I am the cylon

This past Friday on Lounge Day I played Battlestar Galactica for the first time.  People were kind of flabbergasted that I hadn't played it before, but after playing it I think my hesitations about getting into that game were warranted.

I was a cylon.  The game was five players, and in the first round it was four experienced players all being humans, and me, the noob, playing as a cylon.  At first I tried to sneakily damage their plans, and managed to do so effectively, I think.  There were several important failures because of my actions, but it wasn't completely obvious what was happening.

Then player 2 decided I was the cylon and took an action that either would toss me in the brig or damage the Galactica.  He declared that I was a cylon and he was going to brig me.  He was right, of course, but I vigorously denied it and the other players seemed inclined to agree with me, or at least be doubtful.  I had taken several aggressive actions to blow up cylon ships, to sell my 'but I am a human guys, seriously' position, and it had worked.

As a cylon, I want the ship damaged and I don't want to go to the brig.  So I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails.  As a human, I would want to avoid the brig, so I should do nothing and hope the 'brig Sky!' plan fails.

But at this point I was pretty sure I was losing and that all other players were humans, so I decided to do something interesting.  I voted to brig myself.  I put in five cards for the vote, and when all the cards were revealed it was indisputable that I had voted to go to the brig instead of damage the ship.  This caused player 2 to conclude that he had been wrong, as I must surely be human, but he still had to brig someone!

My plans, unorthodox as they were, had come together perfectly.  He was going to brig another human, and then I could reveal myself as a cylon and crush them mercilessly!

Player 2 rolled a die to determine who to brig.  He rolled a 2, and that said to brig me, so he threw me in the lockup anyway.  All my scheming, for nought.

Of course I convinced everyone else I was a human who was just the unfortunate victim of bad luck, so they spent some more cards busting me out of the brig.  Then I pretended to be bad at the game and convinced them to spend even more cards when I got a bad event - 'to protect the good cards in my hand'.  (My hand was total rubbish.)

Finally we reached the midpoint of the game and another round of human/cylon cards were dealt out, giving me the second cylon card.  I was all on my own against four players who know what they are doing, on a ship where *everything* was going the way of the humans, except for the few things I had managed to wreck up.

I revealed myself as a cylon, and hoped to turn another human into a cylon to join me, but they won the game before I even got another turn.  I believe I got five turns in total in the game, which seems ludicrously low given the way the game plays.  It was the fastest game any of them had even played, and the biggest shellacking of the cylons they could remember.

Partly that is because I didn't play correctly.  Partly it is because the cards came out beautifully for the humans, exactly the way they would have wanted.  Four pros against a noob, what do you expect?

But I don't care that I lost.  I am really happy with how I played, given that I was new.  I managed to cause lots of havoc, sow dissent, waste tons of cards, and kept the entire table in the dark about what I was actually doing by pretending to be stupid.  I played the *players* in a way that I am extremely pleased about.  I played the *game* in a fairly mediocre fashion, but that is just how it goes with a new game.

From what I hear the version I played is the worst possible version, the base game.  Lots of problems and holes in it, and huge randomness in terms of card ordering overshadow good play.  Still, I may give it another go with expansions to help fix the issues.

Probably not until next Lounge Day though.