So my friends and I just finished a game, and the cylon players (1 sympathiser, 1 cylon) employed the strategy of using their two skill draws per turn to take leadership cards. Me and my other friend (the humans) were Admiral Adama and Tom Zarek, so 5 of our collective card draws were leadership. My cylon friends did this because they wanted to cripple the number of cards we drew so as to make us fail skill checks. I argued that drawing up all the engineering cards while damaging the battlestar would have been better, because not only would our repairing skills have been severely reduced, they could use the same engineering cards to screw over basically all our skill checks. Thoughts?

Who won?

(stupid thingy won't let me post a short question...grrr)

Depends on how the game was playing out I guess, as to the best Cylon strategy to employ. Hording most of the cards can be a pretty nasty trick though if the Cylons can't take advantage of something better.

Hi

I have a question connected with the topic - some crisis cards give an option to lose skill cards. If I have no skill cards to lose, can I still choose this option? In yesterday's game we ruled that not...

Yes, you can.

This is clarified in the rulebook on page 30.

Yet another point for the "most frequently asked question".

I think leadership is actually more damaging because there are some games where galatica barely gets damaged at all...but executive orders and declare emergency come up in great numbers every game...and in the case of executive order, its the key to human victory

To be clear, since I haven't gotten an answer, the point of my 'who won' question was that if the Cylons won with it, then it was a valid strategy at the time.

Yeah, often as a cylon I will draw Leadership or Tactics and hope to pull the high value cards and keep them out of the humans hands. But each game required different strategies to win.

thanks for answering - one more, which happened in our last game - can a not yet revealed cylon player play Executive Order on the other, already revealed, Cylon? The rules say that revealed cylons can't use card actions, but can they be affected by them?

(I know that would reveal the other player, but in our game it was obvious anyway)

Skie said:

Nope, as per page 2 in the FAQ, revealed cylons can not be the target of Executive order or quorum cards.

Skie said:

The cylon text is actually quite a bit more relevant than that. Its uses a phrase that says they cannot 'perform' actions from a skill card. The extra move and act or 2 actions are a card text action that they would have to perform, so they can't. Cleverly worded to cover both plying it yourself and having a card played on you. Possibly would have been better to state it absolutely though and the FAQ states it absolutely.

I'm not sure what I think about this strategy really since the Cylon hand is still only 10 cards (explicily stated in the rules). So yes with two revealed cylons they could hold 20 cards away from folks but...then they aren't throwing any negatives into various checks. Worse if they do it with leadership they CAN'T negative most skill checks since leadership is so common.

I could see them maybe devoting 6ish cards of their hand each to hording various things. But not really much more than that. And that's quite a few turns of drawing before those cards are all good hoard-worthy ones. I suspect that in the end you'd be better off grabbing up piloting cards as 9 times out of 10 they are negatives. Or tactics as they are often negative and prevent humans getting +2 to die rolls.

A single deck has only 7 cards valued 3-5.

Two Cylons can take away all the Maximum Firepower + Strategic Planning, for example.