• The human player can choose to “jump the fleet” rather than firing a shot, allowing the player to rearrange the locations of all of their ships.
• The Cylon player can return any destroyed ship to the board per turn until the destruction of their resurrection ship, in addition to their normal “take a shot” action. If the Cylon player doesn’t have any destroyed ships, they can instead opt to repair one “hit” from a non-resurrection ship per turn in addition to firing a shot, so long as the resurrection ship is still in play.
• Both sides have a limited number of nuclear weapons which, rather than targeting a single point on the game grid, will have a several-coordinate blast radius. Nukes are only available to their respective players so long as there are battlestars or basestars in play.
• The Cylon player has a number of sleeper agents in the human fleet; the Cylon player can opt to activate a sleeper instead of firing, which will result in one hit against a human ship of the human player’s choosing.
• The human player may sacrifice a battlestar to destroy a Cylon basestar.
• After some as-yet-undertermined number of turns, the human player can produce a stealth Viper, which can be relocated on the grid every turn or which can be sacrificed to learn the location of the Cylon resurrection ship.
• After some as-yet-undetermined number of turns, the human player gets a second battlestar.
• And, if you’re not afraid of Season 4 spoilers, if the human and Cylon player get tired of endlessly killing each other, they can opt to partner up and “go find Earth,” at which point the game is over and they both lose.

Cylon raiders and heavy raiders seem like one- and two-hit vessels to me, while the Colonial Vipers and Raptors are probably single-hit ships. Basestars should be relatively large (suggesting a much larger field of play than the standard Battleship grid) and maintain a six-pronged X shape target profile. Battlestars would probably need to be three spaces wide so that the flight pods can take hits too. Obvious choices for other Colonial ships include Colonial One, Cloud 9, Demetrius, the Astral Queen, Daru Mozu (the tylium refinery ship), mining ships, Space Park (the “spinny ship”), and numerous others. Clearly, getting the balance right on both Colonial and Cylon sides would be important to proper gameplay.

The reaction from my coworkers who are also fans has been very positive, so I suspect that if the appropriate corporate behemoths could work out the licensing, they’d at least sell a few units to us. In the mean time, if you feel like giving it a whirl, go for it! The rules definitely need some fine-tuning to make sure gameplay is properly balanced, but they should be at least a good start. If you do end up trying it out, I’d love to hear how it went.

So say we all!

[Edit 7/14/2008 @ 23:19] The collective unconscious appears to have reared its ugly head–turns out I’m not the first to have this idea.

I’d bought the printer in the first place because it was one of the first to support Bonjour (née Rendezvous, née Zeroconf) networking. With good ol’ Tiger, it Just WorkedTM, and all was milk and honey as far as printing went in my home. But noooo, it didn’t like the hoity-toity, super-duper-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread Leopard attitude, and just spat out endless reams of cryptic stack dumps instead of, say, directions to wherever I was in a hurry to leave for. I poked around a little, checking for new drivers and all that sort of common sense stuff, and found that even Brother’s website claimed that the drivers were bundled with Leopard and that there was nothing for me to download.

I never did get around to figuring out the problem at the time, and being a sleep-deprived and very busy new dad it unfortunately hasn’t been much of a priority. Somehow I’ve learned to live with six months (!!!) of not being able to print a damn thing. And worse, I’ve had to hold off on upgrading my wife’s machine, which has kept her from being able to enjoy the goodness of automated Time Machine backups.

I finally got fed up with it today and decided to finally sort things out once and for all. I even indulged my inner noob and followed Brother’s directions, even though it meant assigning a static IP to my printer and dropping it back from the awesomeness of Bonjour to the semi-awesomeness of old-school IP printing. It turns out that, even though no one says it anywhere, that was the key. So, here’s a bit of advice for future Googlers: the 5070N will not print correctly using Bonjour under 10.5. You want the CUPS driver and the “HP Jetdirect – Socket” protocol. Then poof! It’s all happy again.

Now to go about breaking upgrading Liz’s laptop…