played with pegasus expansion just once.

One thing I have noticed is when people play with people they know really well it is easier to spot a cyclon (well at least I see my one friend constantly pick out the cyclon among our friends...=p ). I definately have a lot fun playing with people who don't know me all that well (at least when i'm a cylon).

So far with exodus I have seen the humans win like 75% of the time.

But I will say this, and this reason is probably why I like the game soo much, even when the humans win it is close. Another turn or just a resource or 2 and the humans would have lost. So even if you are playing against people who suck at playing a cylon, the game mechanics make it a close race still IMO. If someone plays a really good cylon then yea the game probably shifts towards the humans loosing, but if you play with those people enough you can start to spot them earlier (a good cylon player changes things up just to throw poeple off track). So I still feel the game is close to 50/50. but who you play with and who becomes a cylon make a big difference.

I've also found that familiarity with a player often makes it easier to tell if they're a cylon.

Personally, I wouldn't say Exodus has had a significant impact on human win rate for my group. But while we're on the subject, I do have one bone to pick with it relative to what we're discussing; it seems to me that Exodus has made the "reading tells" part of the game less important. The Cylon Fleet Board's appeal tends to draw cylons out quickly; they reveal so that they can go hammer the fleet from the other side. As a result, the intrigue / paranoia has diminished a bit, and I rather miss it.

Still, I do find that games are always close, and that is one of the things I love about the game as well.

In my games - usually 4 or 5 player games - I find that humans win quite frequently, perhaps slightly more than the cylons. In fact, lately, our group has been playing without Pegasus (without the ship, but we keep the rest of the set) just to cut down on the human firepower (and make pilots more useful). Part of this may be that we aren't very good at knowing the best cylon actions to destroy humans, but I'd also say that there have been quite a few games where - using the Exodus set-up for loyalty decks - the cylon card or symp card went unchosen, leaving one lonely cylon (which usually sucks for them)

This ratio is true even though we also play with a house rule version of the Sympathizer/Sympathetic Cylon card that is a little different from the standard rules and may favor the cylons. In the core game, the person pulling the Sympathizer card only goes revealed cylon if resources are still blue; with the Sympathetic Cylon, they always go cylon but are always have a sympathetic agenda. We play with the Sympathetic Cylon card and so the person *always* becomes a revealed cylon no matter where the resources are at; however, we give them a Hostile agenda if the human resources are all blue at the sleeper stage and a Sympathetic agenda if any resource is in red. Also, if they go Sympathetic agenda, then we house rule that the Sympathic Cylon *can* activate the Cylon Fleet but they cannot if they are Hostile (in the rules, they never can use Cylon Fleet).

We don't play much else in Exodus, having found it not terribly satisfying. Maybe that makes a difference, too. There are parts of Exodus that can really hurt humans. So, trying playing without them to increase human chances perhaps?