Apologies if I've missed something in the rules.

We played yesterday and the president drew lots and lots of quorum cards. Then, when a centurion got on board, we got rid of it with the 'Authorize Brutal Force' card - which it looks like goes to the discard pile when used.

A few turns later, another centurion turned up, so we kept exec ordering the president who took 2 actions to effectively draw lots more Quorum cards. This got the 2nd 'Brutal Force' card, so that went too.

However, we now have only 1 card left in the Quorum deck and about 4 in the discard. So anytime a centurion turns up, the president can just draw some Quorum cards, get the Brutal Force back, and the centurion is gone again.

We thought this may be a bit of a loophole / flaw and makes centurions pretty useless.

Our only thought is there should be a hand-limit on Quorum cards.

Yes, it is a loophole and works this way. I am not sure it is a flaw though. It is just another startegy to exploit. You are burning through XO's to allow the President to draw the cards and so the XO's aren't being used for other things. If your focus is on just combatting the Centurions, then you are probaly neglecting ship damage and raiders going after civilian ships.

I think the general idea is that if the humans have enough time to go throught the entire quorum deck, then they have pretty much already won. Not to mention its a very risky tactic anyway since it makes the president very powerful. And if he or she is/becomes a cylon, or the cylon manages to steal the presidency your in a lot of trouble.

Generally speaking, doing this is pretty hard. It only tends to happen in the late game, once all cylons/sympathizers are revealed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it requires a lot of executive orders. In our games, few people will executive order a president at all under the best of circumstances (unless they have confirmed that there is no chance they are a cylon), for fear of Arrest Order + Reveal ability. That requirement in and of itself pretty much ensures that it wont happen. Secondly, players need to have the time (and draw from the green stack) in order to implement it.

Furthermore, there are not many abusive cards in the Quorum deck (from a Human perspective, should a Cylon ever have their hand full of Quorum cards, the humans are out and out screwed). The most abusive is probably Authorization of Brutal Force (an excellent card in its own right without the consideration of some recycling), which carries some risk of population loss. After Authorization of Brutal Force, the abusive card pool shrinks to a minimum. Release Cylon Mugshots carries a significant risk of resource damage, and assumes that there are still Cylons out there (and at this point, you have to wonder if the president is it). Encourage Mutiny is pretty much the same.

Lastly, there are ways for the Cylons to win outside those vulnerable to authorization of brutal force. Simply using the Caprica location and finding crises to drop resources will work fine.

There was a thread about this exact topic a few months back (I think the title was something like "Quorum Deck Cheese"). There was alot of discussion about it, until the original poster finally admitted that the humans still lost the game. Just because a strategy looks promising, doesn't mean it will work out in the end.

JerusalemJones said:

Yeah. It happened in my group's last game, but it was a weird game. At distance 4, everyone was in the brig, by way of arrest orders and Roslin's once per game ability. The Roslin-cylon revealed to activate the Cylon fleet against us and eventually end the game. To make a long story short, the only way for the humans to have a prayer was to executive order me repeatedly to draw quorum cards, looking for the presidential pardon (which ended up on the bottom because of Roslin's once-per-game ability). In any case, throughout the game we played Authorization of Brutal force three times (to deal with two centurions who would have ended the game), and also used it to destroy three raiders later.

I'm not sure it would have made too much of a difference, the raiders might have bought the cylons another turn (we were at 4 population, and won the game by jumping at the -3 prep track), but I don't know that it would have had too much of an impact. The fact of the matter was that the Centurions had been dealt with (from the invasion supercrisis) by the two Authorizations already in the deck.

I'm really not convinced that it's that big a deal, especially the effort involved.

JerusalemJones said:

I was the guy who posted the other thread and I still think the Authorization of Brutal Force card should be removed from the game upon use. I haven't been in the game where it was spammed since I posted that thread, so it really wouldn't matter for 90%+ games either way.

Oh, and the only reason the humans lost that game was they decided it was too cheesy a tactic and activated the FTL location, and missed the roll, instead of giving orders to the President to clear the rest of the raiders.