Hi everyone,

I've just played my third game of BSG and I'm still really enjoying it, each game has been really different so far, the replayability of the game seems very impressive.

I just have a question regarding the Cylon Fleet rules however, as we included it in our most recent game.

Now, we didn't do this as it seemed cheap, but there didn't appear to be anything to stop us leaving a weak Cylon force in play on the main board in order to stop the main fleet jumping back in at all. Is this right, or are we misconstruing the rules?

For example, we drew the Cylon ambush destination card and, once we'd taken out the Basestar and escorted the civvies to safety (which seems a bit too powerful an action, which removes the incentive to fight the Raiders off) we considered landing our vipers and ignoring the 2 remaining raiders as doing so would completely stall the pursuit track and the only risk would be damage on the roll of an 8 which we could easily repair.

Is there an official clarification on this anywhere? We discussed maybe having a house rule of some sort for future sessions. One I'm considering is that if there is no basestar on the main board then during the activation stage, the current player rolls the die and if the roll is greater than then number of raiders on the main board then the pursuit track advances by one, in addition to the Raiders activating as normal. So, the fewer Raiders present, the greater the chance of the Cylon fleet advancing their jump prep. This fits thematically, representing the scouting Raiders reporting the fleet's position to the Cylon fleet.

Has anybody tried this? Any thoughts on whether it would solve the problem of being able to almost cheat the game mechanics?

Thanks all.

Just Another Skinjob,

Well, you're right that there are no rules preventing the humans from leaving a manageable cylon presence on the board through card effects to prevent the pursuit track from moving, and I'd agree that it's often a good idea. It's an open question as to whether it's so strong that it needs a house rule to correct. I'd say that it's one of those tricks that's powerful if everybody's human, but hard to pull off once there's a cylon or two in the mix. Frankly, if everybody's human it should be pretty easy to win anyway, so my group has not yet considered a house rule for this. But if this strategy begins to dominate the game and reduce fun for your playgroup, I'd definitely say that the rule you suggest is a reasonable enough fix. I wouldn't say it goes too far.

I actually have a question about the cylon fleet track myself. It has come up a couple times now and I think I need a clarification. There are certain treach cards that activate cylon ships; i.e. All raiders, heavy raiders and boarding parties activate. There are also crisis cards that say to activate multiple cylon ship steps, like basestars fire, basestars launch then activate raiders. If the main game board is empty does the cylon pursuit marker make its way down the track for each different type of activation? I argue that it does because the rules say for each activation if it cant take place on the main board you add to the cylon fleet and move the token. That does mean however that the one treach card or some of the crisises can move the pursuit track nearly all the way in one hit which sounds crazy. What do you guys think?

Napoleon.

I agree with your opinion on how this would be handled...

Core Rules, page 22
Activate Existing Cylon Ships: Any existing Cylon ships
are activated based upon the icon(s) listed on the card. If
there are multiple icons listed, they are activated from left
to right, following standard activation rules.

Exodus simply modified the rules for the situation when no ships are on the board and created an additional ruleset. Exodus rules don't contradict your explanation in any way and don't specify that ships only activate from the icon in the bottom left corner of a Crisis card... and they state "Use the normal rules for Cylon ship activations as described on pages 22–24 of the core rulebook."

It seems pretty brutal that the Cylon jump track could move multiple times off of a single card, or that a SC card could move it 4 times, but hey, the Cylons have never played fair...

I'm in agreement with both of you on both points. (i.e., yes, it works that way and yes, it's brutal)