Hey everybody, just a quick question if anybody's able to help out.

I've got my second game of BSG organised for tomorrow night and since the first I've been out and picked up Pegasus. Now, my question is whether we can play primarily the core game, as I think we need to get used to the basics first, but incorporate the skill, Quorum and Crisis cards from Pegasus, just to add a little more variety.

From looking through the cards and the rules I think this would work, but let me know if you disagree:

We'll play the core game in every respect, but with the addition of the new skill cards (including the Reckless and Treachery card systems)

It seems that using the Treachery deck will enable us to use the new new crisis, as a number of them involve discarding skill cards and replacing them with treachery cards. I'm aware that some of the new crisis cards refer to Executions being made. Now, from comments I've read on the forums, some seem to think executions take away a little from the intrigue of who's a Cylon, as the humans can just execute a player and if they're wrong then...it doesn't seem to matter a great deal. So, I was thinking of not using execute for now, and any references to it on Crisis cards either being ignored, or the character being sent to sickbay instead.

Any advice/suggestions on whether the game would work this way? As I say, my main aim is to include the new cards for a bit of variety, particularly the skill cards as my friends commented on there only being a handful of skills per skill type. But it would be nice to have the Crisis/Quorum cards included too if possible.

Thanks in advance!

Execution doesn't work exactly like you described... aside from a Quorum card that can execute someone in the brig, an execution requires a high-STR skill check, means spending a lot of cards, using an action to do it, and losing Morale. In my group we rarely use the Airlock and there are only a few Crisis cards that can cause execution, so the most frequent way a character is executed is actually Cally.

I would suggest you keep the execution mechanic if it does come up in your game; just kill the character, that player loses skill cards and either
a) Reveals but is not given a SC card
b) Chooses a new character and then you lose 1 Morale

But given that many of us don't use New Caprica anyway, you're close to using all of the Pegasus mechanics so you might just want to add the ship too and play the game with Kobol. You probably won't want to start using Cylon Leaders for a bit if you are new to the game.

I agree, with one caveat: the Crisis deck is all wrong in Core+Pegasus. One can't shuffle 20 Pegasus Crisis cards into the 70 Core Crisis cards and expect the new Pegasus themes to appear enough to matter (they don't). This is particularly glaring with Treachery cards, which need to clutter up human hands to feel important—and the only consistent way that happens is via Pegasus Crisis cards. Throwing Exodus into the mix makes this even worse, by further diluting the Crisis deck, reducing the impact of Treachery even more.

So I'd recommend checking out the "Razor Cut" supplement (you can find it on boardgamegeek.com under the Pegasus expansion). It's a set of modular changes to the Core+Pegasus game. One of them describes how to rebuild the Crisis deck so that half of the cards are from Pegasus. We also use the Treachery variant, which basically makes Reckless any Skill Check whose total is negative.

Really keeping my fingers crossed for a third expansion that, perish the thought, actually recognizes the existence of Pegasus...