I've had an idea for a variant for playing with only 2 players

one player takes a Cylon leader with a random Sympathetic Agenda card, and the other player takes on the human player with a You are not a Cylon loyalty card.

as this is a Pegasus expansion variant its adviseable to play with the whole expansion so i'll add in the Caprica board option too.

as there will be only one human player that player will hold all of the titles, and will have the most influence over the choices off of the crisis cards, but as the game is naturally stacked against the human players that should be a balancing factor.

the main imbalance might be the lack of skill cards drawn by one human player an the ristrictions placed on the Cylon player. so i might try drawing 4 destiny cards per skill check and allowing the human player to draw double the number of skill cards.

I.m going to try it out tomorrow

I'll let you know how it turns out

If you have any 2 player ideas for this game put them here to share

Hi

Well i played my game- actually it was by myself so it was more of a playtest than a game.

the game worked really well and the Cylon leader only just won. the cylon leader picked at random was number six and the agenda was the one where the cylons have to win but Galactica can't have more than two damage - Salvage their equipment.

I used all the skill cards, and crisis/super crisis cards, and characters from the base set and pegasus expansion, and used the Caprica objective with the Pegasus board

the game still felt balanced even though some of the game-experience was dumbed down. there was no loyalty guessing but that was intentional as i'd covered that with the Cylon leader option. a two player game is never going to feel the same as a 3-7 player game. However the random cylon agenda cards do create a 'what the frak is the cylon up to' kind of paranoia.

my character was even executed by failing a crisis card, and being human i lossed the moral too.

any crisis card that was pointless or unworkable was a 'no-effect', so for example where the president would have to give the title to the admiral became a 'no-effect' as the one human player already held both titles.

I didn't need to double up the skill cards the ratio worked very well and some crisis cards i just had to pick and choose to succeed on or let fail due to my skill set. but plent of the other crisis cards came up where a choice was to be made or the cylons arrived. so again i found the crisis card deck to be balanced enough for 2 player or even solo games

I allowed executive decision to be played on myself, but you could easily have one or two nonplaying characters chosen at random from the character types you didn't pick and only activate them with an executive decision card.

I reckon you could play a two player game with no cylon leaders by constructing the loyalty deck as shown in the exodus expansion, that way no one might be a cylon player at all, that would create enough suspicion and facilitate the need to hide your loyalty from the other player

anyway i'm going to give it another go with an actual other player so i'll check back in here again.

It's an interesting idea, but I definitely have some reservations. First, balance. I'm very surprised that you think a human+sympathetic cylon game might be too hard on the colonials--unless you got hit really hard by those out-of-color skill checks, I'm guessing that the only reason your playtest wasn't an absolute cakewalk was that your cylon drew one of the two "cylons win" agendas. Second, this version obviously loses a lot of the intrigue, since the loyalty/agenda of only one of the players is even in question--it seems to have all the downsides of playing with a cylon leader, but no particular advantages (compared to, for example, the "official" two-player variant).

(It does, however, give me a related idea: a cylons-only game (The Plan?) in which one player is sympathetic and the other is hostile (this would require an insane amount of adjustment--just for starters, we'd want to rearrange the agenda decks so that it's actually cylons-win/colonials-win as opposed to sympathetic/hostile, I don't know what would be done about the titles, and I'm still envisioning a lot of games in which both players lose).)

In any case, let us know how your further testing goes; I may have misjudged it.